His first generation of students included Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, who each produced richly detailed studies of indigenous North American cultures.

He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937 through 1938, replacing Sapir, who was gravely ill. Whorf gave graduate level lectures on " Problems of American Indian Linguistics ".

After settling in New York Edward Sapir was raised mostly by his mother, who stressed the importance of education for the upwardly social mobile, and turned the family increasingly away from Judaism.

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.

This first experience with Native American languages in the field was closely overseen by Boas, who was particularly interested in having Sapir gathering ethnological information for the Bureau.

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.

Boas kept working to secure a stable appointment for his student, and by his recommendation Sapir ended up being hired by the Canadian Geological Survey, who wanted him lead the institutionalization of anthropology in Canada.

By introducing the high standards of Boasian anthropology, Sapir did incite antagonism from those amateur ethnologists who felt that they had contributed important work.

Sapir enlisted the assistance of fellow Boasians Paul Radin and Alexander Goldenweiser, who with Barbeau worked on the people's of the Eastern Woodlands: the Ojibwa, the Iroquois, the Huron and the Wyandot.

Sam Batwi, the speaker of Yana who had worked with Sapir, was unable to understand the Yahi variety, and Krober was convinced that only Sapir would be able to communicate with Ishi.

The Sapir household was largely run by Eva Sapir, who did not get along well with Florence, and this added to the strain on both Florence and Edward.

During the summer of 1925 Bloomfield worked as Assistant Ethnologist with the Geological Survey of Canada in the Canadian Department of Mines, undertaking linguistic field work on Plains Cree ; this position was arranged by Edward Sapir, who was then Chief of the Division of Anthropology, Victoria Museum, Geological Survey of Canada, Canadian Department of Mines.

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

Empirical research into the question has been associated mainly with the names of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who wrote on the topic in the 1930s, and his mentor Edward Sapir, who did not himself write extensively on the topic.

Ishi provided valuable information on his native Yana language, which was recorded and studied by the linguist Edward Sapir, who had previously done work on the northern dialects.

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.

Harris's early publications brought him to the attention of Edward Sapir, who strongly influenced him and who came to regard him as his intellectual heir.

For linguists who follow Edward Sapir in connecting Haida to the above languages, the Haida isolate represents an additional branch, with Athabaskan – Eyak – Tlingit together forming the other.

Among the most prolific and gifted linguists of his times was Edward Sapir, who was among the first to apply the comparative method to native American languages.

Joseph Greenberg worked in the tradition of " lumpers " and following Sapir he accepted kinds of evidence that are not generally acceptable to those who hold that only actual linguistic linguistic reconstruction through the comparative method can yield reliable proof of genetic relationships between languages.

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.

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.

Sapir had a profound influence on Whorf's thinking.

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.

But Sapir did not want to compromise on quality, and in the end the Handbook had to go into press without Sapir's piece.

Apart from Sapir the division had two other staff members, Marius Barbeau and Harlan I. Smith.

During his time in Canada, Sapir also acted as an advocate for Indigenous rights, arguing publicly for introduction of better medical care for Indigenous communities, and assisting the Six Nation Iroquois in trying to recover eleven wampum belts that had been stolen from the reservation and were on display in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania, the belts were only returned to the Iroquois in 1988.

Sapir initially wrote to Benedict to commend her for her dissertation on The Guardian Spirit, but soon realized that Benedict had published poetry pseudonymously.

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

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.

Before departing for Samoa, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of Ruth Benedict.

Edward Sapir had commented on a connection between Na-Dené and Sino-Tibetan.

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 1953 psychologist Eric Lenneberg published a detailed criticism of the line of thought that had been fundamental for Sapir and Whorf.

Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated an actual hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated one based on a condensation of the different expressions of the notion of linguistic relativity in their works.

Boas's obituary for him ( one of a number he had to write for younger colleagues including Pliny Earle Goddard and Edward Sapir ) recalls him as a genuinely good person.

Some while later he used those symbols in some work on an American Indian language he had done for Sapir.

Sapir replied stating that it " should by all means be published "; however, it was not until 1993 that it was prepared for publication by Lyle Campbell and Frances Karttunen.

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 ).

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 collaboration between Kroeber and Sapir was made difficult by the fact that Sapir largely followed his own interest in detailed linguistic description, ignoring the administrative pressures to which Kroeber was subject, among them the need for a speedy completion and a focus on the broader classification issues.

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.

Sapir described the work: " I think I may safely say that my work with Ishi is by far the most time-consuming and nerve-racking that I have ever undertaken.

The Sapir household continued to be managed largely by Grandmother Eva, until Sapir remarried in 1926.

The IALA became a major supporter of mainstream American linguistics, funding, for example, numerous studies by Sapir, Collinson, and Morris Swadesh in the 1930s and 1940s.

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 ).

Members of the early 20th century school of American Anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also embraced forms of the idea to one extent or another, but Sapir in particular wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism.

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.

On the other hand, Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating, " It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language.