Indeed, the vast majority of Sapir's aesthetic pursuits were carried out during his fifteen-year tenure as director of the anthropological division of the Geological Survey of Canada (1910-1925).
Sapir, born in 1884 in Lauenburg, Pomerania, was the only surviving child of Eva Seagal and Jacob David Sapir, a Jewish cantor. He grew up in New York City and received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Initially Sapir specialized in Germanic philology and literature, also studying music; but he switched to anthropology, albeit still concentrating in linguistics, as one of the first generation of students of Franz Boas, the dominant figure of twentieth century North American anthropology and linguistics. Sapir was fascinated by the patterned complexity of grammar, particularly in languages dramatically divergent from the Indo-European language family. Moreover, he accepted Boas's urgent mandate to record Amerindian languages before they became completely extinct, a likelihood considered inevitable in the early part of the century. (Many of the languages Sapir studied are no longer spoken, but others have revived in their usage and symbolization of native American identity, an indirect result of the work of Sapir and his colleagues in both Canada and the United States.)
Sapir did major firsthand fieldwork on five languages before accepting his government position in 1910 (Chinook and Takelma in Oregon, Yana in California, and Ute and Southern Paiute in the Southwest).
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