Albert Gatschet

Template:Short description Template:Use American English Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox academic Albert Louis Samuel Gatschet (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell or Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell;<ref>Template:Multiref</ref>Template:Efn October 3, 1832 – March 16, 1907) was a Swiss-American linguist, philologist, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the study of the Indigenous peoples and languages of the Americas. His work included analyses of almost a hundred different languages and preserved many on the brink of extinction.

Born in Switzerland to a Protestant minister, Gatschet studied at universities in Switzerland and Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1868 working as a language teacher. In 1872, the German botanist Oscar Loew asked him to analyze sixteen American Indian vocabularies recorded during the Wheeler Survey. His analysis was presented to the United States Congress and culminated in a German-language book which earned him the attention of Major John Wesley Powell, who hired Gatschet as an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institute. Gatschet was later a founding member of the Bureau of American Ethnology and spent the majority of his life traveling the United States and completing surveys of the nation's languages en masse.

Gatschet's work remains highly regarded; his ethnological and linguistic publications on Indigenous peoples and their languages are considered to have pioneered the field. His reorganization of the language families of Indigenous languages earned him significant appreciation during his lifetime. His work on the Klamath people earned him particular praise, including from the people themselves several decades after his death. Modern linguists have described his work as part of the driving force behind a period of transition away from missionary-based linguistic study and towards a view based on scientific interest.

Early life and education

Albert Louis Samuel Gatschet was born on October 3, 1832, in Saint Beatenberg, Switzerland, the second child and only son of Mary (Template:Nee) and Karl Albert Gatschet, a Protestant minister.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> Mary died when Albert was about ten years old and he was thereafter raised in part by his older sister, Louise.Template:Sfn Following his mother's death, Albert's relationship with his father grew strained, though he remained extremely affectionate towards his sister throughout his life.Template:Sfn

In his youth, Gatschet's education was primarily religious and for a time he considered becoming a reverend like his father.Template:Sfn He attended the {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} in Neuchâtel and Bern.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> Gatschet attended the University of Bern from 1852 to 1858, studying languages, history, art, and theology; his favorite subjects there were Ancient Greek and theological doctrinal criticism.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> The same year he left the University of Bern, he began studying at the University of Berlin where he studied ancient languages.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Career

Oval sepia image of a mustachioed man with sideburns in a suit with an ornate tie

Gatschet in 1879

Although he had published a handful of articles before, Gatschet published his first major work in 1867, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ('Toponymic Etymological Research in Switzerland')Template:Efn which dealt with the etymological origins of place names around his native Switzerland.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> The book met with critical success and remained a standard reference work until his death.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Gatschet spent several months following its publication working at various museums in Paris and London, including the British Museum, before immigrating to the United States the following January where he settled in New York City.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref>

In New York, Gatschet continued to publish linguistics articles, but worked primarily as a language teacher, being fluent in both French and German, though he reportedly had difficulty with English.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> In 1872, he was given the recorded vocabularies of sixteen American Indian languages to analyze by the German botanist Oscar Loew, who had been attached to the Wheeler Survey tasked with exploring the Southwestern United States.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Gatschet's analyses of the vocabularies were reported in the 1875 and 1876 volumes of the Wheeler reports, culminating in another publication entitled {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref>Template:Efn

Although {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} was published in Weimar, the publication earned Gatschet the attention of John Wesley Powell, a major in the United States Army and a veteran of the American Civil War, then serving as Director of the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region.<ref>Template:Multiref2</ref> In March 1877, Gatschet accepted an offer from Powell to become an ethnologist under him in order to classify and document the languages of the region, prompting Gatschet to relocate to Washington, D.C., permanently.<ref>Template:Multiref2</ref> Upon his arrival, he began working with the Smithsonian Institution to classify its existing documentation of American Indian languages, including the initiation of a five-year effort to classify and describe the Yuman languages of the Southwest.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> The same year, he was commissioned by the government to formulate a comprehensive account of the Pacific Northwest beginning with an expedition to the Otaki village in the Sacramento Valley and later visiting the Modoc and Kalapuya peoples, among others.Template:Sfn There, he also began his work on the Klamath people in and around modern-day border of Oregon and California.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref>

In 1879, Gatschet became a founding member of the Bureau of American Ethnology, with Powell as its new director.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn His work on the Klamath was halted following Powell's order to reexamine the phylogenetic relationships of the nation's language families to create a more certain classification system.Template:Sfn Gatschet was among several other linguists who were deployed to different parts of the country to reassess classifications.Template:Sfn In December 1881, Gatschet traveled to South Carolina where he discovered the relationship between the local Catawba language and the Siouan languages of the Great Plains.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

In January 1885, Gatschet traveled to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to begin work on the Atakapa language.Template:Sfn There, he discovered the last village of the tribe – Template:Langr – experiencing a mass exodus as tribesmen who could speak the language began migrating to Texas and Oklahoma.Template:Sfn Gatschet worked with "the two most knowledgeable speakers of the language" – cousins Template:Langr and Template:Langr – in the village, but he published a plea to try to get support, which failed.Template:Sfn The year after Gatschet's death, John R. Swanton took up Gatschet's plea, publishing a good portion of his notes and finishing his dictionary by 1932.Template:Sfn While Swanton attempted to conduct his own research, he found the tribe somewhat reluctant to speak to outsiders and some of it has been lost.Template:Sfn Although a handful of vocabularies existed prior, Gatschet's work on Atakapa's grammar is the only extant source.Template:Sfn Later that year, Gatschet's work took him to Oklahoma where he undertook the first major survey of the Yuchi language.Template:Sfn He traveled back to Louisiana in 1885 and 1886 to study Tunica, Chitimacha, Biloxi, and two dialects of Choctaw.Template:Sfn

Gatschet made a number of contributions to the study of languages indigenous to the Gulf coast of modern-day Texas. His two-word recording of the Haname language from Tonkawa elder in 1884 ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}} 'Give me water!') is the only documentation of the language.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In November 1888, he traveled to Lynn, Massachusetts, to help complete an account of the Karankawa language.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He was able to review early works with his informant Alice Oliver while also eliciting new vocabulary. Oliver was then a sixty-year-old white woman from Matagorda who had learned the language in her childhood.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn An attempt to link the language other local Texan languages was about to be underway, but Oliver died the following February.Template:Sfn The work Gatschet was able to complete was published in 1890, which covered both the language and some ethnographic notes.Template:Sfn

In 1890, Gatschet published The Klamath Indians of Southwestern Oregon, a more-than-1,500-page monograph published in two parts.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> The contents are the result of years of investigation on the Klamath reservation, its first volume comprising a compilation of accounts of the Modoc War by Klamath veterans, biographical sketches, cultural customs and jurisprudence, and tribal legends and stories recounted to him by Winema, Curly Ball, and a few others, written with English interlinear glossing.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The second volume comprises both a Klamath–English dictionary and an English–Klamath one.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The work captures the language as it was spoken before it experienced significant contamination from the growing dominance of Chinook Jargon; Gatschet was reportedly discerning in distinguishing the speech of those who were already beginning to have their language affected by language contact.Template:Sfn The book was extremely well-received among its readership.Template:Sfn Decades after his death, The National Cyclopædia of American Biography described the publication as "one of the most exhaustive studies of an American native language ever undertaken and may fairly be said to mark an epoch in the science of linguistics".Template:Sfn Many Klamath expressed approval at his work as well, with one writing fifty years after his death that "his work with our Indians [...] can never be surpassed or even equaled".Template:Sfn

Later life and death

A document partially printed, partially filled in by hand with flowing cursive

Gatschet's death certificate

In September 1892, Gatschet married Louise Horner, a widow from Philadelphia about twenty-four years his junior.<ref>Template:Multiref2</ref> The same year, the University of Bern granted him an honorary doctorate.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref> Gatschet became a naturalized citizen of the United States on September 28, 1896.Template:Sfn

Later in life, Gatschet became overly involved in his work to the point of neglecting his own health.Template:Sfn Following the publication of The Klamath Tribe and Language of Oregon, the Bureau of American Ethnology commissioned him to begin a comparative grammar survey of the Algonquian languages, which he planned to follow with a survey of the Shawnee language, but he was forced to retire on March 1, 1905, following the exacerbation of the kidney disease he ultimately died from. Before he left, he gave the Bureau a massive manuscript "probably equal in extent" to his Klamath publication, containing about ten thousand words of the Peoria language.<ref>Template:Multiref2</ref> Gatschet's health began deteriorating rapidly following his retirement and he was constantly attended to by his wife.Template:Sfn His later life was marked with what his doctors referred to as fainting spells. In July 1906, he collapsed in the street and had to be revived at Freedman's Hospital.Template:Sfn

Gatschet died in Washington, D.C., on March 16, 1907, of Bright's disease and overwork at the age of 74.<ref>Template:Multiref2</ref> The couple had no children.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Although later in life he had become unconcerned with spiritual matters altogether, an Episcopalian funeral service was held at his house on 15th Street three days after his death.<ref>Template:Multiref2</ref> He was buried at Mount Peace Cemetery in Philadelphia the following day.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Recognition and legacy

An elderly mustachioed man in a suit with a bowtie

Gatschet, Template:Circa

Gatschet is considered to be a pioneer in the study of American Indian peoples and their languages.Template:Sfn In 1902, The Washington Post described him as "among the greatest of American ethnologists, having done more toward ordering and classifying the disordered mass of American linguistics than any living authority on American philology".Template:Sfn Despite this, most of Gatschet's field notes remain unanalyzed.Template:Sfn Although the majority of Gatschet's work was done in the United States, his work was better known and more highly regarded among European academics during his lifetime.Template:Sfn The American-French historian Template:Ill wrote that "he did much for his adopted homeland, where it can be said that he created the science of languages considered in their relationship to race".Template:Sfn Retrospectives have often compared Gatschet to his Swiss-American compatriots Albert Gallatin and Louis Agassiz.<ref>Template:Multiref</ref>

The American linguist Ives Goddard described the efforts of Gatschet and James Owen Dorsey as "two men of unusual linguistic ability and equipment" who ushered in a period of linguistic interest motivated "by scientific interest rather than missionary zeal".Template:Sfn Gatschet's work examined over a hundred American Indian languages, many of which were critically endangered at the time of his documentation.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He wrote the first major works on Muskogee and Hitchiti and began the only Atakapa-language dictionary.Template:Sfn Template:Efn By 1902, he had published over a hundred works on Indigenous languages.Template:Sfn

Gatschet's influence on the study of the Siouan languages is profound. His work identified the Siouan-speaking peoples' {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} as having been closer to the East Coast of the United States than the Great Plains, as was previously assumed.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Linguists now believe Proto-Siouan was spoken in and around the Ohio River Valley.Template:Sfn His work with the Biloxi people and their language on the Gulf Coast made him the first to identify the language as Siouan.Template:Sfn

Throughout his career, Gatschet was a member of several learned societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philological Society, the American Folklore Society, the National Geographic Society, the Anthropological Society of Washington, the Washington Academy of Sciences, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, the Historical Society of Canton Bern, and the {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} of Bern, among others.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn He was also a beneficiary member of the Bookbinders Guild of Bern.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In 1884, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, followed by election to the American Antiquarian Society in 1902.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Personality

Although highly regarded for his work, Gatschet had a reputation for being solitary, emotionally distant, and unresponsive, which led to some tension between him and his colleagues.Template:Sfn In a letter to Wilberforce Eames, James Pilling – Powell's chief clerk – described Gatschet as "certainly more nearly devoid of all idea of courtesy and social decorum than any man I have ever met".Template:Sfn Pilling also berated Gatschet for continuing to browse his papers unsupervised and without permission.Template:Sfn John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt refused to speak to Gatschet at all. However, Gatschet's usefulness during the survey prompted Powell to protect him from the enmity of other members of the entourage.Template:Sfn

Gatschet's friend and colleague James Mooney wrote that "his chief characteristics were thoroughness and absolute honesty", but admitted that "it was practically impossible for him to collaborate" with others in his work.Template:Sfn The National Cyclopædia of American Biography similarly described him as "a brilliant and painstaking scholar [...] of an unusually retiring nature and, by preference, most of his important work was accomplished alone".Template:Sfn Alfred Kroeber described meeting him thus:

Gatschet I saw at least once in Washington, but he seemed as shy for an old man as I certainly was for a young one, and we did not get far. He rarely attended meetings; as Mooney says, he "preferred to work alone".Template:Sfn {{#if:|

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Still, he was known as morally upright, loyal, and unwilling to tolerate pseudoscience. In response to one such claim, he remarked: "To guess is not science".Template:Sfn

Selected works

References

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Albert Gatschet

Contents

Early life and education

Career

Later life and death

Recognition and legacy

Personality

Selected works

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Further reading

External links

Navigation menu

Albert Gatschet

Early life and education

Career

Later life and death

Recognition and legacy

Personality

Selected works

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Further reading

External links

Navigation menu

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