Edward Sapir



Theoretical Genealogy

Name of Student

Institutional Affiliation

Edward Sapir

Background

Edward Sapir was Franz Boas’ trainee in the early years of the 20th Century and was considered a genius by his peers. Edward was the only trained linguist among Boas’ students and had the gift of intuition that gave him insight into grammatical patterning and the relationship between linguistic families through history (Benedict, 1939). He contributed to general linguistic theory, Amerindian, and Indo-European linguistics. He also contributed significantly to ethnology, cultural psychology, and culture theory. Sapir was known as a prolific fieldworker and expert in theory. During his time, he recorded thirty-nine distinct Amerindian languages, sometimes working with the last speaker alive. Sapir transliterated indigenous-language folklore writings. He was a music composer, humanist, anthropologist as well as a linguist. He was also a literal critic and published poetry. Sapir was an exemplification of the study of meaning and communicative form across linguistic and cultural boundaries for his successors regardless of the discipline.

Sapir was a student of Germanics at Colombia University before switching to anthropology and linguistics after he was influenced by Franz Boas, a huge figure in the field and the founder of contemporary American anthropology. He contributed a lot to Native American and Indo-European linguistics. Before he began contributing to American Indian and general anthropology, Sapir had contributed majorly to American letters through poems and reviews in journals like the Nation, Poetry, Freeman, and the Dial. His contributions to cultural anthropology were mainly the development of formal descriptive linguistics. This made him one of the founders of contemporary linguistic. After his studies at Colombia, Sapir went to the division of anthropology as its chief in Ottawa, Canada, where he worked for 15 years. He moved to the University of Chicago after the death of his wife and back to the center of anthropology, unlike Ottawa, that had isolated him.

Sapir’s contributions to ethnological studies in the form of writings followed each other steady succession from the earliest to those published afterward. He wrote “The Social Organization of the West Coast Tribes” in 1995 that constituted a summary of huge amounts of data, unlike the brief reviews he was doing (Sapir, 1968).

Information on the significant publications and contributions to the field of anthropology

Edward Sapir influenced in a significant way the American linguistics and anthropology even beyond its borders. Sapir was the principal developer of the American school of structural linguistics, in his book Linguistics (1921) Sapir insists that language is closely related to culture (Sapir, 1968). He says that language is culturally acquired.

Sapir founded “Ethnolinguistics,” which studies the relationship between language and culture, and vigorously contributed to the study of North American Indian languages. He was more concerned about the cultural change among the American Indians, something that prompted a publication of the same in 1916. In his writing, he indicated that man perceived the world basically through language. The different behaviors exhibited by individuals with specific cultural backgrounds, he says they are related to the particular style of a specific community.

Sapir contributed to anthropology by explaining the interrelation that exists between culture and language and how they implicate each other in a particular society. He addresses the issues of how style affects literature and culture affects language. Sapir, together with Benjamin Whorf, discovered that the Eskimo have several words to refer to snow as compared to another culture of people who don’t experience snow. The Sapir-Whorfian hypothesis that they developed implies that a language has a direct influence on how the speaker of it thinks. According to Sapir and Whorf, the culture determined the language use and the choice of diction.

Sapir also contributed to the theory of Social Cultural Traditions. In this theory, Sapir and Whorf explain how we form meanings of words by use of culture. It is a culture that determines the definition of a given the term; therefore, we cannot separate a language from its culture. The meaning of words depends on a particular culture. A particular culture defines the phonemes, thus the meaning of the word. Each culture has its own conventions on how they place meaning on a particular word. Sapir also published reviews on poetry, the nation, freeman, and the dial.

Information on which school of thought or theoretical perspective in which this individual is associated with

Sapir is associated with several theoretical perspectives touching on language and anthropology. In his time, Sapir was an influential figure and brain that developed a number of theoretical perspectives that can be used to explain the phenomenon. He mainly focused on culture and personality. Sapir influenced a number of theories; this paper discusses some of the theoretical perspectives.

The linguistic and cultural theory (1925) by Sapir sought to explain the interrelation between language and society. Sapir notes that language is directly influenced by culture. That is to say that words that are used a specific group of people to relay a given meaning they belong to a particular society with a unique surrounding. Every culture provides sense to words depending on the community that they belong to. He further states that sound is part of society that shares particular conventions and structures that help it to come up with meaningful communication. Therefore, language and society are dependent on each other and are inseparable.

Sapir, in his book “Language” (1921), gives a fuller understanding of languages in history and structure. Sapir mainly concentrated in American Indian languages. Sapir was more interested in phonetics and grammatical typology of the words how they were articulated by then and how the society influenced the articulation. In this book, he introduced the theory of linguistic drift, which stipulates that morphological change in language is by systematic trends followed in language history. Therefore, the history of the language influences the grammar and its usage. The theory also highlights the meaning of words being conventional to a particular culture (O’Neill, 2015). The theory suggests that it is through the need of the society to have words to explain a given phenomenon that we came up with words that specifically are related to that culture.

The Intellectual Descent of the Individual- Tracing the Influences on the Anthropologist’s Thinking Where Possible

Edward Sapir was a student at Columbia University, where he studied Germanics when Franz Boas influenced him, and he changed to linguistics and anthropology. Boas was the founder of modern American anthropology. Sapir wanted to make an impact on the American Indian languages that others thought they had no history, and they were not well-documented languages. The chance of working with Franz Boas excited him, and he took it. In anthropology and linguistics, he would at least document and show the history of the American Indian languages.

Franz Boas gave him the tools and techniques to lay bare his desire, and he grew to be a world-renowned linguist and anthropologist who has influenced the course of history in those fields academically. Through the knowledge that he received by switching classes, he was able to write several theories that describe language and culture, which enabled him to analyze the American Indian indigenous languages. He wrote their history and phonemic transcriptions of these languages.

He was able to develop the theories and tools of analyzing these languages by borrowing from Boas’s ideas that he had earlier on come up with. Sapir used these ideas as a basis to create his designs and formulate the theories. Franz Boas have greatly influenced Sapir’s works.

Therefore, we can conclude that Sapir was inspired by his teacher, Boas, who gave him the needed educational information, which helped him to establish his own theories and thoughts. Such educational background provided Sapir with adequate tools for future achievements.

The Significant Problems the Individual Address in His Scholarship

Sapir addresses several problems in his course of evaluating more on anthropology and linguistics. He addresses issues that he feels are more fundamental to him and those that other scholars ignored. Some of the problems he addresses in his scholarship are explained below.

Sapir addresses the psychological reality of phonemes. In his books, especially “Language” (1921), he tries to explain the notion that phonemes are language-specific and mostly influenced by culture. Sapir tries to say that contrary to the general belief that grammars are universal, to him, they belong to a given culture as they are used to create meaning to a word from a specific culture. Therefore, to him, phonemes are unique and only belong to a single culture with unique pronunciation and definition. The phonemes, according to Sapir, are cultural and must be culturally defined.

Sapir also addresses the unconscious patterning of behavior in culture. Sapir believes that language is a determinant of behavior in society. That language directly affects the behavior of the members of the community. He generally believes that when a word is courteous in its tone, it’s most likely that the behavior of the members of the society is also polite. And when the language is perceived to be rude and even its tone, the behavior of that society is equally questionable. Behavior and language in culture are related, and they influence each other. Sapir also addresses problems such as time perspective in American culture, the meaning of religion, among other issues.

References

O’Neill, S. P. (2015). Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, 1-10.

Sapir, E. (1968). Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Univ of California Press.

Benedict, R. (1939). Edward Sapir. 465-477