Samuel Hoyt Elbert

Samuel Hoyt Elbert (8 August 1907 - 14 May 1997) was a linguist who made major contributions to Hawaiian and Polynesian lexicography and ethnography. Born on a farm in Des Moines, Iowa, to Hugh and Ethelind Elbert, Sam grew up riding horses, one of his favorite pastimes well into retirement. After graduating from Grinnell College with an A.B. in 1928, he earned a certificate in French at the University of Toulouse and traveled in Europe before returning to New York City, where he waited tables, clerked for a newspaper, reviewed books, and studied journalism at Columbia University. Wanderlust took him to French Polynesia, first to Tahiti and then to the Marquesas, where he quickly became proficient in Marquesan.

In 1936, he went to work for the United States Geological Survey in Hawaiokinai. There he met researchers on Pacific languages and cultures at the Bishop Museum, chief among them Mary Kawena Pukui, from whom he learned Hawaiian and with whom he worked closely over a span of forty years. When war broke out in the Pacific, the U.S. Navy employed him as an intelligence officer studying the languages of strategically important islands. He was posted to Samoa in 1943, then to Micronesia, where he collected and published wordlists for several island languages.

After the war, encouraged by academics at the Bishop Museum and the University of Hawaiokinai, he studied at Yale and at Indiana University, where he earned a Ph.D. in folklore in 1950, writing his thesis on 'The Chief in Hawaiian Mythology'. He was hired by the University of Hawaiokinai in 1949, and taught classes in Hawaiian language and linguistics until he retired in 1972, introducing new teaching methods and new levels of rigor into Hawaiian language classes, which until then had a reputation for being easy.

In 1957, he began a longterm collaboration with the Danish scholar, Torben Monberg, on the Polynesian outliers of Rennell and Bellona in the Solomon Islands, making four trips to the islands and spending a year in Denmark on a Fulbright scholarship in 1964-64 collaborating with Monberg on a monograph on the oral traditions of Rennell and Bellona. In 1988, he published a grammar of the language.

elected Works

* 1957. "Hawaiian-English Dictionary" (rev. and enl. 1986) (with Mary Kawena Pukui)
* 1959. "Selections from Fornander's Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore"
* 1965. "From the Two Canoes: Oral Traditions of Rennell and Bellona" (with Torben Monberg)
* 1970. "Spoken Hawaiian"
* 1970. "Na Mele o Hawaii Nei: 101 Hawaiian Songs" (with Noelani K. Mahoe)
* 1974. "Place Names of Hawaii" (with Mary Kawena Pukui and Esther T. Mookini)
* 1979. "Hawaiian Grammar" (with Mary Kawena Pukui)
* 1988. "Echo of a Culture: A Grammar of Rennell and Bellona" Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication No. 22
* 1989. "Pocket Place Names of Hawaiokinai" (with Mary Kawena Pukui and Esther T. Mookini)
* 1990. "The Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaigo-Nihongo" (with Mary Kawena Pukui, Esther T. Mookini, and Yuko Nishizawa)
* 1992. "New Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary with a Concise Grammars and Given Names in Hawaiian" (with Mary Kawena Pukui, Esther T. Mookini, and Yu Mapuana Nishizawa)

References

* Hawkins, Emily (1997). In Memoriam: Samuel Hoyt Elbert, 1907-1997. "Oceanic Linguistics" 36:199-204.