Pliny Earle Goddard

Life and works

Goddard was born into a Quaker family of modest means in Lewiston, Maine. He studied classics at Earlham College, earning an A.B. in 1892 and an M.A. in 1896. After teaching Latin in secondary schools in Indiana and Kansas, the economic difficulties of the mid-1890s led him to accept a position as an interdenominational missionary to the Hupa of northwestern California. To communicate with his congregation, he learned the Hupa language and became absorbed in analyzing its radically different linguistic system.

In 1900 he left missionary work and began graduate study at Berkeley, receiving an Assistantship in the new Anthropology department the following year, joining Alfred L. Kroeber. Goddard earned a PhD in 1904 for a detailed grammatical study of Hupa, the first doctorate in anthropological linguistics granted by any American university. He became assistant professor in 1906 and handled much of the undergraduate instruction in anthropology and linguistics.

After completing his Hupa documentation, he spent summers gathering data on other California Athabaskan languages, traveling hundreds of miles on muleback to find speakers of Kato, Wailaki, and Sinkyone. His method of working from narrative texts rather than wordlists was ahead of its time, and his notes remain valuable.

Did You Know?

• In 1917, Goddard co-founded and edited the International Journal of American Linguistics with Franz Boas.
• His last published paper (1928) used mechanical tracings of Hupa speech to argue against the presence of tonal contrasts, a direct challenge to Edward Sapir's claims.
• Goddard's son David R. Goddard became a plant physiologist and geneticist, was nominated to the National Academy of Science, and served as Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.