Two linguists’ twenty-year exchange on the Indigenous languages of California
A Documentary Edition of a Scholarly Exchange
The Sapir-Kroeber Correspondence gathers the letters exchanged between Edward Sapir and Alfred L. Kroeber over the years 1905 to 1925. The volume was edited, with notes and an index, by Victor Golla, and issued in Berkeley by the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California as the sixth number in that survey’s report series. It is an English-language work of roughly 494 pages, illustrated with plates reproducing portraits, and it closes with a bibliography. As a publication it belongs to the documentary rather than the argumentative side of scholarship: its substance is the surviving professional correspondence of two central figures in the study of Native American languages, presented with the editorial apparatus needed to follow it.
The Relationship the Letters Document
The two men whose letters make up the volume stood at the centre of early twentieth-century Americanist linguistics and anthropology. Kroeber was the first student of Franz Boas and directed a project under the California state survey to document the Indigenous languages of California; Sapir, also trained by Boas at Columbia, came to Berkeley in 1907–1908 at Kroeber’s invitation and was directed by him toward the nearly extinct Yana language, on which Sapir then worked with the surviving speakers.
That collaboration was productive but uneasy, and the strains are part of what makes the correspondence a historical record of more than personal interest. Sapir pursued his own interest in detailed linguistic description and paid little heed to the administrative pressures bearing on Kroeber, who needed work completed quickly and wanted attention given to broader questions of classification. Sapir did not finish the Yana material within the allotted year, and Kroeber was unable to extend his appointment; Sapir then did not prepare any of the Yana material for publication until 1910, which disappointed Kroeber considerably. Their dealings continued to matter at critical moments: in 1915 Kroeber, needing someone to document the Yahi language of Ishi, was convinced that only Sapir could communicate with a speaker monolingual in Yahi, and Sapir spent the summer working with him. After Ishi’s death in early 1916, Kroeber partly blamed the exacting nature of working with Sapir for his failure to recover. The twenty years of letters thus run through the period in which the documentation of California’s languages was planned, negotiated, and carried out — and through the friction between two strong scholarly temperaments that shaped how that work was done.
Notes, Index, and Reference Apparatus
The edition is designed for use as a research tool as much as a text to be read through. Golla’s annotations accompany the letters, an index provides access to their contents, and the bibliography occupies a substantial closing section of the book. Library cataloguing describes the work under the headings of correspondence, philologists, and — in some records — linguists and anthropologists, reflecting its dual standing as a primary source for the history of linguistics and for the history of anthropology.
