Frank Siebert
BornApril 2, 1912
Louisville, Kentucky
DiedJanuary 23, 1998 (aged 85)
Bangor, Maine
Burial placeWest Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

Frank T. Siebert Jr. (1912 – 1998) was a medical doctor who became a leading authority on Algonquian languages, including Penobscot, for which he published a dictionary.[1][2][3]

Professional career

Siebert started as a medical pathologist before leaving medicine to focus on linguistics. He studied medicine at the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania graduating in 1938. Apart from his medical studies at Penn, he was influenced by anthropologist Frank Speck in his interest in Native American languages. Traveling to other universities, he was also influenced by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir .[1] In 1969, he became a Guggenheim fellow.[4]

In 1980, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the creation of a Penobscot dictionary, a project that he had been working on since at least 1968.[2][3]

Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution called Siebert "clearly the most brilliant and most competent avocational linguist working on Native American languages that there has ever been, hands down."[2] Karl Teeter, commenting on Siebert, called him "the dean of Algonquian linguistics".[3]

Siebert bequeathed his papers to the American Philosophical Society.

Personal life

Siebert was born in Louisville and grew in the suburban Philadelphia. He attended Haverford College, studying chemistry and graduating in 1934.

He was married, later divorced, with two daughters.

He was described as an eccentric and recluse. He collected rare books [1]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Goddard, Ives (1998). "Frank T. Siebert, Jr. (1912-1998)". Anthropological Linguistics. 40 (3): 481–498. ISSN 0003-5483.
  2. 1 2 3 Gregory, Alice (2021-04-12). "How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2023-12-17.
  3. 1 2 3 McCorison, Marcus (1998). "Obituaries: FRANK THOMAS SIEBERT, JR" (PDF). Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society: 299–304.
  4. ↑ "Search Results - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". web.archive.org. 2012-08-19. Retrieved 2023-12-17.
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