Charles F. Voegelin


Charles Frederick Voegelin, usually cited as C. F. Voegelin, was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was one of the leading authorities on Indigenous languages of North America, specifically the Algonquian and Uto-Aztecan languages. He published many influential works on Delaware, Shawnee, Hopi and the Tübatulabal languages.

Career

Born in New York, he entered Stanford University and received a BA in Psychology, after which he traveled to New Zealand to study Maori music. Then he decided to study anthropology at University of California, Berkeley where he was trained by Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie and Melville Jacobs, writing his dissertation as a grammar of Tübatulabal. At first he had great difficulties hearing the phonetic distinctions of the language, but in 1931 he went to the field with Danish linguist Hans Jørgen Uldall who taught him to recognize all the phonetic contrasts. His proficiency in Indigenous languages became so good that he was able to correspond with Leonard Bloomfield in Ojibwe, letters later published in the journal Anthropological linguistics.
He went on to do postdoctoral work in linguistics at Yale University with Edward Sapir, and then he taught at DePauw University, before joining Indiana University Bloomington in 1941 as that university's first professor of anthropology. During his tenure at Indiana he managed the United States' largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages. In 1944, he persuaded Indiana University to host the International Journal of American Linguistics, which had stopped being published in 1939, shortly before the death of its first editor Franz Boas. Voegelin served as editor of IJAL for many years.
Among his graduate students at Indiana were Ken Hale and Dell Hymes. Later he held an appointment at the University of Hawai'i, before returning to Indiana as an emeritus professor.

Personal life

Voegelin was first married to ethnologist Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, with whom he conducted fieldwork. Later he married linguist Florence M. Voegelin, an accomplished linguist in her own right. Together they co-authored numerous publications.

Honors

Voegelin was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1954.
In 1975, several of Voegelin's colleagues and former students collaborated on the festschrift Linguistics and Anthropology: In Honor of C. F. Voegelin.
Voegelin's collected papers are held by the American Philosophical Society.

Selected publications