Review: Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays

Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays by Edward Sapir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I gave this three stars for how it struck me, but it probably deserves four or more. While Sapir never puts forward a conclusion or deep insight that wows me, he assays into deep and meaningful topics like Montaigne. Probably the nine essays here would bear up on repeated readings; maybe even years later. They are very well organized and build from one to the other, starting with a long essay on language, his principal field of study. Not really an illuminating exploration, he does telegraph an awe and wonder of this hard to define and categorized subject that is universal in the human experience. Mixing in with the wonder is some linguistic science, such as a classification of languages:

Four stages of synthesis may be conveniently recognized; the isolating type, the weakly synthetic type, the fully synthetic type and the polysynthetic type.

This helps to explain why Chinese can be seen as so old (along with its many exports to other languages) and how we can see a taxon in Algonquin and other Native American languages that fit so much into a single word. This flows nicely into "The Function of an International Auxiliary Language", but comes to now conclusion. Sapir puts forward English as the example of promoting an existing language, and Esperanto for a manufactured one without opting for either or neither. But, no discussion of which previously identified type would be best.

Similarly, "The Meaning of Religion" is a courageous undertaking, but the cleverest observation was not even his own:

Tylor believed that the series: soul, ghost, spirit, god, was a necessary genetic chain. "God" would be no more than the individualized totality of all spirits, ...

Maybe this floundering in essays like "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry," and "The Statue of Linguistics as a Science" is from the great mind admitting ideas as disparate as the "human spirit" and the taxonomy of languages and ending up not knowing whether he wants to philosophize or analyze.

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