Mary Haas American linguist Date of Birth: 12.01.1910 Country: USA

1. Biography of Mary Haas
2. Education and Early Work
3. Fieldwork and Contributions
4. Later Career and Accomplishments

Biography of Mary Haas

Mary Haas was an American linguist who specialized in the study of Native American languages, the Thai language, and historical linguistics.

Education and Early Work

Haas completed her undergraduate studies in Comparative Philology at the University of Chicago, where she wrote her thesis. Her first published work, "A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text" (1933), was written in collaboration with M. Swadesh, whom she later married.

In 1935, she defended her doctoral dissertation on linguistics at Yale University. Her dissertation, titled "A Grammar of the Tunica Language," focused on the language of the Tunica Indians who once lived in what is now Louisiana. Haas worked closely with the last living speaker of the language, Sesostrie Youchigant, resulting in a large collection of texts and a dictionary. She also proposed the hypothesis of a language macrofamily in the Gulf area.

Fieldwork and Contributions

Following her research on the Tunica language, Haas conducted fieldwork with the last two speakers of the Natchez language in Oklahoma, collecting a significant amount of unpublished field notes. She then conducted fieldwork on the Creek language and became the first linguist to gather a substantial corpus of texts in this language.

Carl Titter, an American linguist, noted in Haas's obituary that she trained far more linguists than her own mentors, Edward Sapir and Franz Boas. She served as the research advisor for over 100 doctoral students and was highly influential in the field of linguistics.

Later Career and Accomplishments

After World War II, Haas resumed teaching the Thai language and conducting research on it, becoming one of the leading experts in fieldwork on Thai. Her "Thai-English Students' Dictionary," published in 1964, is still used today.

In 1963, Haas served as the President of the Linguistic Society of America, further establishing her reputation as a prominent figure in the field of linguistics.