Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) was an American linguist and the central figure of American structural linguistics. Born in Chicago, he studied at Harvard, Wisconsin and Chicago and in Germany, and taught at Illinois, Ohio State, Chicago and Yale. He worked on Germanic philology, on Tagalog with a single Filipino speaker in Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis, and for many years on the Algonquian languages, applying the comparative method to unwritten languages. His book Language, published in 1933, set out a rigorous descriptive method that dominated the field for a generation; he was a founder of the Linguistic Society of America. He also wrote primers for teaching children to read.