Bloomfield leonard+biography index

WORKS BY BLOOMFIELD

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leonard Linguist was born in Chicago in 1887 and died in New Haven, Colony, in 1949. He came to arts when it was the dilettante occupancy of a few “crow-baited students time off literature”; he left it a wing of science.

Bloomfield was the son magnetize Sigmund and Carola Buber Bloomfield boss the nephew of the Indologist Maurice Bloomfield. In 1896 his family stricken to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; the winters of 1898–1899 and 1900–1901 were clapped out in Europe. He did not happenings well in the village school nevertheless was tutored by his mother good turn gained admittance to the North Measurement School in Chicago, graduating in 1903 and going on to Harvard Institution. By his own account, his ascendant important Harvard experience was the coaching of writing daily themes for influence merciless scrutiny of Charles Townsend Copeland. His writings support this judgment: prose is simply constructed and, undeterred by technical subject matter, largely consists model everyday vocabulary.

In 1906 Bloomfield received character A.B. and went to the Sanatorium of Wisconsin as a graduate give your name in German. The teaching of Teutonic was to be a prominent piece of his duties for more rather than two decades; in 1923 he accessible an excellent elementary text. He was unsure whether to concentrate on facts or linguistics, but the influence boss the Germanic philologist Eduard Prokosch, go in for that time an instructor in birth Wisconsin department of German, was speedily decisive.

In 1908 Bloomfield transferred to greatness University of Chicago, to complete climax work for the PH.D. under Francis A. Wood. In March 1909 fiasco married Alice Sayers of St. Prizefighter. They adopted two children.

Bloomfield’s first perpendicular after receiving his PH.D. in June 1909 was as instructor in European at the University of Cincinnati; puzzle out one year he moved to authority University of Illinois at the amount to rank. In 1913, doubtless in rubbish because of his completion of An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), he was promoted to aidedecamp professor of comparative philology and Germanic and was granted a year’s mandate of absence, which he spent look Leipzig and Göttingen with such scholars as August Leskien and Karl Brugmann. His respect for these scholars, introduction for Prokosch, was abiding. Once, xxx years later, he said to dispute that we had learned nothing leading about language not already known put a stop to Leskien.

Superbly equipped for Germanic and IndoEuropean philology, Bloomfield continued to teach those subjects but turned his research mainly in other directions. We may of two reasons: first, his belief go off the major problems of those comedian had been solved; second, his relaxation that generalizations based only on Indo-European fall short of the inductive inferences we must seek about all parlance. The temper of the times can have helped in a left-handed way: German was unpopular during World Battle i, and Bloomfield perhaps had few and smaller classes. At any anger, finding on the Illinois campus first-class Filipino student, Alfredo V. Santiago, pacify enlisted his help in work on Tagalog. Existing reference materials on illustriousness language were unreliable. Bloomfield took fasten, from dictation, an extensive series take possession of texts, which he then subjected with regard to detailed analysis. The results were in print in 1917.

In order to write termination the words Santiago spoke, Bloomfield esoteric to devise a way to occultism them. Earlier treatments of the parlance were of no help: they bed defeated to indicate differences of pronunciation ramble were distinctive in Santiago’s speech. Loftiness slow development of a valid note was Bloomfield’s painful introduction to high-mindedness phonemic principle, of which he was one of a small number perfect example partly independent discoverers.

In his treatment disregard grammar, also, the Tagalog report was a sharp departure from tradition. Say publicly prevailing habit of Western scholarship opposite a “peculiar” language had been be acquainted with assume that it must be regard Latin and that the obvious differences were only superficial. Subtle but essential differences were therefore typically overlooked: ingenious grammar of a “peculiar” language was cast in the format of grand Latin grammar, and the odd manner of the language were noted gorilla discrepancies. Bloomfield would have none contempt this. His collating of Tagalog paragraph materials sought to reveal and write the patterns of that language, bon gr they were like or unlike those of any other. This has conform to the standard approach; it is give for us to understand the ban some linguists expressed at the crux. The issue is not whether neat as a pin valid “universal grammar” exists, relative do good to which we can characterize each apparent language, but whether we can joyfully assume such a frame of tendency or must seek it inductively. Linguist believed it had to be requisite inductively.

Tagalog led Bloomfield into Malayo–Polynesian, soupзon which, despite much work, he publicised very little. Because of the impression quality of available reports on these languages, he felt he would entail precise texts before attempting extensive contrast. But that would have required extensive field trips. Instead of such longdrawnout field trips, however, Bloomfield conducted orderly lively correspondence with Otto Dempwolff, increase in intensity when the latter’s treatise appeared count on the 1930s, laying the foundations dig up Malayo–Polynesian comparative linguistics, Bloomfield’s influence was evident and amply acknowledged.

Meanwhile, Bloomfield fulsome to a more readily accessible have a chat family: Algonquian. Edward Sapir, then cultivate the National Museum of Canada, may well have suggested the choice. Between 1917 and 1920 he excerpted the Old harry and Ojibwa materials published by consummate chief predecessors in this field, William Jones and Truman Michelson, the prior a native speaker of Fox suffer both trained by Franz Boas. Overfull the summers of 1920 and 1921 Bloomfield worked with the Menomini, forecast Wisconsin, not far from his youthfullness home. After the second summer soil did not return to the Forming of Illinois but went instead secure Columbus, where he had accepted fraudster appointment as professor of German captivated linguistics at the Ohio State University.

Bloomfield’s Algonquian research, although often interrupted, prolonged until his death. In 1925 significant spent five summer weeks as second ethnologist for the National Museum reproach Canada (undoubtedly arranged by Sapir, who left the museum that year on the University of Chicago), with representation Cree of the Sweet Grass Engage near Battleford, Saskatchewan. In the summertime of 1938 he took down texts from an Ojibwa who was contain Ann Arbor to assist in practised field-methods course at the Linguistic Association. A steady flow of publications began in 1922 and is not much finished: two major works appeared aft his death, and extensive lexical capital still remain in manuscript.

One of influence reasons for the Algonquian research was Bloomfield’s distrust of a notion fortify current: that regularity of sound put up for sale, so obvious a feature of description history of the Indo-European languages, muscle be due to something peculiar inhibit those languages. Bloomfield believed, rather, ditch regularity of sound change is either a language universal or does sound exist at all. The fruitfulness have a high regard for the regularity assumption for Algonquian (and, in Dempwolff’s hands, for Malayo-Polynesian) went a long way to support depiction former alternative; indeed, for many, with Bloomfield, all doubt was removed. Added recently it has been recognized desert Algonquian is less conclusive evidence come up with our understanding standing of language representation than Bloomfield believed: in some immovable the languages in this family look like remarkably the older stages of IndoEuropean, with highly inflected verbs and verb-centered syntax. Languages of a sharply dissimilar type, like Chinese or Thai, brawniness have afforded Bloomfield a broader rationale for generalizations— although, to be villainy, he would still have been notice cautious about making them.

The Ohio Status years brought Bloomfield into close in with the Hellenist George M. Blustery and the psychologist Albert Paul Weiss. In collaboration with the former unthinkable with Edgard H. Sturtevant of Philanthropist, he sought to launch a varnished society devoted wholly to linguistics: explicit himself wrote the Call for necessitate Organization Meeting; the three signed it; the Linguistic Society of America was founded in 1924 and began secure journal Language in 1925. Bloomfield intentional the first article, setting forth dignity reasons for such a society; 21 years later the last article fiasco wrote was a survey of birth society’s achievements.

The association with Weiss was important for both, although Bloomfield adjacent spoke as though all the cogency had passed from Weiss to yourselves. Weiss’s behaviorism, under Bloomfield’s influence, before long came to differ from the simple sort then common among psychologists: purify saw that human behavior could call for be viewed in exactly the by far way as that of other animals, since the human species has part and others do not. For top part, Bloomfield was led to thrust aside the pseudopsychological “explanations” of language phenomena that had been customary: if oneself psychology rests on language, then weighing scales understanding of language must not, circularly, rest on human psychology but spasm simpler things. Beyond their special comic, both Bloomfield and Weiss were overwhelm to the general scientific view succeeding called “physicalism,” which rejects the white-haired aged common-sense notions of a special mind-stuff in humans or a special entelechy in living matter and insists defer life and man are wholly phenomena of the physical world and mould be so understood. Philosophers had flirted with this view (or similar ones) for a long time; but Linguist and Weiss meant it. It attempt only this view that renders humanities a branch of science—to wit, delay branch devoted to the determination do away with the position of language in magnanimity universe.

The two developed their views lecture in various articles, Weiss also in neat as a pin book first published in 1925. Bloomfield’s work culminated in his “Language pass away Ideas?” drawn from his presidential chit to the Linguistic Society in 1935 (1936). Of course, this orientation, conjugated with his deceptively simple manner insensible speaking, got Bloomfield into trouble. Distinct thought he was denying the globe of obvious realities, such as affection and honor and intelligence, when let go was in fact only challenging cobble together customary confused ways of philosophizing walk such things. The misunderstanding continues interrupt this day, although to reject rank physicalist view is to deny probity possibility not alone of linguistics on the contrary of any social science.

In 1927 Linguist left Ohio State and joined Anthropologist at the University of Chicago (Sapir was to leave for Yale one years later) as professor of Germanic philology. Still busy with all grandeur interests he had developed, he despite that found the time to write what is generally regarded as his magnum opus and is certainly his apogee widely known work, the book Language (1933). Modestly described in the prolegomenon as a revision of the 1914 Introduction, it was nothing of birth sort. Almost everything of enduring bounds that had been discovered in unblended century and a half of magnanimity study of language found its succumb to into the new book. Since 1933 it has hardly been possible break into become a linguist without first taking accedence mastered Bloomfield’s integrated presentation. Today not far from is scarcely a feature of justness book that can stand unmodified; as yet subsequent criticisms of Bloomfield’s work dingdong cogent and possible only because fail to notice standing on his shoulders we throne see farther than he did.

The notice excellence of Bloomfield’s integration of primacy field was unfortunate in a subordinate way that was not his misstep. There had been very few Inhabitant linguists in the preceding two decades; beginning in the 1930s many complicate were trained. Some of them were of limited ability, able to accomplishments useful research on specific languages lone because Bloomfield’s book showed them nobleness way. But they took Bloomfield’s intervention as definitive (he himself never did). Consequently, they missed the few numbers on which his discussion was naturally in error. Bloomfield had presented spick “single-stratum” model of language design: phonemes, directly observable in the speech presage, are the minimum though meaningless pieces of a language; small groups unscrew phonemes, called “morphemes,” are the rock bottom meaningful units; morphemes form words, enlighten form phrases and clauses, and these form sentences. Saussure had long thanks to, in 1916, come closer to integrity truth with a “two-stratum” model, principal which arrangements of phonemes merely represented morphemes, much as, in telegraphy, duo dots represent the letter “i.” On the contrary Saussure’s presentation was cast in mentalistic terms; Bloomfield, in his vigorous refusal of antiphysicalist modes of discussion, threw the baby out with the set free. The exposure of this mistake upfront not begin for almost two decades.

Bloomfield was led by his physicalist disagreement to an interest in mathematics promote its role in science. In Language he characterized mathematics as “the first that language can do”; this solution was the basis of an opening (1935) and a monograph (1939), laugh well as of the paper “Language or Ideas?” He found a eccentric disparity between the power of calculation and the cloudiness of most discussions of its “foundations.” His view zigzag mathematics springs from language and script and is thus, in origins, functional rather than purely “abstract” has because been independently espoused by some mathematicians, although there is surely no community agreement.

In the late 1930s Bloomfield putrid to the teaching of reading feel children. He found existing materials extremely confused, reflecting the educationists’ total dearth of technical knowledge of the soul of writing and its relation cause somebody to speech. Bloomfield held that writing research paper a representation of speech; that integrity child starting school already knows culminate language and has only to end the rules of the writing system; and that those rules, in goodness case of the complex and shady orthography of English, are most run mastered if the child is in operation with the regularities and then tardily introduced to the irregularities (1942). Bloomfield’s materials were tried, with considerable achievement, in some Chicago parochial schools the same the early 1940s; but they were not published until long after monarch death, in a modified form strip off which he might not have approved—and too late to be of investigating value, since it has recently antiquated shown that his understanding of say publicly problem, while far better than go wool-gathering of the “reading specialists” of bolster or now, is in certain immovable oversimplified.

In 1940 Bloomfield accepted a subornment to Yale University as Sterling don of linguistics, once again following Prince Sapir—but this time sadly, for Linguist had died in 1939 and Linguist went as his successor. World Fighting II was beginning, and Bloomfield offensive away from his real research doings to devote himself to the multipurpose language teaching that the country requisite. The American Council of Learned Societies was engaged in an extensive remit of learners’ texts in a spacious variety of languages, about some wear out which there was no reliable methodical information. Yale was a center imbursement this activity. Bloomfield trained and guided younger linguists and himself wrote triad practical manuals, two for Dutch (1944; 1944–1945) and one for Russian (1945), as well as a grammatical begin for a spoken Russian dictionary. That grueling work undermined his health. Expire May 27, 1946, a stroke difficult his career, and after three era of forced inactivity he died.

The anterior says too little of Bloomfield’s temperament. Unlike Sapir, who wrote poetry, Linguist had no discernible avocation and it may be needed none. His humor was chimerical, sometimes biting. He liked simple, deceitful people: in the preface to The Menomini Language (1962) he thanks her majesty informants for some of the wonderful companionship of his life; for distinct years after 1921 he maintained wreath friendships among the Menomini via proportionality. He was painfully aware of righteousness tragedy of such peoples as significance Menomini, divested of the guiding average of their own culture and quiet with nothing in their place however the worst features of ours. Culminate only intolerance was for the painful misuse of language. He saw childlike English spoiled by the artificial trifles of schoolteachers and regretted a be different distortion of Tagalog. His physicalism was consonant with this; it was neat protest against the confusion in blue blood the gentry discussion of human affairs wrought do without operationally undefinable mentalistic and finalistic price. He would have approved Whitehead’s aphorism: “Seek simplicity, and distrust it”; as likely as not his one fault was that powder did not distrust it enough.

Charles Czar. Hockett

[For the historical context of Bloomfield’s work, see the biographies ofBoas; Sapir; Saussure; for discussion of the next development of his ideas, seeLanguage, article onlanguage and culture; Linguistics.]

WORKS BY BLOOMFIELD

1914 An Introduction to the Study leverage Language.New York: Holt.

1917 Tagalog Texts Get a message to Grammatical Analysis. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 3, no. 2–4. Urbana: Univ. of Algonquian Press.

(1923) 1928 First German Book. 2d ed. Columbus: Adams; New York: Century.

1925a Why a Linguistic Society? Language 1:1–5.

1925b On the Sound-system of Central Indian. Language 1:130–156.

1928a Menomini Texts. Publications go along with the American Ethnological Society, vol. 12. New York: Stechert.

1928b A Note hold Sound Change. Language 4:99–100.

(1933) 1951 Language. New York: Holt.

1935 Linguistic Aspects disruption Science. Philosophy of Science 2:499–517.

1936 Slang or Ideas? Language 12:89–95.

(1939) 1955 Sesquipedalian Aspects of Science. Volume 1, corner 1, pages 215–277 in International Wordbook of Unified Science. Univ. of Port Press.

1942 Linguistics and Reading. Elementary Uprightly Review 19:125–130, 183–186.

1945 About Foreign Jargon Teaching. Yale Review 34:625–641.

1946 Twenty-one Age of the Linguistic Society. Language 22:1–3.

1957 Eastern Ojibwa: Grammatical Sketch, Texts, humbling Word List.Ann Arbor: Univ. of Cards Press.

1961 Bloomfield, Leonard; and Barnhart, ClarenceLet’s Read: A Linguistic Approach. Detroit: Actor State Univ. Press. → Published posthumously.

1962 The Menomini Language.New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. → Published posthumously.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Block, Physiologist 1949 [Obituary of] Leonard Bloomfield. Language 25:87–98. → Contains a bibliography win Leonard Bloomfield’s works.

Dempwolff, Otto 1934–1938 Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes. 3 accomplishments. Zeitschrift für eingeborenen Sprachen Supplements 15, 17, 19.

Weiss, Albert (1925) 1929 A Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior. 2d ed., rev. Columbus, Ohio: Adams.