Leonard Bloomfield - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Bloomfield was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 1, 1887. His father Sigmund Bloomfield immigrated to the United States as a child in 1868; the original family name Blumenfeld was changed to Bloomfield after their arrival in the United States. In 1896 his family moved to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, where he attended elementary school, but returned to Chicago for secondary school. His uncle Maurice Bloomfield was a prominent linguist at Johns Hopkins University, and his aunt Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler was a well-known concert pianist.

Bloomfield attended Harvard College from 1903 to 1906, graduating with the A.B. degree. He subsequently began graduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, taking courses in German and Germanic philology, in addition to courses in other Indo-European languages. A meeting with Indo-Europeanist Eduard Prokosch, a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, convinced Bloomfield to pursue a career in linguistics. In 1908 Bloomfield moved to the University of Chicago where he took courses in German and Indo-European philology with Frances A. Wood and Carl Darling Buck. His doctoral dissertation in Germanic historical linguistics was supervised by Wood, and he graduated in 1909. He undertook further studies at the University of Leipzig and the University of Göttingen in 1913 and 1914 with leading Indo-Europeanists August Leskien, Karl Brugmann, as well as Hermann Oldenberg, a specialist in Vedic Sanskrit. Bloomfield also studied at Göttingen with Sanskrit specialist Jacob Wackernagel, and considered both Wackernagel and the Sanskrit grammatical tradition of rigorous grammatical analysis associated with Pāṇini as important influences on both his historical and descriptive work. Further training in Europe was a condition for promotion at the University of Illinois from Instructor to the rank of Assistant Professor.

Read more about this topic:  Leonard Bloomfield

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
    A light-blue lane of early dawn,
    Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)

    ... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?
    Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)

    She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)