Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was an American linguist and anthropologist. Born in Lauenburg in Pomerania, he emigrated as a child to the United States and studied at Columbia under Franz Boas. He carried out field research on many Native American languages, including Takelma, Yana, Paiute and Nootka, headed the anthropology division of the Geological Survey of Canada from 1910 to 1925, and later taught at Chicago and Yale. His book Language (1921) became a classic, and his ideas on the relation between language and thought, developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, are known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He also wrote poetry.