unnkown · Public domain

Edward Sapir helped found linguistics as a professional discipline in the United States, working under Franz Boas to document Native American languages before building the field's connection to anthropology as a study of how language shapes cultural worldview. Born in German Pomerania and brought to America as a child, he held posts at the Geological Survey of Canada, the University of Chicago and Yale, and trained a generation of scholars — his student Benjamin Lee Whorf developed Sapir's ideas about language and thought into what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.