Obituary
Floyd Glenn Lounsbury, 1914–1998: A brief obituary

Wallace Chafe
University of California, Santa Barbara
Summary

Floyd G. Lounsbury (1914–1998), one of the 20th century’s most influential anthropological linguistics, will be remembered especially for his contributions to three major areas of scholarship: Iroquoian linguistics, the analysis of kinship systems, and the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphs. His earliest Iroquoian work was with the Oneida language in Wisconsin, and his description of the verb morphology of Oneida became the basis for all future studies of Iroquoian languages, many of them carried forward by his students. His analyses of Native American and other kinship systems in terms of semantic ‘components’ were central to the development of componential analysis in linguistic anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s. He was a pioneer in the phonetic interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphs, relating them to the grammatical structures of Mayan languages as well as to the astronomical and mathematical systems that formed much of the content of Mayan texts.

Quick links
Full-text access is restricted to subscribers. Log in to obtain additional credentials. For subscription information see Subscription & Price. Direct PDF access to this article can be purchased through our e-platform.

References

A.Representative publications of Floyd G. Lounsbury

1 For a full bibliography of Floyd G. Lounsbury’s writings, see Chafe (1998).

1953
 Oneida Verb Morphology. (= Yale University Publications in Anthropology 48.) New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
1960a
 “Iroquois-Cherokee Linguistic Relations”. Symposium on Cherokee and Iroquois Culture ed. by William N. Fenton & John Gulick (= Bureau of American Ethnology; Bulletin, 180), 9–17. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
1960b
 “Iroquois Place-Names in the Champlain Valley”. Report of the New York-Vermont Interstate Commission on the Lake Champlain Region (= State of New York; Legislative Document, 9), 21–66. Albany, N.Y. (Repr. as a separate publication, Albany: State University of New York 1965.)Google Scholar
1964a
 “The Structural Analysis of Kinship Semantics”. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists ed. by Horace G. Lunt, 1073–1093. The Hague: Mouton. (Repr. (a) in Kinship and Social Organization ed. by Paul Bo-hannan and John Middleton, 125–148. Garden City, N.Y.: The Natural History Press 1968; (b.) in Cognitive Anthropology ed. by Stephen A. Tyler, 193–212. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1969; (c) in Readings in Kinship and Social Structure ed. by Nelson Graburn, 258–271. New York: Harper & Row 1969.)Google Scholar
1964b
 “A Formal Account of the Crow- and Omaha-Type Kinship Terminologies”. Explorations in Cultural Anthropology ed. by Ward H. Goodenough, 351–393. New York: McGraw-Hill. (Repr. (a) as Bobbs-Merrill Reprints in the Social Sciences, Number A321, 1966, and (b) in Cognitive Anthropology ed. by Stephen A. Tyler, 213–255. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1969.)Google Scholar
1973
 “On the Derivation and Reading of the ‘Ben-Ich’ Prefix”. Mesoamerican Writing Systems ed. by Elizabeth P. Benson, 99–143. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections.Google Scholar
1978
 “Iroquoian Languages”. Handbook of North American Indians, Vol.XV: Northeast, ed. by Bruce Trigger, 334–343. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.Google Scholar
1978
 “Maya Numeration, Computation, and Calendrical Astronomy”. Dictionary of Scientific Biography ed. by Charles Coulson Gillispie, Vol.XV, 759–818. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Google Scholar
1980
 “Some Problems in the Interpretation of the Mythological Portion of the Hieroglyphic Text of the Temple of the Cross at Palenque”. Third Palenque Round Table 1978 ed. by Merle Greene Robertson, Part 2, 99–115. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
1991
 “Recent Work in the Decipherment of Palenque’s Hieroglyphic Inscriptions”. American Anthropologist 93.809–825. DOI logoGoogle Scholar

B.Secondary sources

Chafe, Wallace
1998 “Floyd Glenn Lounsbury” (obituary). Newsletter of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas 17:2.2–4 (July 1998).Google Scholar
In press. “Floyd Glenn Lounsbury”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.
Chafe, Wallace & John S. Justeson
In press. “Floyd Glenn Lounsbury” (obituary). Language.