Edward Sapir

Sapir, Edward

(1884–1939) anthropologist, linguist; born in Lauenburg, Germany (now Poland). He emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1889 and was raised in an orthodox Jewish family on New York City's Lower East Side. He attended Columbia University (B.A. 1904; Ph.D. 1909) where he came under the influence of Franz Boas. After teaching briefly at the Universities of California and Pennsylvania, he became chief of anthropology for the Canadian National Museum (1910–25), then went on to teach at the University of Chicago (1925–31) and Yale (1931–39). Although he did some work in African linguistics, he is primarily known for his work with Native American languages, classifying them in "families" and stressing their relationships with their cultures. He encouraged scholars to extend their research beyond formal linguistics and pure ethnography to the psychology of individual personality and behavior. With his student, Benjamin Whorf, he developed what became known as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis," namely, that the way people perceive and categorize the real world is strongly influenced by the language they speak. His theories on language became an important part of the European structuralist movement. His publications include poetry as well as his specialized writings; his best known work is Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Sapir, Edward

 

Born Jan. 26, 1884, in Lauenburg, Germany; died Feb. 4, 1939, in New Haven, Conn. American linguist and anthropologist. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sapir graduated from Columbia University in 1904. He was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 to 1931, becoming a professor at Yale University in 1931. He served terms as president of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Anthropological Association in 1933 and 1938, respectively. Sapir’s major works were devoted to general linguistics and American Indian languages. His conception of language as a rigidly organized system—an idea that considerably influenced the development of modern American structuralism—is set forth in Language (1921; Russian translation, 1934); this work also contains an original typological classification of languages. Sapir understood the social essence of language and denied racial theories in anthropology and linguistics. His hypothesis concerning the influence of language on the formation of a person’s system of ideas about the environment constitutes the basis of ethnolinguistics; this hypothesis is known as the Whorfian hypothesis.

WORKS

The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon. Washington, D.C., 1912.
“Sound Patterns in Language.” Language, 1925, vol. 1, no. 1.

REFERENCES

Gukhman, M. M. “E. Sepir i ‘etnograficheskaia lingvistika.’” Voprosy iazykoznaniia, 1954, no. 1.
Swadesh, M. “Edward Sapir.” Languae, 1939, vol. 15, no. 2.
Voegelin, C. F. “Edward Sapir.” In Portraits of Linguists, vol. 2. Edited by T. Sebeok. Bloomington, Ind.-London, 1966.

V. A. VINOGRADOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.