Edward Sapir was a linguist dedicated to the investigation of the languages of native North America. Sapir played a major role in the formulation of the "culture and personality" field, and was recognized for his work in linguistics and its formal application to culture. Edward Sapir was born in 1884 in Lauenburg, Germany to Eva Seagal and Jacob David Sapir. The family moved to the United States when Sapir was five, and he grew up in New York City. Sapir received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied with Franz Boas. His studies led to a fascination with the Amerindian languages and their grammars, and he helped Boas to record these languages before they became extinct. His fieldwork included an analysis of the languages of the Chinook, Takelma, Yana, Ute and Southern Paiute. In 1910, Sapir was made the director of the anthropological division of the Geological Survey of Canada and remained in that position until 1925.
During this time, he primarily worked with the languages of the Nootka of Vancouver Island. Sapir then moved on to teach at the University of Chicago (1925-1931) and at Yale University (1931-1939). Also a poet, Sapir published over two hundred poems and one volume of poetry during the course of his career.
Sapir is perhaps most well known for the linguistic theory, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Sapir began working with Benjamin Lee Whorf in the early 1930s, developing a systematic approach to his own studies of the interrelationship between psychology and language. The hypothesis developed by Sapir and Whorf suggests that language shapes the way we think about the world. The most noted examples of this theory are the Eskimo language, which has over one hundred words for snow, each describing a different real-world situation; or the Hanunoo, who have 92 different names for rice. The hypothesis suggests that in instances such as these, language allows for the description of real-life differences because those differences are important to the culture. This hypothesis holds some truth but can lead to relativism. Theorists also point out that there are common linguistic features where words are invented to describe reality (for example, the word "microwave" was created to describe the phenomenon and did not mark the invention of the ovens themselves). In spite of a lack of empirical research into these views, Sapir and Whorf were critical in heightening interest in the field of comparative linguistics and helped to promote the field of psycholinguistics.
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