edward sapir culture language and personality

By 1878 the Junggrammatiker, known in English as the Neogrammarians, Hermann Osthoff (1847-1909) and Karl Brugmann (1849-1919) were positing “sound laws suffer no exceptions.” Robert Blust (1940-) argues that “the general intellectual climate of Europe in the 1870s was attuned to the belief in the rule of natural law and the ultimate triumph of technology.” It was the influence of Franz Boas (1858-1942) that converted Sapir to anthropology and the study of American Indian languages, and away from the strictures of sound laws. European philologists such as Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) used historical written sources to posit regular rules concerning sound change and other language structures. Philology was a tremendously influential discipline in the late 19th century, part of a range of historical theories of the era including the historical materialism of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and the theory of evolution from Charles Darwin (1809-1882). He studied philology as an undergraduate and Masters student in the Columbia University Germanics Department. His later work combining ideas from linguistics, cultural anthropology and psychology has had a critical influence on current linguistic anthropology.īorn in Lauenberg, Germany, and New York City-raised, Sapir was fluent in languages including English, German, and Yiddish. He was also known as an elegant prose writer, a talented poet, and an accomplished musician. It may be treated as history or it may be studied comparatively as form.” Reflecting this, his work included traditional 19th century historically-oriented philology, 20th century synchronic study of linguistic form, and exploring the relationship between the individual and culture.

Writing for American Mercury magazine in 1924, Sapir argued, “There are two ways, it seems, to give linguistics its requisite dignity as a science. Linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) negotiated between multiple worlds of linguistic study.

Edward sapir culture language and personality