Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (April 25, 1914 – May 14, 1998) was an American
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
,
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...
and
Mayanist
A Mayanist ( es, mayista) is a scholar specialising in research and study of the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian Maya civilisation. This discipline should not be confused with Mayanism, a collection of New Age beliefs about the ancient Maya.
Mayan ...
scholar and
epigrapher
Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...
, best known for his work on linguistic and cultural systems of a variety of North and South American languages. Equally important were his contributions to understanding the
hieroglyphs
A hieroglyph (Greek for "sacred carvings") was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called "hieroglyphs". In Neoplatonis ...
,
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tyl ...
and history of the
Maya civilization
The Maya civilization () of the Mesoamerican people is known by its ancient temples and glyphs. Its Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is also noted for its art, archit ...
of
pre-Columbian
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, th ...
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...
.
Early life
Lounsbury was born in
Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Stevens Point is the county seat of Portage County, Wisconsin, United States. The city was incorporated in 1858.
Its 2020 population of 25,666 makes it the largest city in the county. Stevens Point forms the core of the United States Census Bur ...
to John Glenn Lounsbury and Anna Louise Jorgensen. He was one of three children - he had a brother, Gordon, and a sister, Elva.
He graduated from the
University of Wisconsin
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...
in 1941, majoring in Mathematics. During the period,
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh (; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics.
Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and mas ...
was on the faculty, lecturing on American Indian linguistics. Lounsbury audited his courses, and when Swadesh received grants from the Works Progress Administration for a study of
Oneida language
Oneida (, autonym: /onʌjotaʔaːka/, /onʌjoteʔaːkaː/, /onʌjotaʔaːka/, People of the Standing Stone, Latilutakowa, Ukwehunwi, Nihatiluhta:ko) is an Iroquoian language spoken primarily by the Oneida people in the U.S. states of New York a ...
and folk lore, he appointed Lounsbury as his assistant. When Swadesh left Wisconsin for
Mexico City
Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...
, Lounsbury took over as the director of the project. He created an
orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.
Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
for the language, and taught it to students who gathered a variety of texts from Oneida language speakers. After the project, Lounsbury began work in 1940 on the phonology of the language for his master's degree at the university.
Career
When
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
broke out, he enrolled as a
meteorologist
A meteorologist is a scientist who studies and works in the field of meteorology aiming to understand or predict Earth's atmospheric phenomena including the weather. Those who study meteorological phenomena are meteorologists in research, while t ...
in the XXII Weather Squadron,
US Army Air Corps
The United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) was the aerial warfare service component of the United States Army between 1926 and 1941. After World War I, as early aviation became an increasingly important part of modern warfare, a philosophical ri ...
. Stationed in
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
, he learned
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
there. He received his master's degree in 1946. Awarded a fellowship by the
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Carneg ...
, he worked on Oneida
verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
in the department of
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...
at
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...
. He received his Ph.D. in 1949 (his chair was Bernard Bloch), and his dissertation formed the basis of a publication in 1953 that established a framework and terminology followed ever since in the analysis of
Iroquoian languages
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian la ...
. He joined the department in 1949, and taught there until his retirement in 1979.
Contributions
He traced the historical relationship between various Iroquoian languages, and as part of his work for the New York Vermont Interstate Commission on the Lake Champlain Basin, wrote an authoritative study of Iroquois place names in the
Champlain Valley
The Champlain Valley is a region of the United States around Lake Champlain in Vermont and New York extending north slightly into Quebec, Canada. It is part of the St. Lawrence River drainage basin, drained northward by the Richelieu River into ...
. He initiated the application of linguistic methods to the formal analysis of
kinship
In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that ...
terminology and social organization. He also recorded the Oneida
Creation myth
A creation myth (or cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it., "Creation myths are symbolic stories describing how the universe and its inhabitants came to be. Creation myths develop ...
in 1971 in
Ontario
Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...
, which was to result in a book, published posthumously by his student Bryan Gick, that included the creation myth and references to versions translated earlier, and linguistic analysis of various aspects of Iroquoian stories.
His linguistics work also had a bearing on his anthropological studies - he used his knowledge of semantic fields to relate kin type to
phones
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
in the field of
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
.(Lounsbury 1956)
Lounsbury was an early proponent of
Yuri Knorozov
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (alternatively Knorosov; russian: link=no, Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов; 19 November 1922 – 31 March 1999) was a Soviet-Russian linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, who is particularly renown ...
's phonetic theory on the Maya hieroglyphs, that they were syllables rather than ideograms. He contributed to the methodology that ultimately led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. He was part of the trio,
Linda Schele
Linda Schele (October 30, 1942 – April 18, 1998) was an American Mesoamerican archaeologist who was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played an invaluable role in the decipherment of much of the Maya hieroglyphs. She ...
and Peter Mathews being the others, that one afternoon in 1973, worked out a 200-year timeline of the Palenque royal family, presenting it that evening at the First
Palenque Round Table
Palenque (; Yucatec Maya language, Yucatec Maya: ), also anciently known in the Itza Language as Lakamhaʼ ("Big Water or Big Waters"), was a Maya city City-state, state in southern Mexico that perished in the 8th century. The Palenque ruins dat ...
.
During this period, Lounsbury studied the Venus almanac in the Dresden codex and concluded that the Thompson correlation fits the evidence in the codex better than the standard GMT correlation. A correlation constant is the number of days between the start of the
Julian Period
The Julian day is the continuous count of days since the beginning of the Julian period, and is used primarily by astronomers, and in software for easily calculating elapsed days between two events (e.g. food production date and sell by date).
...
(January 1, 4713 BCE) and the era date of the Long Count of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u. It is used to convert between the
Long Count
Long count or slow count is a term used in boxing. When a boxer is knocked down in a fight, the referee will count over them and the boxer must rise to their feet, unaided, by the count of ten or else deemed to have been knocked out. A long count ...
and western calendars. The Thompson correlation constant is 584,285, two days more than the standard GMT correlation of 584,283.A Derivation of the Maya-to-Julian Calendar Correlation From the Dresden Codex Venus Chronology, in ''The Sky In Mayan Literature'' (1992)
He lived in East Haven, and died of congestive heart failure at Connecticut Hospice.
He married Masako Yokoyama and they had a daughter, the novelist and film-maker
Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki is an American-Canadian author, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. Her books and films, including the novels '' My Year of Meats'' (1998), '' All Over Creation'' (2003), '' A Tale for the Time Being'' (2013), and '' The Book of Form ...
.
Appointments and awards
*Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences, 1963–64
*Elected to
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
, 1969
*
Cornplanter Medal
The Cornplanter Medal was named for the Iroquois chief Cornplanter and is an award for scholastic and other contributions to the betterment of knowledge of the Iroquois people. It was initiated by University of Chicago anthropologist Frederick S ...
, 1971
*Awarded the
Wilbur Cross Medal
The Wilbur Cross Medal, or Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal for Alumni Achievement, is an award by the Yale University Graduate School Alumni Association to recognize "...distinguished achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration, and p ...
by the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1971
*Senior Research Scholar,
Dumbarton Oaks
Dumbarton Oaks, formally the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, is a historic estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was the residence and garden of wealthy U.S. diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife, M ...
, Washington D.C., 1973–74 and 1977–78
*Elected to
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
, 1976
*Appointed the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology by the Yale University, 1979
*Elected to
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
, 1987
*Awarded an honorary doctorate by the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
, 1987
*Delivered the Distinguished Lecture at the
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, ...
Annual Meeting, 1990
Notable students
*
Marianne Mithun
Marianne Mithun (born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 19 ...
*
Wallace Chafe
Wallace Chafe (; September 3, 1927 – February 3, 2019) was an American linguist. He was Professor Emeritus and research professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara.
Biography
Chafe was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a ...
*
William C. Sturtevant William Curtis Sturtevant (1926 Morristown, New Jersey – March 2, 2007) was an anthropologist and ethnologist. He is best known as the general editor of the 20-volume ''Handbook of North American Indians''. Renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-S ...
*
Stephen Houston
Stephen Douglas Houston ( ; born November 11, 1958) is an American anthropologist, archaeologist, epigrapher, and Mayanist scholar, who is particularly renowned for his research into the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. He is the a ...
*
Hanni Woodbury
Hanni Woodbury is a German-American linguist and anthropologist who specializes in Onondaga and other Iroquoian languages. She was born in Hamburg and moved with her family to the United States after World War II. She has done fieldwork on Ononda ...
*''Phonology of the Oneida Language'' MA Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1946
*''Stray Number Systems among Certain Indian Tribes'' American Anthropologist XLVIII, 1948
*''Oneida Verb Morphology'' Yale University Press, 1953
*''The Method of Descriptive Morphology'' in Readings in Linguistics ed. E P Hamp, M Joos, F W Householder and R Austerlitz, University of Chicago Press, 1953
*''A Semantic Analysis of Pawnee Kinship Usage'' Language XXXII, 1956
*''Iroquois Place-Names in the Champlain Valley'' University of the State of New York, Albany, 1960
*''Iroquois-Cherokee Linguistic Relations'' Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin CLXXX, 1961
*''A Formal Account of the Crow- and Omaha- type Kinship Terminologies'' in Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, ed. W Goodenough, McGraw-Hill, 1964
*''Another View of the Trobriand Kinship Categories'' in Formal Semantic Analysis, ed. E Hammel, American Anthropological Association, 1965
*''A Study in Structural Semantics: The
Sirionó
The Sirionó are an indigenous people of Bolivia. They primarily live in the forested northern and eastern parts of Beni and northwestern Santa Cruz departments of Bolivia.''The Oneida Creation Story'' by Demus Elm and Harvey Antone, Translated and edited by Lounsbury and Bryan Gick, 2000