Charles F. Voegelin
American linguist (1906–1986)
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Early life and education
Voegelin was born in New York City on January 14, 1906, and christened Charles Frederick Voegelin, but he became known as Carl.
He entered Stanford University and earned a BA in Psychology, after which he traveled to New Zealand to study Maori music. Then he decided to study anthropology at University of California, Berkeley where he was trained by Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie and Melville Jacobs, writing his dissertation as a grammar of Tübatulabal. At first he had great difficulties hearing the phonetic distinctions of the language, but in 1931 he went to the field with Danish linguist Hans Jørgen Uldall who taught him to recognize all the phonetic contrasts. His proficiency in Indigenous languages became so good that he was able to correspond with Leonard Bloomfield in Ojibwe, letters later published in the journal Anthropological Linguistics.
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Career
Voegelin went on to do postdoctoral work in linguistics at Yale University with Edward Sapir, and then he taught at DePauw University, before joining Indiana University Bloomington in 1941 as that university's first professor of anthropology. During his tenure at Indiana he managed the United States' largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages. In 1944, he persuaded Indiana University to host the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL), which had stopped being published in 1939, shortly before the death of its first editor Franz Boas. Voegelin served as editor of IJAL for many years.
Among his graduate students at Indiana were Ken Hale and Dell Hymes. Later he held an appointment at the University of Hawaiʻi, before returning to Indiana as an emeritus professor.
Personal life
Voegelin was first married to ethnologist Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, with whom he conducted fieldwork. Later he married linguist Florence M. Voegelin, an accomplished linguist in her own right. Together they co-authored numerous publications.
He died on May 22, 1986.
Honors
In 1947, Voegelin was Guggenheim Fellow at Indiana University Bloomington's Department of Anthropology. He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1951. He was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1954.
In 1975, several of Voegelin's colleagues and former students collaborated on a Festschrift entitled Linguistics and Anthropology: In Honor of C. F. Voegelin. In 1983 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Humane Letters) by Indiana University Bloomington, as well as a Distinguished Service Award of the American Anthropological Association. Voegelin's collected papers are held by the American Philosophical Society.