BIOGRAPHY OF EDWARD SAPIR
Ilina A.I
Vladimir State University named after the Stoletovs
Vladimir, Russia
ЭДВАРД СЕПИР
Ильина А.И
Владимирский государственный университет имени Александра Григорьевича и
Николаевича Столетовых
Владимир, Россия
Edward Sapir (1884-1939) was born in Lauenburg, Western Pomerania. He came
from a family of Lithuanian Jews who emigrated first to England and then to the United
States by 1889, finally coming to rest five years later on the Lower East side of New
York City, when Sapir was ten. He was an academically precocious child and when he
was fourteen he won a Pulitzer scholarship which was meant to enable him to attend
the Horace Mann school in New York, then and now one of the top collegepreparatory high schools in the country. However, he chose to attend a public
high school instead and defer the award until he could use it as a college scholarship at
Columbia University, where he was admitted in 1901.
Sapir did justice to the support, earning his undergraduate degree in three years at
the age of 20. Being linguistically oriented, he focused on Germanic and IndoEuropean philology, which were the principal areas of linguistic study available at the
time. He continued on in the Master's program in Germanic, and around then he
discovered Anthropology and took some courses with Franz Boas. Boas recognized
Sapir as a budding linguistic analyst of great talent, and encouraged him in his
studies. Sapir completed his Master's degree in 1905 with a thesis on Herder's essay on
the Origin of Language. It was probably the first thesis on this topic to incorporate
examples from Eskimo, showing Boas' influence.
Sapir continued his graduate studies under Boas in Anthropology, inspired by the
opportunity to record and analyze languages in the field. Boas sent him to Washington
state for his first summer fieldwork on Wasco and Wishram Chinook in 1905. He
returned to the field in 1906 to collect data for his dissertation on Takelma and Chasta
Costa, two languages of Oregon. Before writing up his thesis, he was appointed
research assistant at the University of California at Berkeley under Alfred Kroeber, a
fellow Boas student who was in charge of surveying the languages and cultures of the
California Indians. Sapir's appointment lasted a year but was not renewed, and it seems
that his penchant for detailed analysis of grammar was somewhat at odds with the need
for rapid survey and classification work on the California Indian languages project.
In 1908 Sapir won a fellowship for teaching and research at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he worked on Catawba. His Ph.D. was awarded by Columbia in
Anthropology in 1909, but by that time he was working with students of his own.
Sapir began studying further American Indian languages at the University of
Pennsylvania with linguistic consultants he found there, working on Southern Paiute
and Hopi and training graduate students in field methods, especially in his second year
at Penn when he was serving as an instructor. In 1910 he took up the position of first
chief ethnologist in the Division of Anthropology in the Geological Survey of Canada,
Department of Mines. That year he married and settled in Ottawa with his wife. Upon
taking up his position he quickly designed a comprehensive research program to survey
the languages of Canada, and hired a team of mostly Boas-trained researchers to carry
out fieldwork on the various languages. He held the chief ethnologist position for 16
years, during that time working on numerous languages of the west, north, and east of
Canada, studying some in the field, some in Ottawa with consultants from the area or
visiting there on tribal business, and some in the United States where nativespeaker consultants had happened to settle. Nootka, a language of Vancouver Island,
Tlingit, from the northwest Pacific coast, Sarcee, in Alberta, and Kutchin and Ingalik,
languages of Northern Canada, were some of the languages he worked on during
these years. This period of intense work on Canadian Indian languages was
broken only by a summer of fieldwork on Yana, a California language with
one remaining speaker, carried out at Boas' invitation in 1915.
Sapir's wife Florence had long suffered from ill health, both physical and mental,
and she died in 1924, leaving Sapir to raise three children alone. His mother came to
help out, but the situation was difficult for Sapir in many ways. Funding for aboriginal
studies had been seriously curtailed during and after the first world war, and Sapir's
stance as pacifist did not make his situation in Ottawa very comfortable during or after
the war. He felt intellectually isolated, and came to miss more and more the stimulation
of his earlier academic life at Columbia and Penn. He continued his linguistic research
and publications, however, producing some of his greatest works during the years in
Ottawa. These included his 1921 outline of a classification of the American
Indian languages into just six families (later elaborated and supported, but essentially
complete), and his famous book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech.
The latter is the only book he published during his lifetime and a true classic of
linguistic and sociocultural theory, written in a lucid fashion highly accessible to nonspecialists. It has never been out of print. (There is also a posthumous book based on
his students' notes, modelled on the story of de Saussure's Cours, but this was not
published until the 1990s and is still not widely known). In the early 1920s Sapir also
worked to
found
the
Linguistic
Society
of
America
and
its
new
journal, Language whose first issue appeared in 1925 (containing a still classic paper,
Sapir 1925). During his years in Ottawa he found relaxation by writing a good deal of
poetry, literary criticism and music, but he longed to be in a position where he could
interact with theoretical minds and also train students in method and theory.
In 1925 things began looking up as Sapir was offered a job at the University of
Chicago, which was then building a stellar faculty in the social sciences. The
intellectual excitement was intense in his Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
where he found himself at the center of network of serious thinkers with eclectic
and interdisciplinary interests. He was promoted to Professor of Anthropology and
General Linguistics within two years. He continued his descriptive linguistic work,
including fieldwork on Hupa and Navajo, and his development of the
theoretical underpinnings of such description, but on top of these he became deeply
concerned with questions of the relation of culture and individual psychology, as well
as issues of social science methodology. He also gave a good deal of thought to the
role of Linguistics as a discipline distinct from both Philology and Anthropology, and
its place in the social sciences at large. His role in founding the LSA and its
journal helped to put the new field of Linguistics on a solid and respected intellectual
footing in the U.S.
Sapir remarried in 1927 and he and his wife soon had another child; his family life
was happy and he now had a full social life and deep intellectual interactions with
peers. But the heady Chicago days were not to last much longer, as in 1931 Sapir
was offered the Sterling professorship of Anthropology and Linguistics at Yale. It was
a presigious position and one with high expectations from the university, as his role
was not only to head up a newly formed Anthropology Department and participate in
a new Linguistics program, but also to create a coherent research program across the
social sciences.
The start was promising. Sapir could now interact with congenial linguistic
colleagues in departments whose prominence in Germanic and Indo-European
linguistics dated back to the days of William Dwight Whitney in the 19th
century. Moreover, a group of his Chicago students moved with him to Yale, giving
him a dedicated following in his own "school" of Sapirean method and theory. His last
child was born in New Haven, completing his happy family.
In mid-1937 Sapir was teaching at the Linguistic Society of America Summer
Institute when he was felled by a heart attack. He never fully recovered his health
although he tried to return to teaching in fall 1938. He had a second heart attack, and
after a hospitalization, died in early February 1939 at 55 years of age.
Sapir's intellectual breadth and eclecticism, and his genius for observing and
describing in simple and elegant fashion what at first seem to be impossibly confusing
linguistic patterns have always attracted graduate students, even long after his death
and in periods in which American linguistics has been dominated by schools
minimizing his interests. He has inspired many a linguist to try to think more widely
and to delve more deeply into their subjects, whatever their theoretical orientation. It
is likely that his position in American Linguistics as one of the founding and most
intellectually prominent members of the modern field will long remain undiminished.
References
1.Darnell, Regna, and Judith T. Irvine. Edward Sapir, January 26, 1884 - February 4,
1939. Biographical memoirs. National Academy of Sciences. Site accessed 2/20/08.
2.Mandelbaum, David. 1949. Editor's Introduction. Edward Sapir: Selected Writings
in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. by David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, v-xii.
3.Sapir, Edward, 1925. Sound Patterns in Language. Language 1, 37-51.
4.Sapir, Edward. 1933 [1949]. The Psychological Reality of the Phoneme. In
Mandelbaum, ed., 1949, 46-60. Originally published in French in 1933.
5.Sapir, Edward. 1944. Grading: A Study in Semantics. Philosophy of Science 11, 93116. Reprinted in Mandelbaum, ed., 1949, 122-149.