Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (April 25, 1914 – May 14, 1998) was an American
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
,
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...
and
Mayanist
A Mayanist () 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.
Mayanists draw ...
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
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.I ...
,
culture
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
and history of the
Maya civilization
The Maya civilization () was a Mesoamerican civilization that existed from antiquity to the early modern period. It is known by its ancient temples and glyphs (script). The Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writin ...
of
pre-Columbian
In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...
.
Early life and education
Lounsbury was born in
Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Stevens Point is a city in Portage County, Wisconsin, United States, and its county seat. Its population was 25,666 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. It forms the core of the Stevens Point micropolitan statistical area, which had a p ...
to John Glenn Lounsbury and Anna Louise Jorgensen. He was one of three children, along with a brother, Gordon, and a sister, Elva.
He graduated from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...
in 1941, majoring in mathematics. During his undergraduate studies,
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh ( ; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics, and developed his mature career at UNAM in Mexico. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewi ...
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/, 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 and Wisconsin, and ...
and
folklore
Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture. This includes oral traditions such as Narrative, tales, myths, legends, proverbs, Poetry, poems, jokes, and other oral traditions. This also ...
, he appointed Lounsbury as his assistant. When Swadesh left Wisconsin for
Mexico City
Mexico City is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Mexico, largest city of Mexico, as well as the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North America. It is one of the most important cultural and finan ...
, Lounsbury took over as the director of the project. He created an
orthography
An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis.
Most national ...
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 (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
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 atmosphere of Earth, atmospheric phenomena including the weather. Those who study meteorological phenomena are meteorologists ...
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, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
, he learned Portuguese 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 foundation was created by Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller (" ...
, he worked on Oneida
verb
A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...
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, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...
at
Yale
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...
. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1949 (his chair was Bernard Bloch), and his dissertation formed the basis of a 1953 publication (''Oneida Verb Morphology'') 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, almost all surviving I ...
.
He joined the Yale department of anthropology in 1949, and taught there until his retirement in 1979. Upon his retirement, he was appointed Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, a post he held until his death at age 84.
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 ...
(Lounsbury 1960). 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 type of cosmogony, 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. Cre ...
in 1971 in
Ontario
Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...
, which was to result in a book, published posthumously (in 2000) 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, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that enables 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 ...
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 (; 19 November 192230 March 1999) was a Soviet and Russian linguist, epigraphist, and ethnologist. He is best known for the key role he played in the decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system of the Maya ci ...
's phonetic theory on the
Maya hieroglyphs
Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which ...
, namely that they were
syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
s rather than
ideogram
An ideogram or ideograph (from Ancient Greek, Greek 'idea' + 'to write') is a symbol that is used within a given writing system to represent an idea or concept in a given language. (Ideograms are contrasted with phonogram (linguistics), phono ...
s. He contributed to the methodology that ultimately led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. He was part of the trio with
Linda Schele
Linda Schele in 1994.
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 a central role in the decoding of much of the Maya ...
and Peter Mathews that, in one afternoon in 1973, worked out a 200-year timeline of the
Palenque
Palenque (; Yucatec Maya: ), also anciently known in the Itza Language as Lakamha ("big water" or "big waters"), was a Maya city-state in southern Mexico that perished in the 8th century. The Palenque ruins date from ca. 226 BC to ca. 799 AD ...
royal family, presenting it that evening at the first Palenque Round Table. During this period, Lounsbury studied the Venus almanac in the
Dresden Codex
The ''Dresden Codex'' is a Maya book, which was believed to be the oldest surviving book written in the Americas, dating to the 11th or 12th century. However, in September 2018 it was proven that the Maya Codex of Mexico, previously known as th ...
and concluded that the original Goodman correlation fits the evidence in the codex better than the standard Goodman–Martinez–Thompson correlation. A correlation constant is the number of days between the start of the
Julian Period
The Julian day is a continuous count of days from the beginning of the Julian period; it 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).
Th ...
(January 1, 4713 BCE) and the era date of 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 knockout ...
of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u. It is used to convert between the Long Count and western calendars. The Goodman correlation constant is 584,285, two days more than the standard GMT correlation of 584,283.
Personal life
Lounsbury married fellow linguist Masako Yokoyama in 1952. The novelist and film-maker
Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki (born March 12, 1956) 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), an ...
is their daughter.
He lived in
East Haven, Connecticut
East Haven is a New England town, town in New Haven County, Connecticut, New Haven County, Connecticut, United States. As of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, the town population was 27,923. The town is located east of New Haven, Conne ...
, and died of congestive heart failure at Connecticut Hospice.
Appointments and awards
*Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences,
Stanford
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth governor of and th ...
, 1963–64
*Elected to
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, 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 ...
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 gardens of wealthy U.S. diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife ...
, Washington D.C., 1973–74 and 1977–78
*Elected to
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) 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 other ...
, 1976
*Appointed the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology by the Yale University, 1979
*Elected to
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
, 1987
*Awarded an honorary doctorate by the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...
, 1987
*Delivered the Distinguished Lecture at the
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an American organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropo ...
Annual Meeting, 1990
Notable students
Source:
*
Marianne Mithun
Marianne Mithun ( ; born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position sinc ...
*
Wallace Chafe
Wallace L. 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 wa ...
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 ...
Harold Conklin
Harold Colyer Conklin (April 27, 1926 – February 18, 2016) was an American Anthropology, anthropologist who conducted extensive ethnoecology, ethnoecological and Linguistics, linguistic field research in Southeast Asia (particularly the Philip ...
*''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