biography
pronunciation:
[sapeer]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1884–1939)
|
| biography:
| Anthropologist and linguist, born in Lauenburg, Germany. He emigrated to the USA in 1889 and was raised in an orthodox Jewish family on New York City's Lower East Side. He attended Columbia University (1904 BA; 1909 PhD), where he came under the influence of Franz Boas. After teaching briefly at the Universities of California and Pennsylvania, he became chief of anthropology for the Canadian National Museum (1910–25), then went on to teach at the University of Chicago (1925–31) and Yale (1931–9). Although he did some work in African linguistics, he is primarily known for his work with Native American languages, classifying them in ‘families’ and stressing their relationships with their cultures. He encouraged scholars to extend their research beyond formal linguistics and pure ethnography to the psychology of individual personality and behaviour. With his student, Benjamin Whorf, he developed what became known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, namely, that the way people perceive and categorize the real world is strongly influenced by the language they speak. His theories on language became an important part of the European structuralist movement. His publications include poetry as well as his specialized writings, and his best-known work is Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921). |
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