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Floyd Glenn Lounsbury (1914-1998)1
When Floyd Glenn Lounsbury died in Branford, Connecticut, on May 14, 1998, shortly after his 84th birthday, from a long-standing heart condition that had first put him at risk in the mid-1960s, he was Sterling Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Yale University, where he had taught, mentored, and flourished as a preeminent anthropological linguist for more than half a century. His major scholarly contributions included groundbreaking studies of American Indian languages, especially Iroquoian and Mayan; of semantic structures, notably kinship terminological systems and their social matrices; and of Mesoamerican hieroglyphic writing. Lounsbury is survived by his wife, Masako Yokoyama Lounsbury, also a linguist, of East Haven, Connecticut; their daughter, Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, a documentary filmmaker and author, of Cortes Island, British Columbia; and a sister, Elva Lounsbury, in Wisconsin.
Lounsbury was born April 25, 1914, in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, the son of John Glenn Lounsbury and Anna Louise Jorgensen Lounsbury. Very soon thereafter, the family moved to a small, one-family dairy farm in the heartland of rural central Wisconsin, where he spent his childhood and early school days. One of his typical recollections of that period: "Milked cows from the time I was big enough to sit on a one-legged milking stool." From the harsh and often economically stressed conditions where they first settled in the unincorporated village of Sherry (population in 1923: 69), he learned to cope with many near-subsistence-level environmental problems and acquired an intimate knowledge of dairy farming and self-- sufficient food preservation, along with the skills needed to operate and repair farm machinery. They lived close to the land.
Because of shifts made necessary by financial losses and the lack of local post-elementary education, Lounsbury attended three different high schools in Port Edwards and Waukesha. With the onslaught of the Depression, however, he often found himself dropping classes for months at a time to help his father make ends meet by such last-ditch means as debarking and selling cedar fence posts cut in wet swamplands. Thus, his secondary and college education was cumulatively delayed for more than three years. Despite these interruptions, he studied with some excellent teachers in Latin, English, and in his special passion by senior high school, mathematics. He also mined the resources of...