Important Figures in Linguistics - Franz Boas and Edward Sapir

Franz Boas

    Franz Boas was an expert on anthropology, and he is called the father of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology. He worked on Native American languages and made contributions to linguistics in this aspect.

    

    Franz Boas believes culture and language have a strong impact on thought and behavior. Besides working on languages, he worked on culture and race as well. 

 

    He was the teacher of Edward Sapir, and he raised four important students, including Edward Sapir, in the field of anthropology. Also, he had an influence on scholars of the same field that the race itself was a cultural construct, and the variation among races was because of historical events instead of biological fate.

 

“The very fact of the unconsciousness of linguistic processes helps us to gain a clearer understanding of the ethnological phenomena, a point the importance of which cannot be underrated."

     

    He thinks humans have evolved equally but differently. In addition to that, he believes cultural differences are not just because of biological differences as cultural differences can be affected by environmental conditions, migrations, and everything related to humans. 

 

Edward Sapir

 

    Edward Sapir is the founder of ethnolinguistics. (Ethnolinguistics studies on the relation between language and culture. Also, it aims to understand how societies perceive the world and what distinguishes one culture from another.) He studied the relationship between language and culture. Besides, he tried to place linguistics as a discipline apart from philology and anthropology.

    Moreover, he wasn’t interested in only linguistics and ethnology. He studied anthropology as well. He worked at a museum where he was chief of anthropology in Canada. 

 

    He was a student of Franz Boas. In a seminar of him, Sapir was influenced by the examples of Native American languages because the examples revealed that Sapir’s common-sense thoughts about the basic nature of language were wrong. 

 

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