Floyd Lounsbury

Career

When World War II 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. from Yale in 1949 (his chair was Bernard Bloch), and his dissertation formed the basis of a 1953 publication (Oneida Verb Morphology) that established a framework and terminology followed ever since in the analysis of Iroquoian languages.

He joined the Yale department of anthropology in 1949, and taught there until his retirement in 1979. Upon his retirement, he was appointed Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, a post he held until his death at age 84.

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 Valley (Lounsbury 1960). 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 (in 2000) 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, namely, 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 studied the Venus almanac in the Dresden codex and concluded that the original Goodman correlation fits the evidence in the codex better than the standard Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation. A correlation constant is the number of days between the start of the Julian Period (January 1, 4713 BCE) and the era date of the Long Count of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u. It is used to convert between the Long Count and western calendars. The Goodman correlation constant is 584,285, two days more than the standard GMT correlation of 584,283.

Personal life

Lounsbury married fellow linguist Masako Yokoyama in 1952. The novelist and film-maker Ruth Ozeki is their daughter.

He lived in East Haven, Connecticut, and died of congestive heart failure at Connecticut Hospice.

Appointments and awards

• Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences, Stanford, 1963–64
• Elected to National Academy of Sciences, 1969
• Cornplanter Medal, 1971
• Awarded the Wilbur Cross Medal by the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1971
• Senior Research Scholar, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C., 1973–74 and 1977–78
• Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1976
• Appointed the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology by the Yale University, 1979
• Elected to American Philosophical Society, 1987
• Awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Pennsylvania, 1987
• Delivered the Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 1990

Notable students

Source:

• Marianne Mithun
• Wallace Chafe
• William C. Sturtevant
• Stephen Houston
• Hanni Woodbury
• Harold Conklin
• Bryan Gick