Schools of LinguisticsEdward SapirMA. In ELTDr. Abdelrahim Hamid Mugaddam

• Edward Sapir (/səˈpɪər/; 1884–1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics.

• Born in German Pomerania, his parents emigrated to America when Sapir was a child.

• He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native American languages.

• While finishing his PhD he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there.

• He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most influential and important linguists in North America.

• He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, and stayed for several years continuing to work for the professionalization of the discipline of linguistics.

• By the end of his life he was Professor of Anthropology at Yale, where he never really fit in.

• Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh, and anthropologists such as Fred Eggan and Hortense Powdermaker.

• With his solid linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology.

• Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views.

• This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis.

• In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology, maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between different individual personalities is important for the ways in ways in which culture and society develop.

Contribution• Among his major contributions to linguistics is his

classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas, which he elaborated for most of his professional life.

• He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology.

• Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply the methods of historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages.

• Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages. In the 1929 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica he published what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, and the first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics.

Main Contribution!• Sapir's special focus among American languages was in the

Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him: "Dene is probably the son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to actually know...most fascinating of all languages ever invented.

• Sapir also studied the languages and cultures of Wishram Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, Takelma, and Yana.

• His research on Southern Paiute, in collaboration with consultant Tony Tillohash, led to a 1933 article which would become influential in the characterization of the phoneme.

Contribution Continue…• Although noted for his work on American linguistics, Sapir

wrote prolifically in linguistics in general. • His book Language provides everything from a grammar-

typological classification of languages (with examples ranging from Chinese to Nootka) to speculation on the phenomenon of language drift, and the arbitrariness of associations between language, race, and culture.

• Sapir was also a pioneer in Yiddish studies (his first language) in the United States (cf. Notes on Judeo-German phonology, 1915).

Contribution Continue…• Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language

movement. • He argued for the benefits of a regular grammar and

advocated a critical focus on the fundamentals of language, unbiased by the idiosyncrasies of national languages, in the choice of an international auxiliary language.

• He was the first Research Director of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), which presented the Interlingua conference in 1951.

• He directed the Association from 1930 to 1931, and was a member of its Consultative Counsel for Linguistic Research from 1927 to 1938.

• Sapir consulted with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of IALA.

• He was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene languages.

• And he proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated, but which continue to generate investigation such as Hokan and Penutian.

• He specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, Wishram, Southern Paiute.

• Later in his career he also worked with Yiddish, Hebrew and Chinese, as well as Germanic languages, and he was also invested in the development of an International Auxiliary Language

Boas’ influence• Although still in college, Sapir was allowed to participate in Boas'

graduate seminar on American Languages which included translations of Native American and Inuit myths collected by Boas.

• In this way Sapir was introduced to Indigenous American languages while he kept working on his M.A. in Germanic linguistics.

• Robert Lowie later said that Sapir's fascination with indigenous languages stemmed from the seminar with Boas in which Boas used examples from Native American languages to disprove all of Sapir's common-sense assumptions about the basic nature of Language.

• Sapir's 1905 Master's thesis was an analysis of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, and included examples from Inuit and Native American languages, not at all familiar to a Germanicist.

• The thesis criticized Herder for retaining a Biblical chronology, too shallow to allow for the observable diversification of languages.

• But he also argued with Herder that all of the world's languages have equal aesthetic potentials and grammatical complexity.

• He ended the paper by calling for a "very extended study of all the various existing stocks of languages, in order to determine the most fundamental properties of language" - almost a program statement for the modern study of linguistic typology, and a very Boasian approach.

• In 1906 he finished his coursework, having focused the last year on courses in anthropology and taking seminars such as Primitive Culture with Farrand, Ethnology with Boas, Archaeology and courses in Chinese language and culture with Berthold Laufer.

• He also maintained his Indo-European studies with courses in Celtic, Old Saxon, Swedish and Sanskrit.

• Having finished his coursework, Sapir moved on to his doctoral fieldwork, spending several years in short term appointments while working on his dissertation.

• Sapir's first fieldwork was on the Wishram Chinook language in the summer of 1905, funded by the Bureau of American Ethnology.

• This first experience with Native American languages in the field was closely overseen by Boas, who was particularly interested in having Sapir gathering ethnological information for the Bureau.

• Sapir gathered a volume of Wishram text, published 1909, and he managed to achieve a much more sophisticated understanding of the Chinook sound system than Boas.

• In the summer of 1906 he worked on Takelma and Chasta Costa. Sapir's work on Takelma became his doctoral dissertation which he defended in 1908.

• The dissertation foreshadowed several important trends in Sapir's work: Particularly the careful attention to native speakers' intuition regarding sound patterns, that would later become the basis for Sapir's formulation of the phoneme.

Conclusion• Sapir contributed to:• Classification of American indigenous languages.• Linguistic theory• Anthropological thought