Name Charles Voegelin Role Author | Died May 22, 1986 | |
Education University of California, Berkeley (1932) Books Turkish Structure: Publications of the American Oriental Society Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, US & Canada | ||
Charles (Carl) Frederick Voegelin (or C. F. Voegelin) (January 14, 1906 – May 22, 1986) was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was one of the leading authorities on Indigenous languages of North America, specifically the Algonquian and Uto-Aztecan languages. He published many influential works on Delaware, Shawnee, Hopi and the Tübatulabal languages. He was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1954, and he revived the journal International Journal of American Linguistics after the death of its first editor Franz Boas in 1944.
Born in New York, he entered Stanford University and received a BA in Psychology, after which he traveled to New Zealand to study Maori music. Then he decided to study anthropology at Berkeley University where he was trained by Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie and Melville Jacobs writing his dissertation as a grammar of Tübatulabal. At first he had great difficulties hearing the phonetic distinctions of the language, but in 1931 he went to the field with Danish linguist Hans Jørgen Uldall who taught him to recognize all the phonetic contrasts. He went on to do postdoctoral work in linguistics at Yale University with Edward Sapir, and then he taught at DePauw University, before joining Indiana University Bloomington in 1941 as that university's first professor of anthropology.
His proficiency in Indigenous languages became so good that he was able to correspond with Leonard Bloomfield in Ojibwe, letters later published in the journal Anthropological linguistics. He was first married to ethnologist Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, with whom he conducted fieldwork. Later he married linguist Florence M. Voegelin, his graduate student at Indiana and an accomplished linguist in her own right. Together they co-authored numerous publications. During his tenure at Indiana he managed the United States' largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages. Among his graduate students at Indiana were Ken Hale and Dell Hymes. Later he was at the University of Hawai'i, before returning to Indiana as an emeritus professor. His collection of papers are held by the American Philosophical Society.
In 1975, several of Voegelin's colleagues and former students collaborated on the festschrift Linguistics and Anthropology: In Honor of C. F. Voegelin.