XIII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2021

Edward Sapir was born in 1884 in Lauenburg, Western Pomerania. He is one of the most prominent American linguists and anthropologists of his time. A collection of essays, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality are very famous and important.

The work “Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech”

“Language” is the most influential among his publications (1921). This is the only book he completed during his lifetime. This work provides everything from a grammar-typological classification of languages to "language drift" and the associations between language, race, and culture. Edward Sapir included written and unwritten languages on an equal footing, marvelling at the precision and beauty of grammatical forms and structural typologies. The book was addressed to an educated general audience, but its broad outline and insightful vision of language form, its treatment of specific topics, have greatly influenced professional linguists ever since.

Ethnology, language and culture

Sapir served as chief of anthropology for the Canadian National Museum, where he made a significant contribution to ethnology. One of his most important works as a monograph concerned cultural change among American Indians. Sapir worked with examples of structural similarity. He also focused on the Indian languages west of the continental divide.

He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1925. In 1929, Sapir suggested dividing the vast number of Indian languages of the United States and Canada, as well as some languages of Mexico and Central America, into six main sections. Although Sapir himself saw the classification as a series of working hypotheses, many scholars promptly reified its categories, latching onto the six-unit classification as a simple guide to tribal relationships. In 1931, he accepted a professorship at Yale University, where he founded the Department of anthropology and remained active until two years before his death.

Edward Sapir conducted the idea about interrelation of language and three elements: culture, society, and cognition. Sapir’s perspective on culture is highly influenced by some western linguist and philosopher like F. Boas, Ch. Morris, and F. Saussure. To prove that language plays a significant role in creating culture was his main objective in linguistics. From his point of view, a person is not only influenced by their experiences or the society around them, but are also mostly repressed by their language. Sapir supposed that people perceive the world mainly through language. He wrote many articles about the relationship of language to culture.

Sapir argued that language is not static, but that it is constantly changing. Some parts of language change quickly while some are much slower. Reality changes along with the language. Conversely, because of the change in language, reality also changes. Language serves as a filter through which we experience and interpret reality. Every culture has its own language, or set of filters through which it predisposes its members to certain kinds of experience and thinking. Without language, it is difficult to imagine human life at all.

Some of Sapir's ideas about the influence of language on how people think were adopted and developed by Benjamin Wharf. Whorf's development of these ideas later became known as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”. In 1927, Sapir published “The unconscious pattern of behavior in society.” He combined the concepts of phonology and grammar. Sapir formulated that culture should be seen as part of individually learned patterns, both conscious and unconscious, and not as external elements. In his paper "The Status of Linguistics as a Science" he continued to dwell on this idea. It laid the foundation for the development of ethnolinguistics as a scientific field. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is not accepted by experts. However, the idea that language reflects the way reality is looked upon incites the study of language and culture.

Descriptive linguistics

Edward Sapir was a principal developer of the American descriptive school of structural linguistics. Sapir found the distributional method that characterizes descriptive linguistics. He developed phonemic theory, which implies the analysis of the sounds according to the pattern of their distribution. In other words, it is a sequence in which sounds occur and are systematized and perceived by the speakers of the language. Phonemic analysis recognizes language as behaviour resulting from a process of selection. This method of analysis classifies each part of an utterance based on its environment, rather than on its meaning. The method is important because its universe and its terms of reference are so explicit that it is possible to detect all kinds of hidden relations: neutralized phonemic differences, masked and combined phonemes, zeroed morphemes, etc.

In 1925, he published his work “Sound Patterns in Language”. It defined the concept of a phoneme in terms of meaningful relationships between sounds. In 1933, he followed this pattern-oriented argument by discussing the "psychological reality" of phonemes. This “reality” is an intuition of native Amerindian speakers for the phonological system of their native language. The level of generalization implied in Sapir's distinction between phonetics and phonology in these works was derived from fieldwork with aboriginal languages ​​independently of the parallel work on phonemic models of the Prague School of Linguistics in Europe

Distributional methods have become widely used in the formulation of the linguistic process. Phonemic phenomena were considered as processes of change that are structural and thus related to the environment in which they occur. Sapir was one of the creators of the concept of morphophoneme. A morphophoneme classifies together all those phonemes that replace each other in the paradigm. In other words, it classifies the various phonemic forms that a word or morpheme has when it is in different morphemic environments. This concept was also partly based on the speaker's perception of phonemic replacement. Sapir proved the advantages of regular grammar and advocated critical attention to the basics of the language, unbiased to the peculiarities of national languages when choosing an international auxiliary language.

Historical and comparative linguistics

Sapir also worked extensively in the field of historical and comparative linguistics. He traced relationships between languages. His interest in patterns and process led him to think about configurational pressure as a source of change. He meant that phonemic and morphemic changes are influenced by relevant patterns inherent in the language itself. He supposed that configurational pressure is a factor in a drift. According to Sapir, drift is a process that occurs in a language whose speakers have separated and can no longer imitate each other, but whose language habits continue to change in the same way in separated communities. This assumption has not received sufficient study. However, it is consistent with the systematization of linguistic changes.

In historical linguistics, Sapir is particularly known for a series of complex analyses of the earliest stages of Indo-European. He based his work partly on difficult data from the Tocharian language and partly on the laryngeal hypothesis. This hypothesis reconstructed various laryngeal consonants lost in early Indo-European with consequent changes to neighboring vowels.

He studied the similarities and connections of Indo-European languages with Semitic and other Mediterranean languages. He believed that Indo-Europeans and Semites might have descended from the same stock. This hypothesis could not be established by reconstructions using the generally accepted comparative method. Nevertheless, Sapir could indicate many unexpected connections and a large structural similarity at the earliest stages of both Indo-European and Semitic.

In 1937, while he was teaching at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute Sapir suffered a heart attack. He died in 1939 of heart disease at the age of fifty-five. Edward Sapir was a talented poet, essayist, and composer, as well as a brilliant scholar. Sapir's observing and describing in a simple and elegant manner elaborate linguistic patterns have always attracted people.

List of references:

Электронныйресурс: Encyclopedia Britannica, Edward Sapir

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Sapir

Электронныйресурс: Edward Sapir

http://www.ello.uos.de/field.php/TheoryModelMethod/EdwardSapir

Электронныйресурс: Encyclopedia, Edward Sapir

https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/language-and-linguistics-biographies/edward-sapir#C

Электронныйресурс: Biographical sketch of Edward Sapir

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Found/sapirbio.html

Электронныйресурс: New World Encyclopedia

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Edward_Sapir#Legacy

Электронныйресурс: The National Academies Press

https://www.nap.edu/read/5737/chapter/15#294

Linguistics Relativity: Edward Sapir’s Perspective on Language, Culture, and Cognition, Ronald Maraden Parlindungan Silalahi, Bunda Mulia University

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Linguistics-Relativity%3A-Edward-Sapir’s-Perspective-Silalahi/bc2206592bfd7d687cb641ad6187b0c07c68cb7c

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