“Otfridiana,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 28 (1929), 489-502;
“Old English Plural Subjunctives in -E,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29 (1930), 100-13

Leonard Bloomfield, Professor of Comparative Philology and German

“Otfridiana,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 28 (1929), 489-502;
“Old English Plural Subjunctives in -E,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29 (1930), 100-13

Leonard Bloomfield was a leading scholar of American structuralist linguistics. He was an instructor of German at the University of Illinois from 1910 to 1913 and then an Assistant Professor of Comparative Philology and German from 1913 to 1921. Because of intense anti-German sentiments during WWI, Leonard Bloomfield spent less time teaching German classes and devoted his research towards developing methods for linguistics from Sanskrit and an indigenous language from the Phillipines, called Tagálog. From 1914-1919, he worked on Tagálog Texts with Grammatical Analysis with the help of an U of I engineering student, Antonio Viola Santiago, a native speaker of Tagálog. Bloomfield also learned and researched Algoquian learning it from the Menominee people in Wisconsin. In a letter dated August 23, 1920, he writes,

“Having been writing down Menominee words and stories, They are a delightful people of good culture. It must have been an elaborate culture 200 years ago. The European-American takes it away and reduces them to the level of our yokelry, under the pretext of civilizing … Lived 2 weeks with a medicine man and his wife, lovely old people & learned the cooking terms, etc., which have never boon collected for any Algoquin language. They have been very kind to me & patient teaching me, & it was hard, as they don’t speak English.”

A Life for Language: A Biographical Memoir of Leonard Bloomfield, p. 20

1910-1921