Apr 01 2009
Leonard Bloomfield, American Linguist
~Leonard Bloomfield, U.S. Linguist~
American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) is born today, April 1, in Chicago, Illinois. When he was nine years old, his family moved to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin and he attended his elementary school there. However, he returned to Chicago for his secondary education. His uncle, Maurice Bloomfield, was a prominent linguist at John Hopkins University. His aunt, Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, was a well-known concert pianist.
He held several university posts, and later appointed Professor of German and Linguistics at Ohio State University (1921-27), became Professor of Germanic Philology at Chicago University (1927-1940), and Sterling Professor of Linguistics at Yale from 1940.
Bloomfield’s early interest was in Indo-European, especially Germanic, phonology and morphology. He made later studies of Malayo-Polynesian languages, especially Tagalog (the national language of the Philippines), and of the languages of native Americans, in particular, Cree and Minomini.
Bloomfield played a significant role in making linguistics an independent scientific discipline. His major works are Languages (1933), his masterpiece on linguistic theory which has become a standard text with a profound influence on linguistics, Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis (1917), Linguistic Aspects of Science (1939), Spoken Dutch (1945) and Spoken Russian (1945).
