Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Sapir, worked as a cantor.

Sapir worked with his father to transcribe a number of Paiute songs that Tillohash knew.

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 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.

Sapir traveled to San Francisco and worked with Ishi over the summer of 1915, having to invent new methods for working with a monolingual speaker.

In 1937 Pike went to the University of Michigan, where he worked for his doctorate in linguistics under Edward Sapir.

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.

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.

Linguists Edward Sapir and John Peabody Harrington worked with Takelma descendants.

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.

Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Sapir – Whorf hypothesis influenced the development and standardization of Interlingua during the first half of the 20th Century, but this was largely due to Sapir's direct involvement.

Boas ' student, the linguist Edward Sapir later noted that also English speakers pronounce sounds differently even when they think they are pronouncing the same sound, for example few English speakers realize that the sounds written with the letter < t > in the words " tick " and " stick " are phonetically different, the first being generally affricated and the other aspirated-a speaker of a language where this contrast is meaningful would instantly perceive them as different sounds and tend not to see them as different realizations of a single phoneme.

The first half of the 20th century was marked by the structuralist school, based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in Europe and Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in the United States.

The Languages of Pao is a science fiction novel by Jack Vance, first published in 1958, in which the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis is a central theme.

Along with Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder was one of the first to argue that language determines thought, a theme that two centuries later would be central to the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis.

In 1910, upon recommendation from Franz Boas, the anthropologist-linguist Edward Sapir was appointed as the first anthropologist in the newly formed anthropology division of the museum.

The genetic relation of Wiyot and Yurok to Algonquian was first proposed by Edward Sapir ( 1913, 1915, 1923 ), and argued against by Algonquianist Truman S. Michelson ( 1914, 1914, 1935 ).

In nearly a century since Edward Sapir first proposed the " Hokan " hypothesis, little additional evidence has been found that these families were related to each 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.

Sapir entertained the idea that ultimately all languages of the Americas might turn out to be provably related and such a phenomenon as the apparent Pan-American tendency to have first person forms with a prefixed n-was suggestive for this line of thought.

Gahal joined the government on the first day of the Six-Day War, with both Begin and the Liberal's Yosef Sapir becoming a Minister without Portfolio ; Ben-Gurion's Rafi also joined, with Moshe Dayan becoming Defense Minister.

In 1926, Jenness succeeded Canada's first Chief Anthropologist, Dr. Edward Sapir, as Chief of Anthropology at the National Museum of Canada, a position he retained until his retirement in 1948.

" The connection of Wiyot and Yurok in northern California ( which together were formerly called Ritwan, after Dixon and Kroeber's grouping of the two as one of their more remote Californian stocks ) with Algonquian was first proposed by Sapir ( 1913 ) and was quite controversial at that time ( see Michelson 1914, 1915 ; Sapir 1915a, 1915b ; see also Chapter 2 ), but the relationship has subsequently been demonstrated to the satisfaction of all ( see Haas 1958 ; Teeter 1964a ; Goddard 1975, 1979, 1990 ).

) At the beginning, he and Edward Sapir were Canada's first and only two full-time anthropologists.

The emergent science, freshly invigorated by the first widespread publications of German Edward Sapir ( 1921 ) and American Leonard Bloomfield ( 1933 ), could provide Townsend ’ s religious goals with the scientific credibility and prestige he would need to convince governmental officials of his organization ’ s legitimacy.

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.

He enrolled in a program of graduate studies, nominally working towards a PhD in linguistics, but he never actually attempted to obtain a degree, satisfying himself with participating in the intellectual community around Sapir.

Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship.

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.

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.

Also in the summer of 1909 Sapir went to Utah, with his student J. Alden Mason.

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

Ishi died of his illness in early 1916, and Kroeber partly blamed the exacting nature of working with Sapir for his failure to recover.

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.

Margaret Mead decades after her affair with Sapir

Sapir continued work on Athabascan, working with two speakers of the Alaskan languages Kutchin and Ingalik.