In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology, maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between different individual personalities is important for the ways in which culture and society develop.Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas, upon which he elaborated for most of his professional life. This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir–Whorf" hypothesis. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views.
With his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh, and anthropologists such as Fred Eggan and Hortense Powdermaker. By the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, and stayed for several years continuing to work for the professionalization of the discipline of linguistics. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Native American languages. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. Wikipedia Rate this definition: 0.0 / 0 votesĮdward Sapir ( Janu– February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.Sapir was born in German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland.
0 kommentar(er)
