Floyd Lounsbury

Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (April 25, 1914 – May 14, 1998) was an American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist scholar and epigrapher, best known for his work on linguistic and cultural systems of a variety of North and South American languages. Equally important were his contributions to understanding the hieroglyphs, culture and history of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

Lounsbury was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin to John Glenn Lounsbury and Anna Louise Jorgensen. He was one of three children - he had a brother, Gordon, and a sister, Elva.

He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1941, majoring in Mathematics. During the period, Morris Swadesh was on the faculty, lecturing on American Indian linguistics. Lounsbury audited his courses, and when Swadesh received grants from the Works Progress Administration for a study of the Oneida Indian language and folk lore, he appointed Lounsbury as his assistant. When Swadesh left Wisconsin for Mexico City, Lounsbury took over as the director of the project. He created an orthography for the language, and taught it to students who gathered a variety of texts from Oneida language speakers. After the project, Lounsbury began work in 1940 on the phonology of the language for his master's degree at the University.

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. in 1949 (his chair was Bernard Bloch), and his dissertation formed the basis of a publication in 1953 that established a framework and terminology followed ever since in the analysis of Iroquoian languages. He joined the department in 1949, and taught there until his retirement in 1979.

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