Floyd G. Lounsbury
Yale University
April 25, 1914 - May 21, 1998
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Scientific Discipline: Anthropology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1969)
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Beginning in 1938 with his contributions to the Green Bay, Wisconsin-based Oneida Language and Folklore Project, while he was still an undergraduate, Floyd Lounsbury sustained a lifelong interest in indigenous languages—especially those, such as Oneida and Cherokee, in the Iroquoian family. His doctoral dissertation, published in 1953 as Oneida Verb Morphology, remains to this day the scholar’s bible for the basic structure and terminology of Iroquoian languages.
Iroquoian linguistics was not, however, Lounsbury’s only academic focus. He worked in acoustic phonetics and speech recognition; he refined new ways to teach linguistics, particularly with respect to field methods; he critiqued lexicostatistics and glottochronology; he wrote on the psychology of language; and he published on the history of anthropology. He was one of the most sought-after and influential anthropological linguists of his time.
Born and raised in Wisconsin farming communities, Lounsbury enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1932. He took nearly a decade to complete his undergraduate program because of the Great Depression’s economic necessities, but the extended period also allowed him to come in contact with a wide array of linguists and anthropologists and to adopt a thoughtful and measured approach to undergraduate education. Lounsbury majored in mathematics but also studied languages—primarily German but also Latin, Greek, Scandinavian languages, and Old Irish—along with phonetics, phonology, philology, and emerging theories of structuralist linguistics. After receiving his Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University in 1949, Lounsbury accepted an appointment to its Department of Anthropology and remained at Yale until his retirement in 1979. Whether in classes, conferences, workshops, or personal conversation, Lounsbury’s students and colleagues considered him ever humble, generous, and insightful, with a prodigious memory for detail, a wide-ranging curiosity, and a formidable intellect.
