Mary R. Haas
| Mary R. Haas | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
January 23, 1910 Richmond, Indiana |
| Died | May 17, 1996 (aged 86) Alameda County, California |
| Education | Ph.D. in linguistics, Yale University, 1935 |
| Alma mater | Earlham College, University of Chicago, Yale University |
| Occupation | Linguist |
| Employer | University of California, Berkeley |
| Known for | Training linguists; work in North American Indian languages; work in Thai, and historical linguistics. |
| Spouse(s) |
Morris Swadesh (1931–1937) Heng R. Subhanka (divorced in 1949) |
| Awards | Honorary doctorates from Northwestern University, 1975, the University of Chicago 1976, Earlham College, 1980, and Ohio State University, 1980. |
Mary Rosamond Haas (January 23, 1910 – May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics.
Haas attended high school in Richmond, Indiana, and later Earlham College.
Haas undertook graduate work on comparative philology at the University of Chicago. She studied under Edward Sapir, whom she would follow to Yale. She began a long career in linguistic fieldwork, studying various languages during the summer months.
Over the ten-year period from 1931 to 1941, Haas studied Nitinat, Tunica, Natchez, Creek, Koasati, Choctaw, Alabama, and Hichiti, mostly languages of the American southeast. Her first published paper, A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text, written in collaboration with Morris Swadesh, was published in 1933.
She completed her PhD in linguistics at Yale University in 1935 at age 25, with a dissertation titled A Grammar of the Tunica Language. (Tunica was once spoken in what is now Louisiana and Mississippi.) In the 1930s, Haas worked with the last fluent speaker of Tunica, Sesostrie Youchigant, producing extensive texts and vocabularies.
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