Floyd Lounsbury
American mesoamericanist (1914–1998)
Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (April 25, 1914 – May 14, 1998) was an American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist scholar and epigrapher, best known for his work on linguistic and cultural systems of a variety of North and South American languages. Equally important were his contributions to understanding the hieroglyphs, culture and history of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
Early life and education
Lounsbury was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin to John Glenn Lounsbury and Anna Louise Jorgensen. He was one of three children, along with a brother, Gordon, and a sister, Elva.
He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1941, majoring in mathematics. During his undergraduate studies, Morris Swadesh was on the faculty, lecturing on American Indian linguistics. Lounsbury audited his courses, and when Swadesh received grants from the Works Progress Administration for a study of Oneida language and folklore, he appointed Lounsbury as his assistant. When Swadesh left Wisconsin for Mexico City, Lounsbury took over as the director of the project. He created an orthography for the language, and taught it to students who gathered a variety of texts from Oneida language speakers. After the project, Lounsbury began work in 1940 on the phonology of the language for his master's degree at the university.
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This entry incorporates text from “Floyd Lounsbury” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.