Mary Haas

From Freepedia

Mary Rosamund Haas (born January 12, 1910; died May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics.

Haas was born on January 12, 1910 in Richmond, Indiana, where she attended high school, and later Earlham College. At the University of Chicago she undertook graduate work on comparative philology. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University in 1935 with a dissertation entitled A Grammar of the Tunica Language. (Tunica was a language once spoken in present-day Louisiana.) Haas worked with the last fluent speaker of Tunica, Sesostrie Youchigant, producing extensive texts and vocabularies. Shortly afterwards, she also conducted fieldwork with the last two speakers of Natchez in Oklahoma, Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, resulting in extensive unpublished field notes that constitute the most reliable source of information on the Natchez language.

Haas was noted for her dedication to teaching linguistics, and to the role of the linguist in language instruction. Her student Karl Teeter pointed out in his obituary of Haas that she trained more Americanist linguists than her former instructors Edward Sapir and Franz Boas combined: she supervised fieldwork in Americanist linguistics by more than 100 Ph.D. students.

As a result of World War II, she turned to the study and teaching of the Thai language, and she would go on to become a pioneer in the field of Siamese language studies. Her authoritative Thai-English Students' Dictionary, published in 1964, is still in use.

She served as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1963.

She died on May 17, 1996.