Edward sapir

Edward Sapir (Lębork, German Empire, January 26, 1884 - New Haven, Connecticut, February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist and linguist. Sapir is one of the reference figures in structural linguistics, and one of the creators of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Career

Edward Sapir was born in Lębork, then part of the German Empire and now part of Poland, into an Orthodox Jewish family that would emigrate to the United States at the end of the 19th century. He was a disciple of the anthropologist Franz Boas, precursor of cultural relativism, and a teacher of Benjamin Whorf. He is considered one of the most important linguists in the United States, and has influenced other important linguists, such as Noam Chomsky.

Sapir was a professor at the University of Chicago and later at Yale University (1931-1939). His students include Li Fang-kuei, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas and Harry Hoijer; he exerted influence at the Chicago School of Sociology, was a friend of the psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan, and considered the semitologist Zellig Harris his intellectual heir.

A student of Amerindian languages, he was one of the first to investigate the relationship between language and anthropology. In 1921 he affirmed that language determines thought, so that each language carries with it a way of thinking. Sapir's idea was adopted and developed during the 1940s by Benjamin Whorf, eventually becoming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Sapir said that language is a method of communication of ideas, emotions and desires through symbols produced voluntarily and not instinctively, so language is the result of a merely cultural and social process.

Books

• Wishram Texts (1909)
• Language: An introduction to the study of speech (1921) (link)
• Nootka Texts (1939)

Essays and articles

• The Function of an International Auxiliary Language (link)
• The problem of noun incorporation in American languages. Am. Anthropol. 13:250-82. (1911)
• Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method. Canada Department of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 90. Anthropological Series, No. 13. (1916)