Floyd Lounsbury

Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (born April 25, 1914 in Stevens Point , Wisconsin , † May 14, 1998 in Connecticut ) was an American linguist, Mayan researcher and anthropologist.

Lounsbury was a meteorologist in the Air Force during World War II. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1941 and a master's degree in anthropology in 1946 and received his PhD in anthropology from Yale University in 1949 . He also taught at Yale from 1947 until his retirement in 1979. He last lived in East Haven, Connecticut and died in a hospice.

As a linguist, he first dealt with the language of the Oneida Iroquois in 1939, continuing a project by his teacher Morris Swadesh , who had led him to linguistics and Indian studies. That was the beginning of his preoccupation with a variety of languages ​​and cultures of North and South American Indians. He clarified the historical relationships between the Cherokee language and other Iroquois languages ​​and wrote a monograph on place names of the Iroquois in the Champlain Valley. He was also a pioneer in drawing conclusions about the social and cultural conditions of the Indians from linguistic elements. In 1971 he recorded the creation myth of the Oneida Indians in Ontario, published as a book posthumously by his student Bryan Gick.

He was one of the leading experts on Mayan hieroglyphics in his day . Lounsbury was one of the initiators of the conferences at which Maya experts exchanged ideas about the deciphering and thus accelerated the project decisively. In 1973, together with Linda Schele and Peter Mathews, he succeeded in establishing the 200-year-old genealogy of the Palenque royal family, which they presented at the first Palenque Round Table . He published about the Temple of the Cross in Palenque and Maya myths and the astronomy and mathematics of the Maya. While studying the Dresden Codex , he found that the Thompson correlation for the temporal relationship between the Maya calendar and the Julian calendar is better than the correlation that was common at the time. He also early supported the phonetic approach to deciphering the Mayan hieroglyphs by Yuri Walentinowitsch Knorosow (in contrast to the British Eric Thompson ). Ultimately, this path led to the deciphering of the Mayan hieroglyphs.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976), the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences (1969). In 1987 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania . He received the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale University.

With his wife Masako Yokoyama he had the daughter Ruth Ozeki , a Canadian filmmaker, writer and Zen Buddhist priestess.

Fonts (selection)

• Phonology of the Oneida Language , MA Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1946
• Stray Number Systems among Certain Indian Tribes , American Anthropologist XLVIII, 1948
• Oneida Verb Morphology , Yale University Press, 1953
• The Method of Descriptive Morphology , in: EP Hamp, M. Joos, FW Householder, R. Austerlitz (Eds.): Readings in Linguistics, University of Chicago Press, 1953
• A Semantic Analysis of Pawnee Kinship Usage , Language XXXII, 1956
• Iroquois Place-Names in the Champlain Valley , University of the State of New York, Albany, 1960
• Iroquois-Cherokee Linguistic Relations , Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin CLXXX, 1961
• A Formal Account of the Crow- and Omaha-type Kinship Terminologies , in: W. Goodenough (Ed.), Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, McGraw-Hill, 1964
• Another View of the Trobriand Kinship Categories , in: E. Hammel (Ed.), Formal Semantic Analysis, American Anthropological Association, 1965
• with Harold W. Scheffler: A Study in Structural Semantics: The Sirionó Kinship System , Prentice-Hall, 1971
• On the Derivation and Reading of the “Ben-Ich” Affix , in: Mesoamerican Writing Systems, 1973
• Pacal in: MG Robertson (Ed.), First Palenque Round Table, Pre-Columbian Art Research, 1974
• A Rationale for the Initial Date of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque , in: MG Robinson (Ed.), The Art, Iconography and Dynastic History of Palenque, Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 1976
• with Linda Schele , P. Mathews: Parentage Expressions in Classic Maya Inscriptions , International Conference on Maya Iconography and Hieroglyphic Writing Guatemala City, 1977
• Maya Numeration, Computation, and Calendrical Astronomy , in: Dictionary of Scientific Biography , Volume 15, 1978
• A Solution for the Number 1.5.5.0 , in: A. Aveni (Ed.), The Sky in Mayan Literature, Oxford U, Press, 1992.
• Some Problems in the Interpretation of the Mythological Portion of the Hieroglyphic Text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque , in: MG Robinson (Ed.), Third Palenque Round Table, 1978
• Astronomical Knowledge and Its Uses at Bonampak, Mexico in Archaeoastronomy , in: Anthony F. Aveni (Ed.), The New World: American Primitive Astronomy, Cambridge University Press, 1982
• Glyphic Substitutions: Homophonic and Synonymic in Phoneticism , in: JS Justeson, L. Campbell (Eds.), Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York at Albany, 1984
• The Identities of the Mythological Figures in the Cross Group Inscriptions of Palenque , in: MG Robertson, EP Benson (Ed.), Fourth Palenque Round Table, Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 1985
• The Ancient Writing of Middle America in: W. Senner (Ed.), The Origins of Writing, University of Nebraska Press, 1989
• A Palenque King and the Planet Jupiter , in: AF Aveni (ed.), World Archaeastronomy, Cambridge University Press, 1989
• Recent Work in the Decipherment of Palenque's Hieroglyphic Inscriptions , American Anthropologist XCIII, 1991
• A Solution for the Number 1.5.5.0 of the Mayan Venus Table , and A Derivation of the Mayan to Julian Correlation from the Dresden Codex, Venus Chronology , in: AF Aveni (Ed.), The Sky in Mayan Literature , Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Editor and translator with Bryan Gick from Demus Elm, Harvey Antone: The Oneida Creation Story , 2000

Web links

• Obituary in Yale News , May 19, 1998

Individual evidence

1. ^ Profiles on Catalog General. July 27, 2004, accessed July 31, 2018 (French). 
2. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter L. (PDF; 1.1 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved July 31, 2018 .