Edward Sapir (1884–1939)

I gave this three stars for how it struck me, but it probably deserves four or more. While Sapir never puts forward a conclusion or deep insight that wows me, he assays into deep and meaningful topics like Montaigne. Probably the nine essays here would bear up on repeated readings; maybe even years later. They are very well organized and build from one to the other, starting with a long essay on language, his principal field of study. Not really an illuminating exploration, he does telegraph show more an awe and wonder of this hard to define and categorized subject that is universal in the human experience. Mixing in with the wonder is some linguistic science, such as a classification of languages:

Four stages of synthesis may be conveniently recognized; the isolating type, the weakly synthetic type, the fully synthetic type and the polysynthetic type.

This helps to explain why Chinese can be seen as so old (along with its many exports to other languages) and how we can see a taxon in Algonquin and other Native American languages that fit so much into a single word. This flows nicely into "The Function of an International Auxiliary Language", but comes to now conclusion. Sapir puts forward English as the example of promoting an existing language, and Esperanto for a manufactured one without opting for either or neither. But, no discussion of which previously identified type would be best.

Similarly, "The Meaning of Religion" is a courageous undertaking, but the cleverest observation was not even his own:

Tylor believed that the series: soul, ghost, spirit, god, was a necessary genetic chain. "God" would be no more than the individualized totality of all spirits, ...

Maybe this floundering in essays like "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry," and "The Statue of Linguistics as a Science" is from the great mind admitting ideas as disparate as the "human spirit" and the taxonomy of languages and ending up not knowing whether he wants to philosophize or analyze. show less

Based on Sapir's master's thesis, as I understand, this first of many rediscoveries of Herder considers the implications of his move in the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache from a position where language must have developed from cries of beasts to one where it is the innate human capacity, like the hiving of bees and the webbing of spiders, and the one that shows we were built to inhabit this world entire, in that it lets us adapt it--create new words--to come to grips with all show more conditions, all climes. There's a lot of "of course, he is no modern scientist"-type pooh-poohing, but it's gently done, especially by the standards of the era, and I must say that the erudite clarity of Sapir's writing puts all subsequent writers of master's theses on the same topic to shame, or me at least. Modern Philology 5(1). show less

The origins of the Wharf-Sapir hypothesis - language creates reality, not the vice versa.

A classic early text. Highly influential among anthropologists and linguists