Sapir undoubtedly learned German as a child, but the language of his home was Yiddish he read Hebrew with his father, a cantor, beginning when he was seven or eight. (Prussia), in what is now Lebork, Poland, his parents, Jacob David and Eva Seagal Sapir, were Lithuanian Jews. For his successors in a range of disciplines he continues to exemplify the study of meaning and expressive form across linguistic and cultural boundaries. He was a humanist as well as linguist and anthropologist, composing music and publishing poetry and literary criticism. Alongside his linguistic investigations he gathered ethnographic information and transcribed indigenous-language folklore texts. A prolific fieldworker as well as theorist, Sapir recorded for posterity thirty-nine different Amerindian languages, often working with the last living speaker. He also made important anthropological contributions in ethnology, culture theory, and cultural psychology. The only professionally trained linguist among Boas's students, and gifted with intuitive insight into grammatical patterning and historical relationships of linguistic families, Sapir contributed seminally to general linguistic theory, Amerindian linguistics, and Indo-European linguistics.
AMONG THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS trained by Franz Boas in the early decades of the twentieth century Edward Sapir alone was regularly acknowledged by his peers as a genius.
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