William Dwight Whitney

William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist and Sanskrit scholar who became the first professor of Sanskrit at Yale University and one of the most internationally influential American linguists of the nineteenth century. Whitney produced a comprehensive Sanskrit grammar, first published in 1879, that remained a standard reference work for students of the language for well over a century, and he compiled an extensive index of Sanskrit verb roots and their forms. In his general works Language and the Study of Language, published in 1867, and The Life and Growth of Language, published in 1875, Whitney argued that language is a social institution, a conventional system of arbitrary signs maintained and transmitted by a speech community rather than a biologically innate faculty, a position later echoed and developed further by Ferdinand de Saussure, who acknowledged Whitney's influence on his own thinking. Whitney also served as chief editor of the Century Dictionary, a major American dictionary of English first published in the late 1880s, applying his linguistic expertise to lexicography on a large scale.