She completed her PhD in linguistics at Yale University in 1935 at the age of 25, with a dissertation titled A Grammar of the Tunica Language.[4] In the 1930s, Haas worked with the last native speaker of Tunica, Sesostrie Youchigant, producing extensive texts and vocabularies.[5]
Career and research
Early work in linguistics
Haas undertook graduate work on comparative philology at the University of Chicago. She studied under Edward Sapir, whom she would follow to Yale. She began a long career in linguistic fieldwork, studying various languages during the summer months.[3]
Over the ten-year period from 1931 to 1941, Haas studied the Wakashan language Nitinat (Ditidaht), as well as a number of languages that were mainly originally spoken in the American southeast: Tunica, Natchez, Creek, Koasati, Choctaw, Alabama, Cherokee and Hichiti. Her first published paper, A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text, written in collaboration with Morris Swadesh, was published in 1933.[6][7]
Shortly after, Haas conducted fieldwork with Watt Sam and Nancy Raven, the last two native speakers of the Natchez language in Oklahoma.[8] Her extensive unpublished field notes have constituted the most reliable source of information on the now dead language. She conducted extensive fieldwork on the Creek language, and was the first modern linguist to collect extensive texts in the language.[9] Her Creek texts were published after her death in a volumed edited and translated by Jack B. Martin, Margaret McKane Mauldin, and Juanita McGirt.[10][11]
In 1948, she was appointed assistant professor of Thai and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley Department of Oriental Languages, an appointment she attributed to Peter A. Boodberg, whom she described as "ahead of his time in the way he treated women scholars—a scholar was a scholar in his book".[5] She became one of the founding members of the UC-Berkeley Department of Linguistics when it was established in 1953. She was a long-term chair of the department, and she was Director of the Survey of California Indian Languages at Berkeley from 1953 to 1977.[15] She retired from Berkeley in 1977, and in 1984 she was elected a Berkeley Fellow.[16]
Mary Haas died at her home in Berkeley, California, on May 17, 1996, at the age of 86.[3]
^Swadesh, Mary Haas; Swadesh, Morris (1933). "A Visit to the Other World, a Nitinat Text (With Translation and Grammatical Analysis)". International Journal of American Linguistics. 7 (3/4): 195–208. doi:10.1086/463803. JSTOR1262949. S2CID145763774.
^Kimball, Geoffrey (2007). The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Language. UNC Press. p. 98. ISBN978-0-8078-5806-6.
^Shipley, William (1988). In Honour of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics. Walter de Gruyter & Co. ISBN978-3-11-011165-1.
^Haas, Mary R. (June 1, 1964). Thai-English Student's Dictionary. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. ISBN978-0804705677.
^ abFalk, Julia S. (2005). Encyclopedia of Linguistics. p. 430.