ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief discussion of Edward Sapir’s important contributions to our understanding of language, starting with phonology. Edward Sapir was an important, innovative, and creative linguist in the early twentieth century who studied previously undescribed and unanalyzed Native American languages, and often then developed orthographies (writing systems) for these languages. Our larger point is that Sapir showed conclusively that the linguist could only understand the sounds of a language by figuring out what the speakers of that language heard. Whorf explored and thought about differences among languages in their lexical meanings and grammar. He was an insurance investigator for the Hartford Insurance Company. In one case a building with drums of flammable chemicals had exploded and burned. The overall relativity question is: to what degree does linguistic coding of categories and relationships shape, constrain, or influence our thought. Fanti Kinship’s importance, universality, and ubiquity make it a rich source of metaphors and other figurative language.
