Bloomfield, Leonard, 1887–1949, American linguist, b. Chicago. Bloomfield was professor at Ohio State Univ. (1921–27), at the Univ. of Chicago (1927–40), and at Yale (from 1940). His specialty for years was Germanic languages, especially in their comparative aspects. He became interested, however, in languages from a scientific, descriptive viewpoint. His masterpiece Language (1933) is a standard text. It had a profound influence on linguistics, for it was a clear statement of principles that became axiomatic, notably that language study must always be centered in the spoken language, as against documents; that the definitions used in grammar should be based on the forms of the language, not on the meanings of the forms; and that a given language at a given time is a complete system of sounds and forms that exist independently of the past—so that the history of a form does not explain its actual meaning. His other works include Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis (1917), Linguistic Aspects of Science (1939), Spoken Dutch (1945), and Spoken Russian (1945).

Bibliography

See R. A. Hall, Leonard Bloomfield: Essays on His Life and Work (1987).

Bloomfield, Leonard

(born April 1, 1887, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died April 18, 1949, New Haven, Conn.) U.S. linguist. He began his career as a philologist trained in Indo-European, especially Germanic languages. He taught Germanic philology at the University of Chicago (1927–40) and linguistics at Yale (1940–49). In Language (1933), one of the clearest 20th-century presentations of linguistics, he advocated the study of linguistic phenomena in isolation from their nonlinguistic environment and emphasized the need for empirical description. His thinking was influenced by his work on non-Indo-European languages, particularly the Algonquian family; The Menomini Language (1962) is a paragon of linguistic description and American Indian linguistic scholarship.

Bloomfield, Leonard (1887–1949) linguist; born in Chicago, Ill. After teaching at several universities, he became professor of linguistics at Yale (1940–46), already one of the most influential linguists of the century. He was one of the first to advance linguistics as an empirical discipline, set out first in An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914). He developed a method of team-teaching languages and his work on Tagalog and Algonquian languages led to his independent discovery of the phonemic principle that organizes the sound system of a language. He promoted linguistics as a key approach to understanding human behavior and his most important work in this regard, Language (1933), is still widely used and studied.