Pliny Earle Goddard - Life and Works - The Dispute With Sapir Over Athabaskan Tone

The Dispute With Sapir Over Athabaskan Tone

Goddard continued his Athabaskan linguistic research with trips to the Southwest and to Canada, as well as several return visits to California. This work, however, was increasingly overshadowed by that of Edward Sapir, who had begun his own research on Athabaskan in 1922 with a field study of Sarsi. Sapir's interest in Athabaskan was ultimately grounded in his conviction that the "Na-Dene" relationship that connected Athabaskan, Tlingit, and Haida was part of a much older historical relationship that included Chinese and Tibetan He believed that decisive evidence in support of the "Sino-Dene" hypothesis was his discovery in Sarsi of a tonal system "so fundamental...to the phonetic and morphological understanding of that it is inconceivable that it should not be shared by the other Athabaskan dialects as well." This claim brought Sapir into direct conflict with Goddard, who had reported no tonal contrasts in California Athabaskan, in Navajo or Apache, or in the two Canadian languages he had studied, Chipewyan and Beaver. Goddard wisely chose not to dispute the presence of tonal contrasts in the Southwestern and Canadian languages (they are indeed tone languages), but he stood his ground with Hupa, devoting what would be his last published paper (1928) to a close examination of mechanical tracings of Hupa speech, none of which showed evidence of regular differences in pitch. By this time, however. Sapir had had ample opportunity to hear Hupa himself, and for his graduate student Li Fang-Kuei, a native speaker of Mandarin, to hear two other Calidornia Athabaskan languages, and to observe their complete lack of tonal contrasts. Goddard apparenty did not see Sapir's concession before dying quite suddenly on July 12, 1928. during the heat of a New York summer, at the age of 59.