Floyd Lounsbury

Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (1914 to 1998) was an American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist best known for his work on the languages and cultures of North and South America and for his contributions to understanding Maya hieroglyphs. Born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, he studied mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, worked with Morris Swadesh on the Oneida language, and took his doctorate at Yale in 1949. His dissertation became Oneida Verb Morphology (1953), a framework still followed in the analysis of Iroquoian languages. He taught in the Yale department of anthropology from 1949 until his retirement in 1979 as Sterling Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. For social anthropology his most lasting contribution was applying linguistic methods to the formal analysis of kinship terminology and social organization, notably in his papers on Pawnee kinship usage and on the Crow and Omaha type terminologies. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1969.