Samuel Hoyt Elbert

Samuel H. Elbert
Samuel H. Elbert
Born	August 8, 1907; Des Moines, Iowa
Died	May 14, 1997 (aged 89); Honolulu, Hawaii
Academic background
Alma mater	Grinnell College, ; University of Toulouse, ; Indiana University
Influences	Mary Kawena Pukui
Academic work
Main interests	Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages
Notable works	Hawaiian Dictionary; ; Hawaiian Grammar
Influenced	Torben Monberg

Samuel Hoyt Elbert (8 August 1907 – 14 May 1997) was an American linguist who made major contributions to Hawaiian and Polynesian

Marquesas, where he quickly became proficient in Marquesan

. In 1936, he went to work for the United States Geological Survey in Hawaiʻi. 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 Hawaiʻi, 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 Hawaiʻi 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 longtime collaboration with the Danish scholar,

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.

In 1972, he published a dictionary of the

Puluwatese language

followed by a grammar book of the language in 1974.