1936/04/06 by Edward Sapir · 2 citations
Health Professions · #Indigenous Studies and Ecology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1525/aa.1936.38.2.02a00040
openalex publication_date 1936/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
NTERNAL linguistic evidence for inferences as to cultural antecedents I is not in much favor among cultural anthropologists at the present time, and this for two reasons. Such linguistic evidence is often, if not generally, tricky as to what of a factual nature can be gathered from it, for words may change their meanings radically and, furthermore, it is often difficult to tell whether community of nomenclature rests on early linguistic relationship or on linguistic borrowing attending cultural diffusion, In the second place linguistic evidence is difficult to handle, full of phonologic pitfalls, requiring a closeness of knowledge that is often out of proportion to what little can be obtained from it for tangible cultural inference. Nevertheless, a t its best linguistic evidence, properly controlled, may throw an unexpected light on remote cultural perspectives. There is reason to think that as our descriptive and comparative knowledge of unwritten languages increases, their value for cultural reconstructions and other kinds of inference-not least among which is elimination of theoretically conceivable possibilities-will grow in importance. It is natural that in the Americanistic field linguistic evidence has as yet yielded but a scanty return to the historian of culture, but this need not continue to be the case indefinitely.