Floyd Lounsbury

Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (25 April 1914 to 14 May 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 and for his contributions to understanding the hieroglyphs, culture and history of the Maya civilization. Born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, he graduated in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1941 and worked on the Oneida language as an assistant to Morris Swadesh. After wartime service as a meteorologist in Brazil he took his Ph.D. at Yale in 1949, and his dissertation became Oneida Verb Morphology (1953), which set the framework and terminology used ever since for the analysis of Iroquoian languages. He taught in the Yale department of anthropology from 1949 until his retirement in 1979, and he applied linguistic methods to the formal analysis of kinship terminology and social organization.