He also began to study the comparative linguistics of the Uto-Aztecan language family, which Edward Sapir had recently demonstrated to be a linguistic family.

But Sapir had since become influenced by a current of logical positivism, such as that of Bertrand Russel and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly through Ogden and Richards ' The Meaning of Meaning, from which he adopted the a view that natural language potentially obscures, rather than facilitates, the mind to perceive and describe the world as it really is.

Also in 1937, Whorf and his friend G. L. Trager, published a paper in which they elaborated on the Azteco-Tanoan language family, proposed originally by Sapir as a family comprising the Uto-Aztecan and the Kiowa-Tanoan languages —( the Tewa and Kiowa languages ).

Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views.

Complementing his language studies, Sapir studied music in the department of the famous composer Edward MacDowell, though it is uncertain if Sapir studied with MacDowell, or with other faculty.

Kroeber suggested that Sapir work on the nearly extinct Yana language, and Sapir set to work.

Sapir described the way in which the Yana language distinguishes grammatically and lexically between men's and women's speech.

Tillohash's strong intuition about the soundpatterns of his language led Sapir to propose that the phoneme is not just an abstraction existing at the structural level of language, but that it in fact has psychological reality for speakers.

This fruitful collaboration laid the ground work for the classical description of the Southern Paiute language published in 1930, and enabled Sapir to produce the conclusive evidence linking the Shoshonean languages to the Nahuan languages-establishing the Uto-Aztecan language family on solid evidence.

In 1915 Sapir returned to California, where his expertise on the Yana language made him urgently needed.

Sapir was also a pioneer in Yiddish studies ( his first language ) in the United States ( cf.

Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language movement.

Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis.

This claim has been derived from the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis, which states that a language ’ s grammatical categories shape the speaker ’ s ideas and actions ; although Andrews says that moderate conceptions of the relation between language and thought are sufficient to support the " reasonable deduction ... cultural change via linguistic change ".

Many of his stories, such as Gulf, If This Goes On —, and Stranger in a Strange Land, depend strongly on the premise, related to the well-known Sapir – Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential ( as in the case of Joe Green in Gulf ).

Popularly known as the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two versions: ( i ) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and ( ii ) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.

This usage has been criticized as a misnomer, since Sapir and Whorf did not in fact formulate a hypothesis for empirical research, and because it is unclear to what extent Sapir actually subscribed to the idea of language influencing thought.

This formulation implicitly acknowledges that Sapir and Whorf were not the first or only scholars to have theorized about relations between language and thought and that other strands of thinking about the issue also exist.

Sapir insisted that the discipline of linguistics was of integral importance for ethnographic description, arguing that just as nobody would dream of discussing the history of the Catholic Church without knowing Latin or study German folksongs without knowing German, so it made little sense to approach the study of Indigenous folklore without knowledge of the indigenous languages.

Benedict also started a friendship with Edward Sapir who encouraged her to continue the study of the relations between individual creativity and cultural patterns.

A 1969 study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay claimed to demonstrate that color terminology is subject to universal semantic constraints, and hence to discredit the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis.

According to a study carried out at Sapir Academic College in 2007, some 75 % of the population was suffering from PTSD in the wake of rocket attacks on the city, and 1, 000 residents were receiving psychiatric treatment at the community mental health center.

Thus, contrary to Alfred L. Kroeber, Kluckhohn, and Edward Sapir, White saw the delineation of the object of study not as a cognitive accomplishment of the anthropologist, but as a recognition of the actually existing and delineated phenomena which comprise the world.

It was at Chicago that Haas began to study under Edward Sapir, whom she would follow to Yale.

It was Sapir who suggested that Emeneau take up a study of the Toda language of the Nilgiri hills in South India with an aim toward a comparative study of the Dravidian languages.

At age 14 Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school, but he chose not to attend the school which he found too posh, going instead to Peter Stuyvesant High School, and saving the scholarship money for his college education.

In his last year in college Sapir enrolled in the course " Introduction to Anthropology ", with Professor Livingston Farrand, who taught Boas ' four field approach to anthropology.

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.

" The Stuy "-Stuyvesant Highschool as it looked in 1909 a few years after Sapir attended

Having finished his coursework, Sapir moved on to his doctoral fieldwork, spending several years in short term appointments while working on his dissertation.

In the years 1910 – 25 Sapir established and directed the Anthropological Division in

Sapir's second wife, Jean Victoria McClenaghan, was sixteen years younger than him, had first met Sapir as a student in Ottawa, but had since also come to work at the University of Chicago's department of Juvenile Research.

The concept of the phoneme was then elaborated in the works of Nikolai Trubetzkoi and others of the Prague School ( during the years 1926 – 1935 ), and in those of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield.

This led him to begin studying linguistics with Edward Sapir at Yale University while still maintaining his day job at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company.

Edward Sapir, Whorf's mentor in linguistics at Yale

Whorf had met Sapir, the leading US linguist of the day, at professional conferences, and in 1931 Sapir came to Yale from the University of Chicago to take a position as Professor of Anthropology.

During his stay at Yale, Whorf acquired this current of thought partly from Sapir and partly through his own readings of Russell and Ogden and Richards.

In 1907-1908 Sapir was offered a position at the University of California, where Boas ' first student Alfred Kroeber who was the head of a project under the California state survey, to document the Indigenous languages of California.

Disappointed at not being able to stay at Berkeley, Sapir devoted his best efforts to other work, and did not get around to write up any of the Yana material for publication until 1910, to Kroeber's deep disappointment.

Sapir ended up leaving California early to take up a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Ethnology and American Linguistics.

Tillohash became a good friend of Sapir, and visited him at his home in New York and Philadelphia.

At Pennsylvania, Sapir was urged to work at a quicker pace than he was comfortable with.

Sapir, who had by then given up the hope to work at one of the few American research universities, accepted the appointment and moved to Ottawa.

Unsatisfied with efforts by amateur and governmental anthropologists, Sapir worked to introduce an academic program of anthropology at one of the major Universities, in order to professionalize the discipline.

Before departing Canada, Sapir had a short affair with Margaret Mead, Benedict's protégé at Columbia.

From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.

Also the distinction between a weak and a strong version of the hypothesis is a later invention, as Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy although in their writings at times their view of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.

Sapir was explicit that the connections between language and culture were neither thoroughgoing nor particularly deep, if they existed at all:

Instead of merely assuming that language influences the thought and behavior of its speakers ( after Humboldt and Sapir ) he looked at Native American languages and attempted to account for the ways in which differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers perceived the world.

But the reputation he had during his lifetime belies this idea: his academic peers at Yale University considered the " amateur " Whorf to be the best man available to take over Sapir's graduate seminar in Native American linguistics while Sapir was on sabbatical in 1937 – 38.

In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel-17, based on the Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis.

At Bloomington, he wrote several essays about his native Chewa tribe for the folklorist Stith Thompson, who introduced him to Edward Sapir, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, to which, after four semesters, he transferred.