Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir (/səˈpɪər/; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an Prussian-
Edward Sapir
American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most
[1][2]
important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics.

Sapir was born in German Pomerania; his parents emigrated to United States of
America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where
he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native
American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with
Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. 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 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. By the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale, where he
never really fit in. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and
Morris Swadesh, and anthropologists such as Fred Eggan and Hortense
Powdermaker.
Edward Sapir (about 1910)
With his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop
most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied Born January 26, 1884
the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested Lauenburg, Prussia
(now Lębork, Poland)
in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world
views. This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf Died February 4, 1939
into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis. In (aged 55)
anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology New Haven,
to anthropology, maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between Connecticut, U.S.
different individual personalities is important for the ways in which culture and Citizenship American
society develop.[3]
Alma mater Columbia University
Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous Known for Classification of
languages of the Americas, upon which he elaborated for most of his professional Native American
life. He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, languages
greatly advancing the understanding ofphonology. Sapir–Whorf
hypothesis
Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply the methods of
Anthropological
historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed
linguistics
to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages. Sapir was the first to prove
that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to Scientific career
indigenous languages. In the 1929 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica he published Fields Linguistics,
what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, Anthropology
and the first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics. He was the Institutions University of Chicago
first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na- Canadian Museum of
Dene languages. He proposed some language families that are not considered to Civilization
have been adequately demonstrated, but which continue to generate investigation Columbia University
such as Hokan and Penutian. Yale University
Thesis The Takelma
He specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages, and language of
Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, southwestern
Wishram, Southern Paiute. Later in his career he also worked with Yiddish, Hebrew, Oregon (1909)
and Chinese, as well as Germanic languages, and he also was invested in the Doctoral Franz Boas
development of an International Auxiliary Language. advisor
Doctoral Li Fang-Kuei
students Mary Haas
Morris Swadesh
Contents Harry Hoijer
Life
Childhood and youth
Education at Columbia
College
Influence of Boas
Early fieldwork
In Ottawa
Canada's Geological Survey
Work with Ishi
Moving on
Chicago years
At Yale
Anthropological thought
Breadth of languages studied
Selected publications
Books
Essays and articles
Biographies
Correspondence
References
External links

Life

Childhood and youth

Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Sapir,
worked as a cantor. The family was not Orthodox, and his father maintained his ties to Judaism through its music. The Sapir family
did not stay long in Pomerania and never accepted German as a nationality. Edward Sapir's first language was Yiddish,[4] and later
English. In 1888, when he was four years old, the family moved to Liverpool, England, and in 1890 to the United States, to
Richmond, Virginia. Here Edward Sapir lost his younger brother Max to typhoid fever. His father had difficulty keeping a job in a
synagogue and finally settled in New York on the Lower East Side, where the family lived in poverty. As Jacob Sapir could not
provide for his family, Sapir's mother, Eva Seagal Sapir, opened a shop to supply the basic necessities. They formally divorced in
1910. After settling in New York, Edward Sapir was raised mostly by his mother, who stressed the importance of education for the
upwardly social mobile, and turned the family increasingly away from Judaism. Even though Eva Sapir was an important influence,
Sapir received his lust for knowledge and interest in scholarship, aesthetics, and music from his father. At age 14 Sapir won a Pulitzer
scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school, but he chose not to attend the school which he found too posh, going instead
to DeWitt Clinton High School,[5] and saving the scholarship money for his college education. Through the scholarship Sapir
supplemented his mother's meager earnings.[4]
Education at Columbia
Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship. Columbia at this time was one of the few elite private
universities that did not limit admission of Jewish applicants with implicit quotas around 12%. Approximately 40% of incoming
students at Columbia were Jewish.[6] Sapir earned both a B.A. (1904) and an M.A. (1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia,
before embarking on hisPh.D. in Anthropology which he completed in 1909.[7]

College
Sapir emphasized language study in his college years at Columbia, studying Latin,
Greek, and French for eight semesters. From his sophomore year he additionally
began to focus on Germanic languages, completing coursework in Gothic, Old High
German, Old Saxon, Icelandic, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish. Through Germanics
professor William Carpenter, Sapir was exposed to methods of comparative
linguistics that were being developed into a more scientific framework than the
traditional philological approach. He also took courses in Sanskrit, and Columbia University libraryin 1903
complemented his language studies by studying music in the department of the
famous composer Edward MacDowell (though it is uncertain whether Sapir ever
studied with MacDowell himself). In his last year in college Sapir enrolled in the course "Introduction to Anthropology", with
Professor Livingston Farrand, who taught the Boas "four field" approach to anthropology. He also enrolled in an advanced
.[8]
anthropology seminar taught byFranz Boas, a course that would completely change the direction of his career

Influence of Boas
Although still in college, Sapir was allowed to participate in the Boas graduate
seminar on American Languages, which included translations of Native American
and Inuit myths collected by Boas. In this way Sapir was introduced to Indigenous
American languages while he kept working on his M.A. in Germanic linguistics.
Robert Lowie later said that Sapir's fascination with indigenous languages stemmed
from the seminar with Boas in which Boas used examples from Native American
languages to disprove all of Sapir's common-sense assumptions about the basic
nature of language. Sapir's 1905 Master's thesis was an analysis of Johann Gottfried
Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, and included examples from Inuit and
Native American languages, not at all familiar to a Germanicist. The thesis criticized
Herder for retaining a Biblical chronology, too shallow to allow for the observable
diversification of languages, but he also argued with Herder that all of the world's
languages have equal aesthetic potentials and grammatical complexity. He ended the
paper by calling for a "very extended study of all the various existing stocks of
Franz Boas
languages, in order to determine the most fundamental properties of language" -
almost a program statement for the modern study of linguistic typology, and a very
Boasian approach.[9]

In 1906 he finished his coursework, having focused the last year on courses in anthropology and taking seminars such as Primitive
Culture with Farrand,Ethnology with Boas, Archaeology and courses in Chinese language and culture with Berthold Laufer. He also
maintained his Indo-European studies with courses in Celtic, Old Saxon, Swedish, and Sanskrit. Having finished his coursework,
[10]
Sapir moved on to his doctoral fieldwork, spending several years in short term appointments while working on his dissertation.

Early fieldwork
Sapir's first fieldwork was on the Wishram Chinook language in the summer of
1905, funded by the Bureau of American Ethnology. This first experience with
Native American languages in the field was closely overseen by Boas, who was
particularly interested in having Sapir gathering ethnological information for the
Bureau. Sapir gathered a volume of Wishram texts, published 1909, and he managed
to achieve a much more sophisticated understanding of the Chinook sound system
than Boas. In the summer of 1906 he worked on Takelma and Chasta Costa. Sapir's
work on Takelma became his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 1908. The
dissertation foreshadowed several important trends in Sapir's work, particularly the
careful attention to the intuition of native speakers regarding sound patterns that later
would become the basis for Sapir's formulation of thephoneme.[11] Tony Tillohash with family. Tillohash
was Sapir's collaborator on the
In 1907 - 1908 Sapir was offered a position at the University of California, where famous description of theSouthern
Boas' first student Alfred Kroeber was the head of a project under the California Paiute language
state survey to document the Indigenous languages of California. Kroeber suggested
that Sapir study the nearly extinct Yana language, and Sapir set to work. Sapir
worked first with Betty Brown, one of the language's few remaining speakers. Later he began work with Sam Batwi, who spoke
another dialect of Yana, but whose knowledge of Yana mythology was an important fount of knowledge. Sapir described the way in
[12]
which the Yana language distinguishes grammatically and lexically between the speech of men and women.

The collaboration between Kroeber and Sapir was made difficult by the fact that Sapir largely followed his own interest in detailed
linguistic description, ignoring the administrative pressures to which Kroeber was subject, among them the need for a speedy
completion and a focus on the broader classification issues. In the end Sapir didn't finish the work during the allotted year, and
Kroeber was unable to offer him a longer appointment.

Disappointed at not being able to stay at Berkeley, Sapir devoted his best efforts to other work, and did not get around to preparing
any of the Yana material for publication until 1910,[13] to Kroeber's deep disappointment.[14]

Sapir ended up leaving California early to take up a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Ethnology and
American Linguistics. At Pennsylvania he worked closely with another student of Boas,
Frank Speck, and the two undertook work on
Catawba in the summer of 1909.[15] Also in the summer of 1909, Sapir went to Utah with his student J. Alden Mason. Intending
originally to work on Hopi, he studied the Ute and Southern Paiute languages; he decided to work with Tony Tillohash, who proved
to be the perfect informant. Tillohash's strong intuition about the sound patterns of his language led Sapir to propose that the
phoneme is not just an abstraction existing at the structural level of language, but in fact has psychological reality for speakers.

Tillohash became a good friend of Sapir, and visited him at his home in New York and Philadelphia. Sapir worked with his father to
transcribe a number of Paiute songs that Tillohash knew. This fruitful collaboration laid the ground work for the classical description
of the Southern Paiute language published in 1930,[16] and enabled Sapir to produce conclusive evidence linking the Shoshonean
languages to the Nahuan languages - establishing the Uto-Aztecan language family. Sapir's description of Southern Paiute is known
[17]
by linguistics as "a model of analytical excellence".

At Pennsylvania, Sapir was urged to work at a quicker pace than he felt comfortable. His "Grammar of Southern Paiute" was
supposed to be published in Boas' Handbook of American Indian Languages, and Boas urged him to complete a preliminary version
while funding for the publication remained available, but Sapir did not want to compromise on quality, and in the end the Handbook
had to go to press without Sapir's piece. Boas kept working to secure a stable appointment for his student, and by his recommendation
Sapir ended up being hired by the Canadian Geological Survey, who wanted him to lead the institutionalization of anthropology in
Canada.[18] Sapir, who by then had given up the hope of working at one of the few American research universities, accepted the
appointment and moved to Ottawa.

In Ottawa
In the years 1910–25 Sapir established and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa.
When he was hired, he was one of the first full-time anthropologists in Canada. He brought his parents with him to Ottawa, and also
quickly established his own family, marrying Florence Delson, who also had Lithuanian Jewish roots. Neither the Sapirs nor the
Delsons were in favor of the match. The Delsons, who hailed from the prestigious Jewish center of Vilna, considered the Sapirs to be
rural upstarts and were less than impressed with Sapir's career in an unpronounceable academic field. Edward and Florence had three
[19]
children together: Herbert Michael, Helen Ruth, and Philip.

Canada's Geological Survey

As director of the Anthropological division of the Geological Survey of Canada, Sapir embarked on a project to document the
Indigenous cultures and languages of Canada. His first fieldwork took him to Vancouver Island to work on the Nootka language.
Apart from Sapir the division had two other staff members, Marius Barbeau and Harlan I. Smith. Sapir insisted that the discipline of
linguistics was of integral importance for ethnographic description, arguing that just as nobody would dream of discussing the history
of the Catholic Church without knowing Latin or study German folksongs without knowing German, so it made little sense to
approach the study of Indigenous folklore without knowledge of the indigenous languages.[20] At this point the only Canadian first
nation languages that were well known were Kwakiutl, described by Boas, Tshimshian and Haida. Sapir explicitly used the standard
of documentation of European languages, to argue that the amassing knowledge of indigenous languages was of paramount
importance. By introducing the high standards of Boasian anthropology, Sapir incited antagonism from those amateur ethnologists
who felt that they had contributed important work. Unsatisfied with efforts by amateur and governmental anthropologists, Sapir
worked to introduce an academic program of anthropology at one of the major universities, in order to professionalize the
discipline.[21]

Sapir enlisted the assistance of fellow Boasians: Frank Speck, Paul Radin and Alexander Goldenweiser, who with Barbeau worked
on the people's of the Eastern Woodlands: the Ojibwa, the Iroquois, the Huron and the Wyandot. Sapir initiated work on the
Athabascan languages of the Mackenzie valley and the Yukon, but it proved too difficult to find adequate assistance, and he
est Coast.[22]
concentrated mainly on Nootka and the languages of the North W

During his time in Canada, together with Speck, Sapir also acted as an advocate for Indigenous rights, arguing publicly for
introduction of better medical care for Indigenous communities, and assisting the Six Nation Iroquois in trying to recover eleven
wampum belts that had been stolen from the reservation and were on display in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania. (The
belts were finally returned to the Iroquois in 1988.) He also argued for the reversal of a Canadian law prohibiting the Potlatch
ceremony of the West Coast tribes.[23]

Work with Ishi

In 1915 Sapir returned to California, where his expertise on the Yana language made
him urgently needed. Kroeber had come into contact with Ishi, the last native
speaker of the Yahi language, closely related to Yana, and needed someone to
document the language urgently. Ishi, who had grown up without contact to whites,
was monolingual in Yahi and was the last surviving member of his people. He had
been adopted by the Kroebers, but had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and was not
expected to live long. Sam Batwi, the speaker of Yana who had worked with Sapir,
was unable to understand the Yahi variety, and Krober was convinced that only Sapir
would be able to communicate with Ishi. Sapir traveled toSan Francisco and worked
with Ishi over the summer of 1915, having to invent new methods for working with
a monolingual speaker. The information from Ishi was invaluable for understanding
the relation between the different dialects of Yana. Ishi died of his illness in early Alfred Kroeber and Ishi

1916, and Kroeber partly blamed the exacting nature of working with Sapir for his
failure to recover. Sapir described the work: "I think I may safely say that my work
with Ishi is by far the most time-consuming and nerve-racking that I have ever undertaken. Ishi's imperturbable good humor alone
[24]
made the work possible, though it also at times added to my exasperation".
Moving on
The First World War took its toll on the Canadian Geological Survey, cutting
funding for anthropology and making the academic climate less agreeable. Sapir
continued work on Athabascan, working with two speakers of the Alaskan languages
Kutchin and Ingalik. Sapir was now more preoccupied with testing hypotheses about
historical relationships between the Na-Dene languages than with documenting
endangered languages, in effect becoming a theoretician.[25] He was also growing to
feel isolated from his American colleagues. From 1912 Florence's health
deteriorated due to a lung abscess, and a resulting depression. The Sapir household
was largely run by Eva Sapir, who did not get along well with Florence, and this
Margaret Mead decades after her
added to the strain on both Florence and Edward. Sapir's parents had by now affair with Sapir
divorced and his father seemed to suffer from a psychosis, which made it necessary
for him to leave Canada for Philadelphia, where Edward continued to support him
financially. Florence was hospitalized for long periods both for her depressions and for the lung abscess, and she died in 1924 due to
an infection following surgery, providing the final incentive for Sapir to leave Canada. When the University of Chicago offered him a
position, he happily accepted.

During his period in Canada, Sapir came into his own as the leading figure in linguistics in North America. Among his substantial
publications from this period were his book on Time Perspective in the Aboriginal American Culture (1916), in which he laid out an
approach to using historical linguistics to study the prehistory of Native American cultures. Particularly important for establishing
him in the field was his seminal book Language (1921), which was a layman's introduction to the discipline of linguistics as Sapir
envisioned it. He also participated in the formulation of a report to the American Anthropological Association regarding the
standardization of orthographic principles for writing Indigenous languages.

.[26] His interest

While in Ottawa, he also collected and published French Canadian Folk Songs, and wrote a volume of his own poetry
in poetry led him to form a close friendship with another Boasian anthropologist and poet, Ruth Benedict. Sapir initially wrote to
Benedict to commend her for her dissertation on "The Guardian Spirit", but soon realized that Benedict had published poetry
pseudonymously. In their correspondence the two critiqued each other's work, both submitting to the same publishers, and both being
rejected. They also were both interested in psychology and the relation between individual personalities and cultural patterns, and in
their correspondences they frequently psychoanalyzed each other. However, Sapir often showed little understanding for Benedict's
private thoughts and feelings, and particularly his conservative gender ideology jarred with Benedict's struggles as a female
professional academic. Though they were very close friends for a while, it was ultimately the differences in worldview and
personality that led their friendship to fray.[27]

Before departing Canada, Sapir had a short affair with Margaret Mead, Benedict's protégé at Columbia. But Sapir's conservative ideas
about marriage and the woman's role were anathema to Mead, as they had been to Benedict, and as Mead left to do field work in
Samoa, the two separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while still in Samoa, and burned their
correspondence there on the beach.[28]

Chicago years
Settling in Chicago reinvigorated Sapir intellectually and personally. He socialized with intellectuals, gave lectures, participated in
poetry and music clubs. His first graduate student at Chicago was Li Fang-Kuei.[29] The Sapir household continued to be managed
largely by Grandmother Eva, until Sapir remarried in 1926. Sapir's second wife, Jean Victoria McClenaghan, was sixteen years
younger than he. She had first met Sapir when a student in Ottawa, but had since also come to work at the University of Chicago's
[30] Their other son J. David Sapir became a linguist
department of Juvenile Research. Their son Paul Edward Sapir was born in 1928.
and anthropologist specializing in West African Languages, especially Jola languages. Sapir also exerted influence through his
membership in the Chicago School of Sociology, and his friendship with psychologistHarry Stack Sullivan.

At Yale
From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught atYale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology
. He
was invited to Yale to found an interdisciplinary program combining anthropology, linguistics and psychology, aimed at studying "the
impact of culture on personality". While Sapir was explicitly given the task of founding a distinct anthropology department, this was
not well received by the department of sociology who worked by William Graham Sumner's "Evolutionary sociology", which was
anathema to Sapir's Boasian approach, nor by the two anthropologists of the Institute for Human Relations Clark Wissler and G. P.
Murdock.[31] Sapir never thrived at Yale, where as one of only four Jewish faculty members out of 569 he was denied membership to
[32]
the faculty club where the senior faculty discussed academic business.

At Yale, Sapir's graduate students included Morris Swadesh, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Mary Haas, Charles Hockett, and Harry Hoijer,
several of whom he brought with him from Chicago.[33] 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.)[34] In 1936 Sapir clashed
with the Institute for Human Relations over the research proposal by anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, who proposed a study of
the black community of Indianola, Mississippi. Sapir argued that her research should be funded instead of the more sociological work
of John Dollard. Sapir eventually lost the discussion and Powdermaker had to leave aYle.[31]

In the summer of 1937 while teaching at the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in Ann Arbor, Sapir began
having problems with a heart condition that had initially been diagnosed a couple of years earlier.[35] In 1938, he had to take a leave
from Yale, during which Benjamin Lee Whorf taught his courses and G. P. Murdock advised some of his students. After Sapir's death
in 1939, G. P. Murdock became the chair of the anthropology department. Murdock, who despised the Boasian paradigm of cultural
anthropology, dismantled most of Sapir's efforts to integrate anthropology, psychology, and linguistics.[36]

Anthropological thought
Sapir's anthropological thought has been described as isolated within the field of anthropology in his own days. Instead of searching
for the ways in which culture influences human behavior, Sapir was interested in understanding how cultural patterns themselves
were shaped by the composition of individual personalities that make up a society. This made Sapir cultivate an interest in individual
psychology and his view of culture was more psychological than many of his contemporaries.[37][38] It has been suggested that there
is a close relation between Sapir's literary interests and his anthropological thought. His literary theory saw individual aesthetic
sensibilities and creativity to interact with learned cultural traditions to produce unique and new poetic forms, echoing the way that
.[39]
he also saw individuals and cultural patterns to dialectically influence each other

Breadth of languages studied

Sapir's special focus among American languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him. In a
private letter, he wrote: "Dene is probably the son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to actually know...most fascinating of all
languages ever invented."[40] Sapir also studied the languages and cultures of Wishram Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, Takelma,
and Yana. His research on Southern Paiute, in collaboration with consultant Tony Tillohash, led to a 1933 article which would
become influential in the characterization of thephoneme.[41]

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,[42] 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).

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.[43] Sapir consulted with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of IALA.[44]
Selected publications

Books
Sapir, Edward (1907). Herder's "Ursprung der Sprache". Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ASIN:
B0006CWB2W.
Sapir, Edward (1908). "On the etymology of Sanskrit asru, Avestan asru, Greek dakru". In Modi, Jivanji Jamshedji.
Spiegel memorial volume. Papers on Iranian subjects written by various scholars in honour of the late .Dr Frederic
Spiegel. Bombay: British India Press. pp. 156–159.
Sapir, Edward; Curtin, Jeremiah (1909).Wishram texts, together with Wasco tales and myths. E.J. Brill. ISBN 0-404-
58152-8. ASIN: B000855RIW.
Sapir, Edward (1910). Yana Texts. Berkeley University Press.ISBN 1-177-11286-8.
Sapir, Edward (1915). A sketch of the social organization of the Nass River Indians
. Ottawa: Government Printing
Office.
Sapir, Edward (1915). Noun reduplication in Comox, a Salish language of V ancouver island. Ottawa: Government
Printing Office.
Sapir, Edward (1916). Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, A Study in Method . Ottawa: Government
Printing Bureau.
Sapir, Edward (1917). Dreams and Gibes. Boston: The Gorham Press.ISBN 0-548-56941-X.
Sapir, Edward (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech . New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
ISBN 4-87187-529-6. ASIN: B000NGWX8I.
Sapir, Edward; Swadesh, Morris (1939). Nootka Texts: Tales and ethnological narratives, with grammatical notes and
lexical materials. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America.ISBN 0-404-11893-3. ASIN: B000EB54JC.
Sapir, Edward (1949). Mandelbaum, David, ed. Selected writings in language, culture and personality . Berkeley:
University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-01115-5. ASIN: B000PX25CS.
Sapir, Edward; Irvine, Judith (2002).The psychology of culture: A course of lectures. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
ISBN 978-3-11-017282-9.

Essays and articles

Sapir, Edward (1907). "Preliminary report onthe language and mythology of the Upper Chinook".American
Anthropologist. 9: 533–544. doi:10.1525/aa.1907.9.3.02a00100.
Sapir, Edward (1910). "Some fundamental characteristics of the Ute language".Science. 31 (31): 350–352.
doi:10.1126/science.31.792.350.
Sapir, Edward (1911). "Some aspects of Nootka language and culture".American Anthropologist. 13: 15–28.
doi:10.1525/aa.1911.13.1.02a00030.
Sapir, Edward (1911). "The problem of nounincorporation in American languages".American Anthropologist. 13:
250–282. doi:10.1525/aa.1911.13.2.02a00060.
Sapir, E. (1913). "Southern Paiute and Nahuatl, a study in Uto-Aztekan"(PDF). Journal de la Société des
Américanistes. 10 (2): 379–425. doi:10.3406/jsa.1913.2866.
Sapir, Edward (1915). "The Na-dene languages: a preliminary report".American Anthropologist. 17: 765–773.
doi:10.1525/aa.1915.17.3.02a00080.
Sapir, Edward (1917). "Do we need a superorganic?". American Anthropologist. 19: 441–447.
doi:10.1525/aa.1917.19.3.02a00150.
Sapir, Edward (1924). "The grammarian andhis language". The American Mercury(1): 149–155.
Sapir, Edward (1924). "Culture, Genuine andSpurious". The American Journal of Sociology. 29 (4): 401–429.
doi:10.1086/213616.
Sapir, Edward (1925). "Memorandum on theproblem of an international auxiliary language".The Romanic Review
(16): 244–256.
Sapir, Edward (1925). "Sound patterns in language". Language (1): 37–51. doi:10.2307/409004.
Sapir, Edward (1931). "The function of an international auxiliary language". Romanic Review (11): 4–15. Archived
from the original on 2009-10-28.
Sapir, Edward (1936). "Internal linguistic evidence suggestive of the Northern origin of the Navaho".American
Anthropologist. 38: 224–235. doi:10.1525/aa.1936.38.2.02a00040.
Sapir, Edward (1944). "Grading: a study in semantics". Philosophy of Science (11): 93–116. doi:10.1086/286828.
Sapir, Edward (1947). "The relation of American Indian linguistics to general linguistics".Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology (1): 1–4.
Biographies
Koerner, E. F. K.; Koerner, Konrad (1985). Edward Sapir: Appraisals of his life and work. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins. ISBN 978-90-272-4518-2.
Cowan, William; Foster, Michael K.; Koerner, Konrad (1986). New perspectives in language, culture, and personality:
Proceedings of the Edward Sapir Centenary Conference (Ottawa, 1–3 October 1984) . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
ISBN 90-272-4522-3.
Darnell, Regna (1989).Edward Sapir: linguist, anthropologist, humanist . Berkeley: University of California Press.
ISBN 978-0-520-06678-6.
Sapir, Edward; Bright, William (1992).Southern Paiute and Ute: linguistics and ethnography . Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-013543-5.
Sapir, Edward; Darnell, Regna; Irvine, JudithT.; Handler, Richard (1999). The collected works of Edward Sapir:
culture. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-012639-6.

Correspondence
Sapir, Edward; Kroeber, Alfred L.; Golla (ed.), Victor (1984). "The Sapir–Kroeber correspondence: Letters between
Edward Sapir and A.L. Kroeber 1905–1925"(PDF). Reports from the Survey of California and other Indian
languages. 6: 1–509.

References
1. "Edward Sapir" (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/523671/Edward-Sapir). Encyclopædia Britannica.
2. Sapir, Edward. (2005). In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. www.credoreference.com/entry/wileycs/sapir_edward
3. Moore, Jerry D. 2009. "Edward Sapir: Culture, Language, and the Individual" in isions
V of Culture: an Introduction to
Anthropological Theories and Theorists, W
alnut Creek, California: Altamira. pp. 88-104
4. Darnell 1990:1-4
5. Allyn, Bobby"DeWitt Clinton's Remarkable Alumni"(http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/dewitt-clintons-re
markable-alumni/), The New York Times, July 21, 2009. Accessed September 2, 2014.
6. Darnell 1990:5
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8. Darnell 1990:7-8
9. Darnell 1990:9-15
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11. Darnell 1990:23
12. Darnell 1990:26
13. Sapir, Edward. 1910. Yana Texts. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology , vol.
1, no. 9. Berkeley: University Press. O
( nline version (https://archive.org/details/yanatexts00sapirich)at the Internet
Archive).
14. Darnell 1990:24-29
15. Darnell 1990:29-31
16. Sapir, Edward. "The Southern Paiute language". Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
. 65:
1–730. doi:10.2307/20026309 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F20026309).
17. Darnell 1990:34
18. Darnell 1990:42
19. Darnell 1990:44-48
20. Darnell 1990:50
21. Murray, Stephen O (1991). "The Canadian Winter' of Edward Sapir".Historiographia Linguistica. 8 (1): 63–68.
doi:10.1075/hl.8.1.04mur (https://doi.org/10.1075%2Fhl.8.1.04mur).
22. Darnell 1990:74-79
23. Darnell 1990:59
24. Darnell 1990:81
25. Darnell 1990:83-86
26. Dreams & Gibes (1917)
27. Darnell 1990:1972-83
28. Darnell 1990:187
29. Golla, Victor (2011). "51". California Indian Languages(https://books.google.com/books?id=B_yqdSE1F8wC&pg=P
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51&lpg=PA51&dq=li+fang-kuei+yale&source=bl&ots=YVgUxPD0cp&sig=ZRnVkk6qAq-rH8-KT92uIEwgCWE&hl=en
&sa=X&ei=3V8TVZGgNMrnoASXtIHACg&ved=0CFgQ6AEwDQ#v=snippet&q=%22sapir's%20first%20graduate%20
student%22&f=false).
30. Darnell 1990:204-7
31. Darnell 1998
32. Gelya Frank. 1997. Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology
. American Anthropologist, New Series, V
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99, No. 4, pp. 731-745
33. Haas, M. R. (1953), Sapir and the Training of Anthropological Linguists. American Anthropologist, 55: 447–450.
34. Reported by Regna Darnell, Sapir's biographer (p.c. to Bruce Nevin).
35. Morris Swadesh. 1939. "Edward Sapir" Language V
ol. 15, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1939), pp. 132-135
36. Darnell, R. (1998), Camelot at Yale: The Construction and Dismantling of the Sapirian Synthesis, 1931-39. American
Anthropologist, 100: 361–372.
37. Moore 2009
38. Richard J. Preston. 1966. Edward Sapir's Anthropology: Style, Structure, and Method. American Anthropologist ,
New Series, Vol. 68, No. 5, pp. 1105-1128
39. Richard Handler. 1984. Sapir's Poetic Experience. American Anthropologist , New Series, V
ol. 86, No. 2, pp. 416-
417
40. Krauss 1986:157
41. Sapir, Edward (1933). "La réalité psychologique des phonèmes (The psychological reality of phonemes)".Journal de
Psychologie Normale et Pathologique(in French).
42. Malkiel, Yakov. 1981. Drift, Slope, and Slant: Background of, and V
ariations upon, a Sapirian Theme. Language, V
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57, No. 3 (Sep., 1981), pp. 535-570
43. Gopsill, F. Peter. International Languages: a matter for Interlingua
. British Interlingua Society, 1990.
44. Falk, Julia S. "Words without grammar: linguists and the international language movement in the United States",
Language and Communication, 15(3): pp. 241–259. Pergamon, 1995.

External links
National Academy of Sciences biography
Robert Throop and Lloyd Gordon Ward: Mead Project 2.0 at spartan.ac.brocku.ca
Interlingua: Communication Sin Frontiera. Biographia, Edward Sapir
Works by Edward Sapir at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Edward Sapirat Internet Archive

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