Paul William Friedrich (October 22, 1927 – August 11, 2016) was an American

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, poet, and Professor of Social Thought at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

. He studied at

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

with

Roman Jakobson Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

under the supervision of

Sidney Mintz Sidney Wilfred Mintz (November 16, 1922 – December 27, 2015) was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and cond ...

. He specialized in Slavic languages and literature, and in the ethnographic and linguistic study of the

Purépecha The Purépecha (endonym pua, P'urhepecha ) are a group of indigenous people centered in the northwestern region of Michoacán, Mexico, mainly in the area of the cities of Cherán and Pátzcuaro. They are also known by the pejorative "Tarascan ...

people of Western Mexico, as well as in the role of poetics and aesthetics in creating linguistic and discursive patterns. Among his best known works were ''Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village'' (1970; 1977), ''The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method'' (1987), both ethnographic works describing local politics in a small community in the Mexican state of Michoacan. And in linguistics his works ''The Tarascan Suffixes of Locative Space: Meaning and Morphotactics'' (1971) and ''A Phonology of Tarascan'' (1973) were among the most detailed as well as earliest modern linguistic of the

Purépecha language Purépecha (also ''P'urhépecha'' , tsz, Phorhé or ''Phorhépecha''), often called Tarascan, which is a pejorative term coined by Spanish colonizers ( es, Tarasco), is a language isolate or small language family that is spoken by some 140,000 ...

. In 2005, his former students honored him with a festschrift titled ''Language, Culture and the Individual: A Tribute to Paul Friedrich''. In 2007 Yale University awarded Friedrich with the

Wilbur Cross Medal The Wilbur Cross Medal, or Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal for Alumni Achievement, is an award by the Yale University Graduate School Alumni Association to recognize "...distinguished achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration, and p ...

. A prolific poet, he also published seven collections of poems, some of them focusing on the

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

form.

Selected publications

*''Proto-Indo-European Trees'' (1970) *''Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village'' (1977) *''The Meaning of Aphrodite'' (1978) *''The Language Parallax. Linguistics, Relativism and Poetic Creativity'' (1986) *''Music in Russian Poetry'' (1998)

Poetry

*''From Root to Flower: Selected Poems'' (2006) *''Handholds: Haiku'' (2009) *''a goldfish instant: Concord to India haikus'' (2010)

References

External links

Paul Friedrich's poetry site

Guide to the Paul Friedrich Papers 1945-1999
at th
University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
{{DEFAULTSORT:Friedrich, Paul 1927 births 2016 deaths Harvard University alumni Linguists from the United States American anthropologists Linguists of Mesoamerican languages American Mesoamericanists Anthropology educators Indo-Europeanists Linguists of Indo-European languages American semioticians University of Chicago faculty Slavists