Page "Edward Sapir" Paragraph 10

Although still in college, Sapir was allowed to participate in Boas ' graduate seminar on American Languages which included translations of Native American and Inuit myths collected by Boas.

In this way Sapir was introduced to Indigenous American languages while he kept working on his M. A.

in Germanic linguistics.

Robert Lowie later said that Sapir's fascination with indigenous languages stemmed from the seminar with Boas in which Boas used examples from Native American languages to disprove all of Sapir's common-sense assumptions about the basic nature of Language.

Sapir's 1905 Master's thesis was an analysis of Johann Gottfried Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language, and included examples from Inuit and Native American languages, not at all familiar to a Germanicist.

The thesis criticized Herder for retaining a Biblical chronology, too shallow to allow for the observable diversification of languages.

But he also argued with Herder that all of the world's languages have equal aesthetic potentials and grammatical complexity.

He ended the paper by calling for a " very extended study of all the various existing stocks of languages, in order to determine the most fundamental properties of language "-almost a program statement for the modern study of linguistic typology, and a very Boasian approach.