born April 1, 1887, Chicago, Ill., U.S.
died April 18, 1949, New Haven, Conn.
U.S. linguist.
He began his career as a philologist trained in Germanic languages . He taught Germanic philology at the University of Chicago (1927–40) and linguistics at Yale (1940–49). In Language (1933), one of the clearest 20th-century presentations of linguistics, he advocated the study of linguistic phenomena in isolation from their nonlinguistic environment and emphasized the need for empirical description. His thinking was influenced by his work on non-Indo-European languages, particularly the {{link=Algonquian languages">Algonquian family; The Menomini Language (1962) is a paragon of linguistic description and American Indian linguistic scholarship.