"Comparison of statements made at different periods frequently enable us to give maximal and minimal dates to the appearance of a cultural element or to assign the time limits to a movement of population." -- Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (), (January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. He was one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.
"A common allegiance to form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.""A common creation demands a common sacrifice, and perhaps not the least potent argument in favour of a constructed international language is the fact that it is equally foreign, or apparently so, to the traditions of all nationalities.""A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services.""A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.""A second type of direct evidence is formed by statements, whether as formal legends or personal information, regarding the age or relative sequence of events in tribal history made by the natives themselves.""A standard international language should not only be simple, regular, and logical, but also rich and creative.""As a matter of fact, a national language which spreads beyond its own confines very quickly loses much of its original richness of content and is in no better case than a constructed language.""Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.""Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.""English, once accepted as an international language, is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science.""French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well.""Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.""I am convinced that the stratigraphic method will in the future enable archaeology to throw far more light on the history of American culture than it has done in the past.""Impatience translates itself into a desire to have something immediate done about it all, and, as is generally the case with impatience, resolves itself in the easiest way that lies ready to hand.""In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all.""It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.""It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.""It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.""More and more, unsolicited gifts from without are likely to be received with unconscious resentment.""National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.""No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.""No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.""One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.""So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.""The attitude of independence toward a constructed language which all national speakers must adopt is really a great advantage, because it tends to make man see himself as the master of language instead of its obedient servant.""The modern mind tends to be more and more critical and analytical in spirit, hence it must devise for itself an engine of expression which is logically defensible at every point and which tends to correspond to the rigorous spirit of modern science.""The psychology of a language which, in one way or another, is imposed upon one because of factors beyond one's control, is very different from the psychology of a language which one accepts of one's free will.""The spirit of logical analysis should in practice blend with the practical pressure for the adoption of some form of international language, but it should not allow itself to be stampeded by it.""The supposed inferiority of a constructed language to a national one on the score of richness of connotation is, of course, no criticism of the idea of a constructed language.""These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.""We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."
Sapir was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania Province to an orthodox Jewish family. His family immigrated to New York in the United States in 1888.
Sapir earned both a B.A. (1904) and an M.A. (1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia. His linguistic interests proved to be much broader.
In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Native Americans in southwestern Oregon. In 1909 he received his Ph.D. in anthropology, just emerging as a new field of study. While a graduate student at Columbia, Sapir met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas. The latter was likely the person who provided the most impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas.
Boas arranged Sapir's employment in 1907-08 researching the nearly extinct Yana language of northern California. Sapir returned there in 1915 to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana).
In the years 1910-1925 Sapir established and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. When he was hired, he and Marius Barbeau were the first full-time anthropologists in Canada.
Among the many accomplishments of this productive period were a series of substantial publications on Nootka and other languages, and his seminal book Language (1921). Alec Thomas assisted with interviews. It is still important today and accessible to educated lay people.
As Sapir left for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, one of the few research universities then in the United States, he enabled Leonard Bloomfield to obtain support from Ottawa to do fieldwork on Cree language. This was essential to Bloomfield's project of historical reconstruction in Algonquian languages.
From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology. He was one of the first to explore the relations between language studies and anthropology. His students included Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer. Sapir came to regard a young Semiticist named Zellig Harris as his intellectual heir, although Harris was never a formal student of Sapir. (For a time he dated Sapir's daughter.) Sapir also exerted influence through his membership in the Chicago School of Sociology, and his friendship with psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan.
Some of Sapir's suggestions about the influence of language on the ways in which people think were adopted and developed by Whorf. They both believed that stimulating and challenging theories would attract students to this fledgling field. During the 1940s and later, this concept became known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Late work of Harris supported their hypothesis.
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." (Krauss 1986:157) Sapir also studied the languages and cultures of Wishram Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, Takelma, and Yana.
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).
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.
Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language movement. In his paper The Function of an International Auxiliary Language, 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.
