Edward Sapir
Speech is neither instinct nor race. Reading the anthropologist Edward Sapir’s Language (1921).
Reading Edward Sapir's Language (1921) — Speech Is Neither Instinct Nor Race
Five years after Saussure's Course, the anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote his own introduction to linguistics. Language is culture, not instinct; its essence is pattern, not sound; and a language drifts on its own. The book's core, with quotations and plain diagrams.
Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 1: Is Speech an Instinct, and What Is a Sound?
How does walking differ from talking? Can a cry become a word? With Hokusai's Fuji beside Cézanne's Sainte-Victoire, a plain walk through Sapir's chapters 1–3: the definition of language, the myth of 'organs of speech', and the pattern behind the sounds.
Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 2: Form, Meaning, and Why Languages Have No Rank
By what methods is a word built? How many kinds of meaning hide in 'the farmer kills the duckling'? And why should we throw away the ladder that lines languages up from 'isolating' to 'inflective'? Sapir's chapters 4–6.
Sapir's "Drift" — a Language Moves Down Time and Has Its Own Slope
"Whom" will be gone in a couple of centuries, Sapir predicted. Not the fluctuations of one speaker but an unconscious selection that piles up in one direction — that is drift. A close reading of chapters 7–8 of Language.
Language, Race and Culture Are Separate — Sapir's Argument
"A racial genius that fashions a language" is a myth. Race, language and culture are independent variables — Sapir carrying his teacher Boas's anthropology over to the side of language, in chapters 9–10 of Language.
From the Sound Pattern to the Phoneme — Sapir's Chapter 3, and What Came After
Not one English speaker in a hundred knows that the t of 'sting' is a different sound from the t of 'teem.' Behind the objective sounds is a system in the mind — and how Sapir's insight became the phoneme.
Language and Literature — What Translates and What Does Not (Sapir, Chapter 11)
"With Heine one is under the illusion that the universe speaks German." Literature is made of a language as its material. The layer that translates and the layer that does not, and prosody as an outcrop of a language's dynamics — the last chapter of Language.