LEONARD BLOOMFIELD (1887-1949)

Leonard Bloomfield

Bernard Bloch

Leonard Bloomfield died on April 18, 1949, at the age of 62, after nearly three years of crippling illness. He was a signer of the Call that led to the founding of the Linguistic Society, and the Society’s President in 1935.

Bloomfield was born in Chicago on April 1, 1887, the son of Sigmund and Carola Buber Bloomfield. His aunt was Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, a concert pianist of international repute ; his uncle was Maurice Bloomfield, for many years Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology in the Johns Hopkins University—like his nephew, one of the great figures in American linguistics, and the second President of the Linguistic Society.¹

When Bloomfield was nine years old, his family moved to the village of Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, where his father was proprietor of a hotel. Here the boy lived until he was old enough to go to high school, except for two winters spent in Europe with his family (1898-9 and 1900-1). The village school did not agree with him : it came to be a standingjoke in his family that he found it hard, and that once he failed of promotion to a higher grade—perhaps because he disapproved of the teaching methods in use there.² In spite of these difficulties, and largely as a result of his mother’s tutoring, he passed the high-school entrance examination required in those days and returned to Chicago to attend the North Division (now the Waller) School.

In 1903 he entered Harvard College, to be graduated three years later. The course that he liked best and found most valuable there was the one in daily themes, conducted by the late Professor Charles Townsend Copeland. Because it forced him to put something down on paper day after day, week after week through the year, knowing that every careless word and every awkward sentence would be mercilessly exposed, this course, he used to say, taught him not only to write but also to think.

At the age of nineteen, with his A.B. from Harvard, Bloomfield went to the University of Wisconsin to begin his graduate work and serve at the same time as Assistant in German. Here he met Eduard Prokosch, his senior by nine years, and fell at once under the spell of the older man’s personality. The meeting was an important event in Bloomfield’s life ; for it marked the birth of his career as a linguist. The incident is charmingly described in Bloomfield’s obituary of Prokosch.³

... In the summer of 1906 I came, fresh out of college, to Madison, to be looked over for an assistantship. Desiring to earn an academic living, I had developed no understanding or inclination for any branch of science. The kindly Professor Hohlfeld delegated Prokosch, one of his young instructors, to entertain me for the day. On a small table in Prokosch’s dining room there stood a dozen technical books (I seem to remember that Leskien’s Old Bulgarian grammar was among them) and in the interval before lunch Prokosch explained to me their use and content. By the time we sat down to the meal, a matter perhaps of fifteen minutes, I had decided that I should always work in linguistics.

After two years of teaching and study at Wisconsin, Bloomfield went to the University of Chicago, where he continued both activities under the direction of Professor Francis A. Wood. It was Wood who chose the subject for his dissertation : ‘ a semasiologie differentiation in Germanic secondary ablaut ‘. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1909. On March 18 of the same year he had married Miss Alice Sayers of St. Louis.

In 1913 and 1914 he further extended his knowledge of linguistics through study at the Universities of Leipzig and Göttingen ; among the scholars with whom he worked in Germany were August Leskien, Karl Brugmann, and Hermann Oldenberg. But in spite of the veneration in which he held these men, it was always Prokosch whom he called his teacher. ‘ At the end of the two years of pupilhood (in Madison),’ he wrote,⁴ ‘ I knew no greater intellectual pleasure than to listen to Prokosch.’

Bloomfield’s teaching career is shown in the barest outline by the following dates : 1909-10, Instructor in German, University of Cincinnati ; 1910-13, the same, University of Illinois ; 1913-21, Assistant Professor of Comparative Philology and German, University of Illinois ; 1921-27, Professor of German and Linguistics, Ohio State University ; 1927-40, Professor of Germanic Philology, University of Chicago ; 1940-49, Sterling Professor of Linguistics, Yale University. In the summer of 1925 he served as Assistant Ethnologist in the Canadian Department of Mines ; for three summers (1938, ‘39, and ‘40) he was on the staff of the Linguistic Institute in Ann Arbor.

At the time of his death he was a member of the following professional organizations : the Linguistic Society of America, the American Oriental Society, the American Philological Association, the American Ethnological Society, the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies, the International Phonetic Association, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Danish Academy of Science. He was also one of the two American members of the Comité International Permanent de Linguistes.

Bloomfield’s scholarly writings were at first concerned with rather small details of Indo-European (and especially Germanic) phonology and morphology. But soon his interest in the larger aspects of linguistic science came to be reflected in wider-ranging and more general studies. In 1914 he published his first inclusive survey of the field, An introduction to the study of language. His Tagalog texts appeared in 1917, a product of his increasingly varied research in languages outside the Indo-European orbit ; and five years later, in a review of Michelson’s work on Fox, he wrote the first of his many contributions to the descriptive and comparative study of the Algonquian languages.

Bloomfield’s masterpiece is unquestionably his book Language, published in 1933 : a work without an equal as an exposition and synthesis of linguistic science. He called it, in the Preface (vii), ‘ a revision of the author’s Introduction to the Study of Language ‘ ; but it is in fact a new work in every detail of its plan and execution. Even the author’s fundamental point of view is wholly different in the two books. In 1914 Bloomfield had viewed language from the position of Wilhelm Wundt, whose ‘ Völkerpsychologie ‘ is accordingly reflected in the earlier book. By 1933, partly as a result of his association with the psychologist Albert Paul Weiss,⁵ he had become a behaviorist. But what is more important, he had convinced himself, as he was later to convince so many others, that it does not matter what particular brand of psychology a linguist finds attractive, so long as he keeps it out of his linguistic writings. Because of this teaching, which now is a commonplace among American linguists, Bloomfield has been repeatedly charged with denying some of the most vital features of human behavior—as if an ethnologist who chose to describe social organization without reference to physiology should be accused of denying the circulation of the blood.

His absorbing interest in linguistics as a science did not prevent him from devoting himself also—more diligently than the majority of linguists—to its practical applications, especially in the teaching of reading and the study of foreign languages. In opposition to many scholars with far less understanding of science, he felt that scientific inquiry was by no means wholly its own justification, which lay rather in the hope that it might lead us ultimately ‘ toward the understanding and control of human events ‘.⁶ Among the more utilitarian products of this conviction are his German beginners’ book (1923, 2nd ed. 1928) and his English primer, a complete course for teaching schoolchildren to read and write, based on the true relation of writing to speech and carefully planned to illustrate all regular spellings before proceeding to the irregular. This primer was used experimentally in Chicago parochial schools in the early 1940’s and proved its worth in the classroom ; but it was never published—partly because ‘ the basic teaching of our schools, in reading and writing, in standard language and composition . . . , is dominated still by educationists who, knowing nothing about language, waste years of every child’s time, and leave our community semi-literate.’ ⁷

It was during the last war that Bloomfield’s concern for foreignlanguage teaching bore fruit. The history of the Intensive Language Program is familiar to most members of the Linguistic Society : how it was organized in 1941 by the American Council of Learned Societies to train teachers and prepare textbooks of strategically important languages ; how it supervised the methods of instruction in the Army Specialized Training Program throughout the country ; and how it published, through the Linguistic Society, a series of practical manuals written by trained linguists and applying the latest results of our science to the problem of teaching foreign languages. What is not so widely known is the part that Bloomfield played in these activities. Although he was not a member of the committees that nominally directed the Intensive Language Program, and remained by preference in the background of its operations, there is no one to whom the Program is more deeply indebted. The influence of his teachings is obvious in every phase of its work : many of the younger men and women who took part in it learned their trade from him 01־ from his book Language ; and he himself contributed no fewer than four works to the series which the Program sponsored. In 1942, when it was not yet clear what direction the Program would take, he wrote one of the Program’s two booklets on descriptive methodology : his Outline guide for the practical study of foreign languages, a brief but lucid statement of how the linguist works with an informant. Later he wrote three of the practical manuals : two for Dutch and one for Russian, devoting months of gruelling work to the task. In addition, he found time and strength to prepare a grammatical introduction for the War Department’s Russian dictionary.

Bloomfield’s relation to the Linguistic Society was peculiarly intimate. He was a member (with George M. Boiling and Edgar H. Sturtevant) of the organizing committee that first conceived the possibility of an association devoted wholly to linguistics ; he himself wrote the Call for the Organization Meeting,⁸ as well as the first article published in Language (1.1-5), setting forth the reasons for establishing a Linguistic Society. In the days of the Society’s early struggle for recognition he was one of its most convinced and convincing supporters ; when it had come to be internationally respected as a professional and scientific body, he continued to work for it with quiet devotion. It is not inappropriate that the last article from his pen is a summary of the Linguistic Society’s development.⁹

Bloomfield’s greatness as a scholar was not limited to any one branch or aspect of linguistics. He was intimately acquainted with much of the vast literature of our science ; and what he once read remained active in his prodigious memory. This reading gave him a profound sense of indebtedness to earlier workers in the field : he would often emphasize the cumulative nature of science, which enables each new generation to begin where the old one left off. But the ties that linked him to his predecessors did not fetter his imagination, or prevent him from exploring new languages and new techniques. Few men have been at home in so many corners of linguistics. Trained as an Indo-Europeanist in the great tradition of the neo-grammarians, he had also a specialist’s knowledge of at least four groups within the general field : Germanic, Indie, Slavic, and Greek. Moreover, with a breadth of understanding rare among scholars of similar background, he appreciated not only the value of comparative and historical grammar but that of descriptive grammar as well. His interest in the latter subject, and the depth of insight that he brought to it—both stemming perhaps from his intimate study of Panini—are notably reflected in his book Language, where more than a third of his exposition is concerned with it.¹⁰

Nor did he confine himself within the bounds of Indo-European ; he had a wide acquaintance with languages in other families also. His first-hand investigation of several Malayo-Polynesian languages was one of the pioneer works in a little-known field. And as everyone knows, his descriptive and comparative studies of the Algonquian languages are among the classics of American Indian research. Few anecdotes are more often told in support of the neo-grammarian hypothesis than Bloomfield’s use of it to predict the discovery of a previously unattested consonant cluster in a Central Algonquian dialect.¹¹ The significance of his writings in this field has been fully explored elsewhere ;¹² here it will be enough to point out the characteristic union of old and new in Bloomfield’s work : the application of an established technique, developed in the comparison of Indo-European languages, to a linguistic family without written records—a family that many Indo-Europeanists have never heard of.

Bloomfield’s profound influence on the development of our science was in some ways a paradox. He consistently discouraged would-be beginners in linguistics from entering the field, on the ground that they would find it impossible to make a living, yet the vogue that linguistics enjoys today is largely the result of his work in it. He had almost no students, yet most American descriptivists look up to him as their teacher. He despised all talk of schools and factions—’ the blight of the odium theologicum ‘,¹³ yet many linguists regard them- selves proudly as members of a school that bears his name. He avoided public discussion and only rarely engaged in controversy, yet his views on many controversial questions are well known and have become current doctrine. He kept himself as much as possible in the background, preferring his own work to the business of propaganda, yet no linguist of his generation had wider fame or was more universally revered.

His personality was not strongly magnetic. He was too unassuming to impose it on others, too withdrawn to enjoy the immediate satisfaction of dominating an audience. His influence, therefore, was not primarily a personal one. It is probable that many of those who count themselves his followers never saw him. That his teaching has nevertheless changed the course of linguistics in this country, that his approach and his method have come to be almost matters of orthodoxy to many students, is due to the tremendous impact of his book Language and of his other writings.¹⁴ To appreciate that impact it is enough to recall the state of our linguistic methods before the appearance of Language. It was a shocking book : so far in advance of current theory and practice that many readers, even among the well-disposed, were outraged by what they thought a needless flouting of tradition ; yet so obviously superior to all other treatments of the subject that its unfamiliar plan could not be dismissed as mere eccentricity. Today, of course, the book no longer shocks anyone ; more than any other work, it approaches the status of a standard text. Its innovations have become commonplace ; some of its most novel features now seem slightly old-fashioned. The reason for this reversal is plain : not only did the book summarize and clarify the main results of our science up to the time of its publication, it also pointed the direction that linguistics was to take in the immediate future. It is not too much to say that every significant refinement of analytic method produced in this country since 1933 has come as a direct result of the impetus given to linguistic research by Bloomfield’s book. If today our methods in descriptive analysis are in some ways better than his, if we see more clearly than he did himself certain aspects of the structure that he first revealed to us, it is because we stand upon his shoulders.

His own opinion of his book was characteristically modest. He thought of it as an elementary work, ‘ intended for the general reader and for the student who is entering upon linguistic work.’¹⁵ In conversation he often referred to it as ‘ my high-school text ‘, though surely no high-school student could read it through. Even professional linguists usually find it slow reading—not because it is obscurely written but because it so carefully says in every sentence exactly what it means, because every word is essential and every definition must be taken seriously. Bloomfield was regretfully aware that many readers found the book difficult, and acknowledged that the fault was his for not having written it more diffusely. He attributed his error to the lack of a popularizing tradition in linguistics. Only a series of better and better approximations to an ideal work, he used to say, would ultimately yield a satisfactory popularization. The object of such a work is admirably set forth in his own words, written six years before the appearance of his book :¹⁶ ‘ Sound popularizing tries to lead the layman toward an understanding and appreciation of science, not to encourage his taste for the bizarre, irrelevant, and inaccurate.’

There can be no doubt that Bloomfield’s greatest contribution to the study of language was to make a science of it. Others before him had worked scientifically in linguistics ; but no one had so uncompromisingly rejected all prescientific methods, or had been so consistently careful, in writing about language, to use terms that would imply no tacit reliance on factors beyond the range of observation. To some readers, unaware of the danger that lies in a common-sense view of the world, Bloomfield’s avoidance of everyday expressions may have sounded like pedantry, his rigorous definitions like jargon. But to the majority of linguists, the simple clarity of Bloomfield’s diction first revealed in full the possibilities of scientific discourse about language. It was Bloomfield who taught us the necessity of speaking about language in the style that every scientist uses when he speaks about the object of his research : impersonally, precisely, and in terms that assume no more than actual observation discloses to him.

In his long campaign to make a science of linguistics, the chief enemy that Bloomfield met was that habit of thought which is called mentalism : the habit of appealing to mind and will as ready-made explanations of all possible problems. Most men regard this habit as obvious common sense ; but in Bloomfield’s view, as in that of other scientists, it is mere superstition, unfruitful at best and deadly when carried over into scientific research. In the opposite approach— known as positivism, determinism, or mechanism—Bloomfield saw the main hope of the world ; for he was convinced that only the knowledge gained by a strictly objective study of human behavior, including language, would one day make it possible for men to live at peace with each other. The following statement is typical both of his confidence in the methods of science and of his hatred of superstition :¹⁷

We have acquired understanding and the power of prediction and control and have reaped vast benefit in the domains where we have developed non-animistic and non-teleologic science. We remain ignorant and helpless in the domains where we have failed to develop that kind of science, namely, in human affairs, such as the correlation of incentive with the distribution of economic goods, or the disposal of conflicting national interests.

The only exception here is our relatively good knowledge of the structure and history of languages, a body of knowledge which, against the predisposition and expectation of the discoverers, turned out to imply no animistic or teleological factors. Although this situation gives us no certainty, it offers a strong probability in favor of extending the methods that have been successful to replace those which have yielded no success. Mankind has always found such steps difficult and has resisted them with more than mere inertia. Obscurantism, the articulate vanguard of that resistance, has never employed rational argument, but only invective and, from the time of Galileo to our own, every degree of irrational sanction.

On May 27, 1946, at the summit of his career, Bloomfield suffered a stroke that put an end to his life as a productive scholar—to everything that gave satisfaction and purpose to his life as a man. For eight weeks he lay unconscious ; then by slow degrees he began to regain his faculties—but never all of them. After many months he was able to walk again, supported by a cane and a companion’s arm. After yet more months of creeping improvement, interrupted by a succession of minor strokes, he recovered so far as to be able to make short visits to his office in the Hall of Graduate Studies, where he would sit in a wheelchair at his littered desk and chat with friends. He could do no work. His eyes had been permanently affected by his illness, and his memory was impaired. When he received the first number of Language for 1948, with its dedication to him, he was deeply touched ; but he could not read it. For a time there was hope that he might one day be well enough to resume his teaching ; then the slow improvement ceased, and his paralysis began to grow more general. During the last year of his life he became steadily weaker, until, four months before his death, he was again confined to his bed. He died peacefully. To those who saw him during the three years of his empty survival, his death was not a new occasion for grief.

Throughout these years Bloomfield never complained. He rarely spoke of himself, and never to invite compassion or solicitude. That modesty which had prevented him from acknowledging his own true stature, and from taking seriously the tributes that he received from other scholars, now blinded him—perhaps mercifully—to the tragic significance of his uncompleted work. He gave the impression that his illness was a merely personal inconvenience, and therefore unimportant. In character he was unchanged. He lost none of his lively interest in the world about him, none of his warmth in human contacts, his fondness for conversation, his whimsical humor. But above all his other interests, what he liked best to talk about, then as always, was the study of language. Though he could no longer pursue it himself, he followed eagerly the work of his younger colleagues ; and when they brought their problems to him, his criticism was no less trenchant, his advice no less clear-sighted than in the days of his own full vigor.

Leonard Bloomfield was unfailingly generous, a devoted worker in the cause of truth, an unrelenting fighter against reaction and stupidity. Above all, he was humane. We shall remember him with admiration for his greatness as a man of science, with love for his greatness as a human being.

Source : Bernard Bloch, ‘ Leonard Bloomfield,’ Language 25.87-98 (1949). By permission of Language, and the author.

¹ See the obituary of Maurice Bloomfield by George M. Boiling in Lg. 4.214-7 (1928).

² Personal communication from Mr. Grover Bloomfield of Milwaukee.

³ Lg. 14.311-2 (1938).

⁴ Lg. 14.312.

⁵ Weiss’s chief work, A theoretical basis of human behavior (Columbus, Ohio, 1924 ; rev. ed. 1929), had a profound influence on Bloomfield. See also the shorter statement of Weiss’s view in Lg. 1.52-7 (1925), and Bloomfield’s obituary in Lg. 7.219-21 (1931).

⁶ Language 509. The whole last chapter of Language is an expression of this hope and a discussion of the special fields where it may be most directly realized.

⁷ Lg. 22.3 (1946).

⁸ Printed in Lg. 1.6-7 (1925).

⁹ Twenty-one years of the Linguistic Society, Lg. 22.1-3 (1946).

¹⁰ Chapters 5-8 on phonemics, and chapters 10-16 on grammar (pp. 74-138, 158-280).

¹¹ A note on sound-change, Lg. 4.99-100 (1928)

¹² Charles F. Hockett, Implications of Bloomfield’s Algonquian studies, Lg. 24.117-31 (1948).

¹³ Lg. 22.2.

¹⁴ The following articles and reviews contain important general statements : A set of postulates for the science of language, Lg. 2.153-64 (1926) ; On recent work in linguistics, MPhil. 25.211-30 (1927) ; Linguistics as a science, Studies in Philology 27.553-7 (1930) ; review of Ries, Lg. 7.204-9 (1931) ; review of Herrmann, Lg. 8.220-33 (1932) ; review of Havers, Lg. 10.32-40 (1934) ; Language or ideas?, Lg. 12.89-95 (1936) ; review of Bentley, Lg. 12.137^tl (1936) ; Secondary and tertiary responses to language, Lg. 20.45-55 (1944) ; review of Bodmer, American Speech 19.211-3 (1944). See also his monograph, Linguistic aspects of science (Chicago, 1939).

¹⁵ Preface, p. vii.

¹⁶ In a review of Lokotsch, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der amerikanischen (іindianischen) Wörter im Deutschen, MPhil. 24.489 (1927).

¹⁷ Lg. 20.55 (1944). Although this article (Secondary and tertiary responses to language) began as a jeu d’esprit, its latter half contains an admirable and wholly serious defense of the mechanistic position ; see pp. 51-5 (omitting the long quotation).

Leonard Bloomfield

(1887-1949)

Edgar H. Sturtevant

When it became necessary to choose a successor to Eduard Prokosch as Sterling Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale, a committee of the faculties was appointed to consider the matter. Professor Karl Young of the Department of English was a member of the committee, and, when Leonard Bloomfield’s name was suggested, he asked where he could get evidence about his qualifications. He was advised to read Bloomfield’s most important book.¹ When Young had finished this volume, which many professional linguists have found slow and difficult reading, he gave its author the highest praise he knew : ‘ The man is a poet.’ The work of the committee might have ended right then, if there had not been grave doubt whether the officials of the university where Bloomfield was then situated would be so blind as to let him go.

It is too late to ask Young what he meant by poet in this connection. I imagine he referred to the marvelous clarity and incisiveness of Bloomfield’s exposition, combined as it is with imaginative figures of speech that further illustrate his point of view. He was a poet in the same sense that Plato has been called a poet. Perhaps we may illustrate with the final paragraph of a review he published in Language 19 : 168-170, 1943. In spite of much hearty praise, he blames the author for a few lapses ‘ into traditional philosophic jargon.’ Then this :

These ‘ philosophic ‘ passages stand out darkly against the rational and humane illumination that pervades the treatise. They could serve as an instance of vestigial traits in culture : shreds of medieval speculation still hanging to the propellers of science and sometimes fouling them. The lesson of this contrast is brought home to the reader because the rest of the book speaks clearly with the voice of enlightenment. Philosophic and political meditations have no place in a scientific manual.

Unhappily such poetic passages as this can easily be warped into the most grotesque nonsense with the help of a little ill-will. Leo Spitzer has done just this in Modern Language Quarterly 4 : 430, fn. 29, 1943.

The fact that Leonard Bloomfield was justly called a poet is of considerable interest, since he, as other linguists, has been widely held to be hostile to literature. This was a grave error ; he was hostile only to those who objected to the findings of linguistic science ; and some of these urged the claims of philosophy, poetry, or other kinds of literature, either as substitutes for linguistic studies, or as refutations of linguistic doctrine.

Bloomfield was rather widely known in his later years as an adherent of the American school of psychologists called Behaviorists. Certain it is that between the publication of An Introduction to the Study of Language in 1914 and the composition of Language, which was published in 1933, his views on psychology had undergone a profound change. The earlier book was frankly based upon the mentalistic psychology of Wilhelm Wundt, while the later adopts the behaviorist point of view as presented by Albert Paul Weiss.² It is significant that the two men were colleagues at Ohio State University from 1921 to 1927. It is important to note that Bloomfield has far less to say about psychology in the second book than in the first ; he does not any longer base his treatment of language upon psychology of any particular school. One may even suspect that if he had treated the material a third time he might have declared the logical dependence of psychology upon linguistics.

His connection with this psychological school, at any rate, was scarcely more significant than his earlier dependence upon Wilhelm Wundt ; both phases sprang from the obvious relationship of language with human psychology and Bloomfield’s determination not to write about anything without mastering it to the best of his ability. In this case, however, he has acquired a position in the age-long conflict between the Church and Science. In at least one of the schools maintained by the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, the use of Bloomfield’s Language as a textbook has, I am told, been forbidden, and the teacher in charge of the course has fallen back upon a much inferior book ³ of which Bloomfield disapproved as a work for the general reader.

Leonard Bloomfield was one of a committee of three which called a meeting in December, 1924, to found the Linguistic Society of America. He served as President of the Society in 1935. In 1942 he was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society.

The really important thing that one must say about Leonard Bloomfield is that during his later years he was the leader of American linguists. He never claimed such a position, and never even tried to attain it. He always, on principle, advised inquiring students to specialize in other subjects than linguistics, on the ground that paying positions in the latter field were very few. His classes were usually small, and he trained scarcely any candidates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

As far as I know he had but one major triumph as a teacher. In the summer of 1938 his Introduction to Linguistic Science at the Linguistic Institute in Ann Arbor was attended throughout the eightweek session by nearly the entire membership of the Institute. We had always had introductory courses ; in the early sessions of the Institute they were conducted by Professor Prokosch, and they were always relatively popular. In the summer of 1937 the introduction was given by Professor Edward Sapir before a regularly enrolled class of about thirty, including at least one member of the staff. This course of Sapir's was so remarkably effective that the director moved the next year’s introduction to an evening hour, so that it could be more largely attended. But it was Bloomfield’s handling of the course that made it the extraordinary success it was.

In general, however, he lectured to small classes ; his great influence was largely exerted through his books and articles, although one must not forget his numerous conferences with individuals who sought him out. At any rate many descriptive linguists who got their training from Boas or Sapir have stoutly maintained that they learned their method from Bloomfield. In an important preface he is called the ‘ dean of American linguists.’ When this was brought to his attention he said, ‘ So I’m a dean now! ‘ (All college administrators were for Bloomfield a race apart.)

Leonard Bloomfield died on April 18, 1949, at the age of sixty-two, after an illness of three years, during which time he had not been able to do any work. He left behind him in manuscript, a Menomini grammar, which is thought to be the most complete account of an Indian language ever written.

Much less ambitious but amply tested in the class rooms of a parochial school in Chicago is the manuscript of a textbook for teaching children to read English. By merely concentrating upon such groups as (cat, hat, bat, sat ; pad, had, bad, sad ; can, man, ran, pari) before any other value of the letter a is touched upon, then concentrating upon other values of single letters, he largely eliminates the handicap of the irregular spelling of English ; he teaches children to read English almost as rapidly as Spanish or Finnish children are taught to read those languages. But educationists are convinced that all attention to specific letters delays children in learning to read rapidly ; such a book as Bloomfield’s is simply unorthodox ; so far the educationists have prevented its publication.

Recently one of Bloomfield’s colleagues procured a copy of the book and used it to teach his three-year-old daughter to read. Those who managed the child’s other education advised that this should be stopped, for fear her other interests might be stunted, and that her eye-sight might suffer because by this amazingly efficient method she was learning to read so rapidly.

Source : Edgar H. Sturtevant, ‘ Leonard Bloomfield,’ in The American Philosophical Society Yearbook 1949 (Philadelphia, 1950), pp. 302-305. By permission of the American Philosophical Society.

¹ Language, N. Y., Holt, 1933.

² Weiss, A. P., A theoretical basis of human behavior, 2nd ed., Columbus, Ohio, R. G. Adams, 1929.

³ Gray, Louis H., Foundations of Language, N. Y., Macmillan, 1939. Reviewed by L. Bloomfield, Mod. Lang. Forum 24 : 198 f., 1939.