Floyd Lounsbury
Encyclopedia
Floyd Glenn Lounsbury was an American linguist
, anthropologist and Mayanist
scholar and epigrapher
, 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
, culture
and history of the Maya civilization
of pre-Columbian
Mesoamerica
.
to John Glenn Lounsbury and Anna Louise Jorgensen. He was one of three children - he had a brother, Gordon, and a sister, Elva.
He graduated from the University of Wisconsin
in 1941, majoring in Mathematics. During the period, Morris Swadesh
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 the Oneida Indian language
and folk lore, he appointed Lounsbury as his assistant. When Swadesh left Wisconsin for Mexico City
, Lounsbury took over as the director of the project. He created an orthography
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.
broke out, he enrolled as a meteorologist in the XXII Weather Squadron, US Army Air Corps. Stationed in Brazil
, he learned Portuguese
there. He received his Master's degree in 1946. Awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation
, he worked on Oneida verb
morphology
in the department of anthropology
at Yale
. He received his Ph.D. in 1949, and his dissertation formed the basis of a publication in 1953 that established a framework and terminology followed ever since in the analysis of Iroquoian languages. He joined the department in 1949, and taught there until his retirement in 1979.
. He initiated the application of linguistic methods to the formal analysis of kinship
terminology and social organization. He also recorded the Oneida Creation myth in 1971 in Ontario
, which was to result in a book, published posthumously 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 in the field of phonetics
.(Lounsbury 1956)
Lounsbury was an early proponent of Yuri Knorozov's phonetic theory on the Maya hieroglyphs, that they were syllables rather than ideograms. He contributed to the methodology that ultimately led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. He was part of the trio, Linda Schele
and Peter Mathews being the others, that one afternoon in 1973, worked out a 200 year timeline of the Palenque royal family, presenting it that evening at the First Palenque Round Table.
During this period, Lounsbury developed his Mesoamerican Long Count calendar
correlation, a method that allows translation of a given Long Count date into its comparable Western calendar date. This correlation is expressed as the difference between the start of the Julian Period (January 1, 4713 BCE) to the start of the Long Count on 0.0.0.0.0 (4 Ajaw, 8 Kumk'u). Lounsbury arrived at an offset of 584,285, two days more than the now-standard GMT correlation of 584,283.
He lived in East Haven, and died of congestive heart failure at Connecticut Hospice.
He married Masako Yokoyama and they had a daughter, the novelist and film-maker Ruth Ozeki
.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, anthropologist and Mayanist
Mayanist
A Mayanist is a scholar specialising in research and study of the Central American pre-Columbian Maya civilization. This discipline should not be confused with Mayanism, a collection of New Age beliefs about the ancient Maya....
scholar and epigrapher
Epigraphy
Epigraphy Epigraphy Epigraphy (from the , literally "on-writing", is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be...
, 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
Maya script
The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...
, culture
Maya society
Maya society shared many features with other Mesoamerican civilizations, for there was a high degree of interaction and cultural diffusion throughout the region. Although aspects such as writing and the calendar did not originate with the Maya, the Maya script and their calendar were among the...
and history of the Maya civilization
Maya civilization
The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period The Maya is a Mesoamerican...
of pre-Columbian
Pre-Columbian
The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic period to European colonization during...
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...
.
Early life
Lounsbury was born in Stevens Point, WisconsinWisconsin
Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...
to John Glenn Lounsbury and Anna Louise Jorgensen. He was one of three children - he had a brother, Gordon, and a sister, Elva.
He graduated from the University of Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
in 1941, majoring in Mathematics. During the period, Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas...
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 the Oneida Indian language
Oneida language
Oneida is an Iroquoian language spoken primarily by the Oneida people in the U.S. states of New York and Wisconsin, and the Canadian province of Ontario. There are an estimated 160 native speakers left. Language revitalization efforts are in progress...
and folk lore, he appointed Lounsbury as his assistant. When Swadesh left Wisconsin for Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, Lounsbury took over as the director of the project. He created an orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
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 IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
broke out, he enrolled as a meteorologist in the XXII Weather Squadron, US Army Air Corps. Stationed in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, he learned Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
there. He received his Master's degree in 1946. Awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
, he worked on Oneida verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
in the department of anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
at Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
. He received his Ph.D. in 1949, and his dissertation formed the basis of a publication in 1953 that established a framework and terminology followed ever since in the analysis of Iroquoian languages. He joined the department in 1949, and taught there until his retirement in 1979.
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 ValleyChamplain Valley
The Champlain Valley is a region of the United States around Lake Champlain in Vermont and New York extending slightly into Quebec, Canada as part of the St. Lawrence River drainage basin drained northward by the Richelieu River into the St...
. He initiated the application of linguistic methods to the formal analysis of kinship
Kinship
Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. And descent groups, lineages, etc. are treated in their own subsections....
terminology and social organization. He also recorded the Oneida Creation myth in 1971 in Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
, which was to result in a book, published posthumously 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 in the field of phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
.(Lounsbury 1956)
Lounsbury was an early proponent of Yuri Knorozov's phonetic theory on the Maya hieroglyphs, that they were syllables rather than ideograms. He contributed to the methodology that ultimately led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. He was part of the trio, Linda Schele
Linda Schele
Linda Schele was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played an invaluable role in the decipherment of much of the Maya hieroglyphics. She produced a massive volume of drawings of stelae and inscriptions, which, following her wishes, are free for use to scholars...
and Peter Mathews being the others, that one afternoon in 1973, worked out a 200 year timeline of the Palenque royal family, presenting it that evening at the First Palenque Round Table.
During this period, Lounsbury developed his Mesoamerican Long Count calendar
Mesoamerican Long Count calendar
The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is a non-repeating, vigesimal and base-18 calendar used by several Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya. For this reason, it is sometimes known as the Maya Long Count calendar...
correlation, a method that allows translation of a given Long Count date into its comparable Western calendar date. This correlation is expressed as the difference between the start of the Julian Period (January 1, 4713 BCE) to the start of the Long Count on 0.0.0.0.0 (4 Ajaw, 8 Kumk'u). Lounsbury arrived at an offset of 584,285, two days more than the now-standard GMT correlation of 584,283.
He lived in East Haven, and died of congestive heart failure at Connecticut Hospice.
He married Masako Yokoyama and they had a daughter, the novelist and film-maker Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki
Ruth Ozeki is a Canadian-American novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction.-Life:...
.
Appointments and Awards
- Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences, 1963-64
- Elected to National Academy of SciencesUnited States National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
, 1969 - Awarded the Wilbur Cross MedalWilbur Lucius CrossWilbur Lucius Cross, Ph. D. was an American educator and political figure who was the 71st Governor of Connecticut for eight years.-Biography:Born in 1862 in Mansfield, Connecticut, Cross graduated from Yale University Wilbur Lucius Cross, Ph. D. (April 10, 1862 – October 5, 1948) was an American...
by the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1971 - Senior Research Scholar, Dumbarton OaksDumbarton OaksDumbarton Oaks is the conventional name for the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, situated on a historic property in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The institution is administered by the Trustees for Harvard University. Its founders, Robert Woods Bliss and his wife...
, Washington D.C., 1973-74 and 1977-78 - Elected to American Academy of Arts and SciencesAmerican Academy of Arts and SciencesThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
, 1976 - Appointed the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology by the Yale University, 1979
- Elected to American Philosophical SocietyAmerican Philosophical SocietyThe American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...
, 1987 - Awarded an honorary Doctorate by the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, 1987 - Delivered the Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological AssociationAmerican Anthropological AssociationThe American Anthropological Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic...
Annual Meeting, 1990
External links
- Floyd Lounsbury explains the meaning of the Pacal glyph
- Obituary-Yale University