Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

[admin]

Charles Henry Tawney
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

Charles Henry Tawney
Born: 1837
Died: 1922
Occupation: Indologist, librarian

Charles Henry Tawney CIE (1837–1922[1][2]) was an English educator and scholar, primarily known for his translations of Sanskrit classics into English. He was fluent in German, Latin, and Greek; and in India also acquired Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, and Persian.[3]

Biography

Tawney was the son of Rev. Richard Tawney, and educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge; where he was a Cambridge Apostle and worked as a Fellow and Tutor for 4 years, until he moved to India for health reasons. He married Constance Catharine Fox in 1867 and had a large family.[3] One of his children, born 30 November 1880 in Calcutta, was Richard Henry or R. H. Tawney. From 1865 to his retirement in 1892 he held various educational offices, most significantly Principal of Presidency College for much of the period of 1875-1892.[3] His translation of Kathasaritsagara was printed by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in a small series called Bibliotheca Indica between 1880 and 1884.

After retirement, Tawney was made Librarian of the India Office.

Translations from Sanskrit

Tawney translated the Mālavikāgnimitra of Kālidāsa whose first edition was published in 1875 and second edition in 1891.[4]

His other works include:

• Bhavabhūti: Uttara-rāma-carita (1874) — a play
• Two Centuries of Bhartṛihari (1877) — two collections of ethical and philosophico-religious stanzas (online)
• Somadeva: Kathā Sarit Sāgara (1880-1884) — the massive collection of legends and tales (Vol I online) (Vol II online)
• Kathākoça (1895) — Jain stories (online)
• Merutunga: Prabandhacintāmaṇi (1899-1901) — Jain stories (online)

Notes

1. Thomas, F. W. (January 1923). "Charles Henry Tawney, M.A., C.I.E.". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1): 152–154. JSTOR 25210014.
2. "C. H. Tawney". Folklore. 33 (3): 334. September 30, 1922. JSTOR 1256118.
3. Penzer 1924, pp. vii-x
4. Schuyler, Jr., Montgomery (1902). "Bibliography of Kālidāsa's Mālavikāgnimitra and Vikramorvaçī". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 23: 93–101. doi:10.2307/592384. JSTOR 592384.

References

• Penzer, N. M. (1924), "Charles Henry Tawney", The Ocean of Story, being C.H. Tawney's Translation of Somadeva's Katha Sarit Sagara, I, London: Chas. J. Sawyer

External links

Charles Henry Tawneyat Wikipedia's sister projects

• Texts from Wikisource
• Online HTML ebook of The Ocean of Story (kathasaritsagara), volume 1-9, proofread, including thousands of notes and extra appendixes.
• Works by Charles Henry Tawney at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Charles Henry Tawney at Internet Archive

[admin]

Franz Bopp
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20


Franz Bopp
Born: 14 September 1791, Mainz, Electorate of Mainz
Died: 23 October 1867 (aged 76), Berlin, Province of Brandenburg
School: Romantic linguistics[1]
Institutions: University of Berlin
Notable students: Wilhelm Dilthey
Main interests: Linguistics
Notable ideas: Comparative linguistics
Influences: Pāṇini, Friedrich Schlegel
Influenced: Max Müller; Michel Bréal; August Schleicher[2]

Franz Bopp (German: [ˈfʁants ˈbɔp]; 14 September 1791 – 23 October 1867)[a] was a German linguist known for extensive and pioneering comparative work on Indo-European languages.

Early life

Bopp was born in Mainz, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mainz caused his parents' move to Aschaffenburg, the second seat of the Archbishop of Mainz. There he received a liberal education at the Lyceum and Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East. (Windischmann, along with Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Joseph Görres, and the brothers Schlegel, expressed great enthusiasm for Indian wisdom and philosophy.) Moreover, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel's book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Speech and Wisdom of the Indians, Heidelberg, 1808), had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds of German philosophers and historians, and stimulated Bopp's interest in the sacred language of the Hindus.[4]

Career

In 1812, he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian government, with a view to devoting himself vigorously to the study of Sanskrit. There he enjoyed the society of such eminent men as Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (his primary instructor),...

[Antoine-Léonard de Chézy] was born at Neuilly. His father, Antoine de Chézy (1718–1798), was an engineer who finally became director of the École des Ponts et Chaussées.

École des Ponts ParisTech (originally called École nationale des ponts et chaussées or ENPC, also nicknamed Ponts) is a university-level institution of higher education and research in the field of science, engineering and technology. Founded in 1747 by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, it is one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious French Grandes Écoles...

Following the creation of the Corps of Bridges and Roads in 1716, the King's Council decided in 1747 to found a specific training course for the state's engineers, as École royale des ponts et chaussées. In 1775, the school took its current name as École nationale des ponts et chaussées, by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, in a moment when the state decided to set up a progressive and efficient control of the building of roads, bridges and canals, and in the training of civil engineers.

The school's first director, from 1747 until 1794, was Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, engineer, civil service administrator and a contributor to the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Without lecturer, fifty students (among whom Lebon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Pierre-Simon Girard, Riche de Prony, Méchain and Brémontier), initially taught themselves geometry, algebra, mechanics and hydraulics. Visits of building sites, cooperations with scientists and engineers and participation to the drawing of the map of the kingdom used to complete their training, which was usually four to twelve years long.

During the First French Empire run by Napoleon I from 1804 to 1814, a number of members of the Corps of Bridges and Roads (including Barré de Saint-Venant, Belgrand, Biot, Cauchy, Coriolis, Dupuit, Fresnel, Gay-Lussac, Navier, Vicat) took part in the reconstruction of the French road network that had not been maintained during the Revolution, and in large infrastructural developments, notably hydraulic projects. Under the orders of the emperor, French scientist Gaspard Riche de Prony, second director of the school from 1798 to 1839, adapts the education provided by the school in order to improve the training of future civil engineers, whose purpose is to rebuild the major infrastructures of the country: roads, bridges, but also administrative buildings, barracks and fortifications. Prony is now considered as a historical and influential figure of the school. During the twenty years that followed the First Empire, the experience of the faculty and the alumni involved in the reconstruction strongly influenced its training methods and internal organisation. In 1831, the school opens its first laboratory, which aims at concentrating the talents and experiences of the country's best civil engineers. The school also gradually becomes a place of reflection and debates for urban planning.

As a new step in the evolution of the school, the decree of 1851 insists on the organisation of the courses, the writing of an annual schedule, the quality of the faculty, and the control of the students’ works. For the first time in its history, the school opens its doors to a larger public. At this time, in France, the remarkable development of transports, roads, bridges and canals is strongly influenced by engineers from the school (Becquerel, Bienvenüe, Caquot, Carnot, Colson, Coyne, Freyssinet, Résal, Séjourné), who deeply modernised the country by creating the large traffic networks, admired in several European countries.

-- École des ponts ParisTech, by Wikipedia

The son was intended for his father's profession; but in 1799 he obtained a post in the oriental manuscripts department of the national library. In about 1803, he began studying Sanskrit, and although he possessed no grammar or dictionary, he succeeded in acquiring sufficient knowledge of the language to be able to compose poetry in it.

In Paris sometime between 1800 and 1805, Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea introduced him to the Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, called Hermina or Hermine, who, extremely unusually for the time, was a very young divorcée who had come to Paris to be a correspondent for German newspapers.

Helmina von Chézy (26 January 1783 – 28 February 1856), née Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, was a German journalist, poet and playwright. She is known for writing the libretto for Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe (1823) and the play Rosamunde, for which Franz Schubert composed incidental music.

Helmina was born in Berlin, the daughter of Prussian officer Carl Friedrich von Klencke and his wife Caroline Louise von Klencke (1754–1802), daughter of Anna Louisa Karsch and herself a poet. The marriage of her parents had already broken up at her birth and she was partly raised by her grandmother. She started writing at the age of 14.

Married the first time in 1799, she divorced the next year and upon the death of her mother moved to Paris, where she worked as a correspondent for several German papers. From 1803 to 1807 she edited her own Französische Miszellen ("French Miscellanea") journal, commenting on political issues, which earned her trouble with the ubiquitous censors.

In Paris she befriended Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea, who introduced her to the French orientalist Antoine-Léonard de Chézy. In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the later author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. In 1810, together with Adelbert von Chamisso, she translated several of Friedrich Schlegel's lectures from French into German. They had a short romantic fling, followed by another extramarital affair of Helmina with the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, probably the father of another son who died shortly after his birth in 1811.

As her second marriage too turned out to be an unhappy one, Helmina finally parted from her husband in 1810. She returned to Germany, where she alternately lived in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Aschaffenburg and Amorbach. In 1812 she settled in Darmstadt. She witnessed the German campaign of the Napoleonic Wars as a military hospital nurse in Cologne and Namur. After she had openly criticised the miserable conditions in the field, she was accused of libel, but was acquitted by the Berlin Kammergericht court under presiding judge E. T. A. Hoffmann.

From 1817 she lived in Dresden, where she wrote the libretto of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe. Weber appreciated her writing but disliked her unbound ambition, speaking of her as a "suave poetess but unbearable woman". Several of her Romantic poems were set to music and Franz Schubert wrote incidental music for her play Rosamunde, which however flopped when it premiered in 1823 at the Vienna Theater an der Wien. Living in Vienna from 1823, she again became politically involved, calling attention to the inhumane working conditions at the saltworks in the Austrian Salzkammergut region. She met Beethoven who was one of her heroes growing up and became good friends with Beethoven and attended his funeral in 1827

--Helmina von Chézy, by Wikipedia

In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. However, the marriage was ultimately not a success, and the couple parted, although did not divorce, in 1810. De Chézy continued to make annual payments for her support until his death.

He was the first professor of Sanskrit appointed in the Collège de France (1815), where his pupils included Alexandre Langlois, Auguste-Louis-Armand Loiseleur-Deslongchamps and especially Eugène Burnouf, who would become his successor at the Collège on his death in 1832.

He was a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions.

-- Antoine-Léonard de Chézy, by Wikipedia

Silvestre de Sacy,...

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (French: [sasi]; 21 September 1758 – 21 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.

Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist. He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family...

In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was promoted in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department.

The Cour des monnaies (French pronunciation: ​[kuʁ de mɔnɛ], Currency Court) was one of the sovereign courts of Ancien Régime France. It was set up in 1552. It and the other Ancien Régime tribunals were suppressed in 1791 after the French Revolution.

The regulation of coin-making was royal regulation par excellence and very soon became the object of strict surveillance and dedicated judicial institutions. Monetary crimes were particularly severely punished, and coin clipping and counterfeiting could be punishable by death. At first monetary justice was exercised by généraux des monnaies, but in 1346 this passed to a dedicated Chambre des monnaies, set up in 1358 at the Palais de la Cité in buildings adjoining the Chambre des comptes. Appeals against sentences passed in the Chambre des monnaies were taken to the Parlement until January 1552, when the Chambre was turned into a sovereign court called the Cour des monnaies. The pioneering historian of the French language and medieval French literature, Claude Fauchet, served as President of the Cour des monnaies from 1581-1599.

-- Cour des monnaies, by Wikipedia

Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787 and 1791 deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes)...

In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days.

He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was created a baron of the French Empire by Napoleon in 1813; and in 1832, when quite an old man, be became a peer of France and regularly spoke in the Chamber of Peers (Chambre des Pairs). In 1815 he became rector of the University of Paris, and after the Second Restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. With Abel Rémusat, he was joint founder of the Société asiatique, and was inspector of oriental typefaces at the Imprimerie nationale. In 1821 he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Silvestre de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone. He made some progress in identifying proper names in the demotic inscription.

From 1807 to 1809, Sacy was also a teacher of Jean-François Champollion, whom he encouraged in his research.

But later on, the relationship between the master and student became chilly. In no small measure, Champollion's Napoleonic sympathies were problematic for Sacy, who was decidedly Royalist in his political sympathies.

-- Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, by Wikipedia

Louis Mathieu Langlès, and, above all Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824), cousin of the American statesman of the same name, who had acquired an acquaintance with Sanskrit when in India and had brought out, along with Langlès, a descriptive catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Imperial Library.[4]

In the library, Bopp had access not only to the rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts (mostly brought from India by Jean François Pons in the early 18th century), but also to the Sanskrit books that had been issued from the Calcutta and Serampore presses. He spent five years of laborious study, almost living in the libraries of Paris and unmoved by the turmoils that agitated the world around him, including Napoleon's escape, the Waterloo campaign and the Restoration.

The first paper from his years of study in Paris appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, under the title of Über das Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic), to which Windischmann contributed a preface. In this first book, Bopp entered at once the path on which he would focus the philological researches of his whole subsequent life. His task was not to point out the similarity of Sanskrit with Persian, Greek, Latin or German, for previous scholars had long established that, but he aimed to trace the postulated common origin of the languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition. This was something no predecessor had attempted. By a historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared.[4]

After a brief sojourn in Germany, Bopp travelled to London where he made the acquaintance of Sir Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke. He also became friends with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian ambassador at the Court of St. James's, to whom he taught Sanskrit. He brought out, in the Annals of Oriental Literature (London, 1820), an essay entitled "Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages" in which he extended to all parts of grammar what he had done in his first book for the verb alone. He had previously published a critical edition, with a Latin translation and notes, of the story of Nala and Damayanti (London, 1819), the most beautiful episode of the Mahabharata. Other episodes of the Mahabharata, Indralokâgama, and three others (Berlin, 1824); Diluvium, and three others (Berlin, 1829); a new edition of Nala (Berlin, 1832) followed in due course, all of which, with August Wilhelm von Schlegel's edition of the Bhagavad Gita (1823), proved excellent aids in initiating the early student into the reading of Sanskrit texts. On the publication, in Calcutta, of the whole Mahabharata, Bopp discontinued editing Sanskrit texts and confined himself thenceforth exclusively to grammatical investigations.[4]

After a short residence at Göttingen, Bopp gained, on the recommendation of Humboldt, appointment to the chair of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Berlin in 1821, which he occupied for the rest of his life. He also became a member of the Royal Prussian Academy the following year.[6]

In 1827, he published his Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskritsprache (Detailed System of the Sanskrit Language), on which he had worked since 1821. Bopp started work on a new edition in Latin, for the following year, completed in 1832; a shorter grammar appeared in 1834. At the same time he compiled a Sanskrit and Latin Glossary (1830), in which, more especially in the second and third editions (1847 and 1868–71), he also took account of the cognate languages. His chief activity, however, centered on the elaboration of his Comparative Grammar, which appeared in six parts at considerable intervals (Berlin, 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849, 1852), under the title Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend [Avestan], Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Gothic and German).[7]

How carefully Bopp matured this work emerges from the series of monographs printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy (1824–1831), which preceded it.[7] They bear the general title Vergleichende Zergliederung des Sanskrits und der mit ihm verwandten Sprachen (Comparative Analysis of Sanskrit and its related Languages).[8] Two other essays (on the Numerals, 1835) followed the publication of the first part of the Comparative Grammar. Old Slavonian began to take its stand among the languages compared from the second part onwards. E. B. Eastwick translated the work into English in 1845. A second German edition, thoroughly revised (1856–1861), also covered Old Armenian.[7]

In his Comparative Grammar Bopp set himself a threefold task:

1. to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their inter-comparison.
2. to trace their phonetic laws.
3. to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms.

The first and second points remained dependent upon the third. As Bopp based his research on the best available sources and incorporated every new item of information that came to light, his work continued to widen and deepen in the making, as can be witnessed from his monographs on the vowel system in the Teutonic languages (1836), on the Celtic languages (1839), on the Old Prussian (1853) and Albanian languages (Über das Albanesische in seinen verwandtschaftlichen Beziehungen, Vienna, 1854), on the accent in Sanskrit and Greek (1854), on the relationship of the Malayo-Polynesian to the Indo-European languages (1840), and on the Caucasian languages (1846). In the last two, the impetus of his genius led him on a wrong track.[7] He is the first philologist to prove Albanian as a separate branch of Indo-European.[9] Bopp was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.[10]

Criticism

Critics have charged Bopp with neglecting the study of the native Sanskrit grammars, but in those early days of Sanskrit studies, the great libraries of Europe did not hold the requisite materials; if they had, those materials would have demanded his full attention for years, and such grammars as those of Charles Wilkins and Henry Thomas Colebrooke, from which Bopp derived his grammatical knowledge, had all used native grammars as a basis. The further charge that Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, gave undue prominence to Sanskrit is disproved by his own words; for, as early as 1820, he gave it as his opinion that frequently, the cognate languages serve to elucidate grammatical forms lost in Sanskrit (Annals of Or. Lit. i. 3), which he further developed in all his subsequent writings.[7]

The Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition of 1911) assesses Bopp and his work as follows:[7]

Bopp's researches, carried with wonderful penetration into the most minute and almost microscopical details of linguistic phenomena, have led to the opening up of a wide and distant view into the original seats, the closer or more distant affinity, and the tenets, practices and domestic usages of the ancient Indo-European nations, and the science of comparative grammar may truly be said to date from his earliest publication. In grateful recognition of that fact, on the fiftieth anniversary (May 16, 1866) of the date of Windischmann's preface to that work, a fund called Die Bopp-Stiftung, for the promotion of the study of Sanskrit and comparative grammar, was established at Berlin, to which liberal contributions were made by his numerous pupils and admirers in all parts of the globe. Bopp lived to see the results of his labours everywhere accepted, and his name justly celebrated. But he died, on the 23rd of October 1867, in poverty, though his genuine kindliness and unselfishness, his devotion to his family and friends, and his rare modesty, endeared him to all who knew him.[7]

English scholar Russell Martineau, who had studied under Bopp, gave the following tribute:[5]

Bopp must, more or less, directly or indirectly, be the teacher of all who at the present day study, not this language or that language, but language itself — study it either as a universal function of man, subjected, like his other mental or physical functions, to law and order, or else as an historical development, worked out by a never ceasing course of education from one form into another.[11]

Martineau also wrote:

"Bopp's Sanskrit studies and Sanskrit publications are the solid foundations upon which his system of comparative grammar was erected, and without which that could not have been perfect. For that purpose, far more than a mere dictionary knowledge of Sanskrit was required. The resemblances which he detected between Sanskrit and the Western cognate tongues existed in the syntax, the combination of words in the sentence and the various devices which only actual reading of the literature could disclose, far more than in the mere vocabulary. As a comparative grammarian he was much more than as a Sanskrit scholar, ... [and yet] it is surely much that he made the grammar, formerly a maze of Indian subtilty, as simple and attractive as that of Greek or Latin, introduced the study of the easier works of Sanskrit literature and trained (personally or by his books) pupils who could advance far higher, invade even the most intricate parts of the literature and make the Vedas intelligible. The great truth which his Comparative Grammar established was that of the mutual relations of the connected languages. Affinities had before him been observed between Latin and German, between German and Slavonic, etc., yet all attempts to prove one the parent of the other had been found preposterous.[11]

Notes

1. Formerly sometimes anglicized as Francis Bopp[3]

References

1. Angela Esterhammer (ed.), Romantic Poetry, Volume 7, John Benjamins Publishing, 2002, p. 491.
2. Hadumod Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge, 1996, p. 85.
3. Baynes 1878, p. 49.
4. Chisholm 1911, p. 240.
5. Rines 1920, p. 261.
6. Chisholm 1911, pp. 240–241.
7. Chisholm 1911, p. 241.
8. Rines 1920, p. 262.
9. Lulushi, Astrit (22 October 2013). "Histori: Çfarë ka ndodhur më 22 tetor?" [History: what happened on 22 October?] (in Albanian). New York: Dielli.
10. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
11. Rines 1920, p. 261 cites Martineau 1867

Sources

• Baynes, T. S., ed. (1878), "Francis Bopp" , Encyclopædia Britannica, 4 (9th ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 49–50
• Martineau, Russell (1867), "Obituary of Franz Bopp", Transactions of the Philological Society, London: 305–14

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911), "Bopp, Franz", Encyclopædia Britannica, 4 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 240–241
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920), "Bopp, Franz" , Encyclopedia Americana, 4, pp. 261–262

External links

Franz Bopp, "A Comparative Grammar, Volume 1", 1885, at the Internet Archive.

[admin]

Friedrich Schlegel
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

-- Aphorisms, by Friedrich Schlegel

-- Lucinda, by Friedrich Schlegel

-- Works of Frederick von Schlegel: Comprising (1) Letters on Christian Art; (2) An Essay on Gothic Architecture; (3) Remarks on the Romance-Poetry of the Middle Ages and on Shakspere; (4) On the Limits of the Beautiful; and (5) On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, by Frederick von Schlegel, Translated from the German by E.J. Millngton

Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel in 1801
Born: 10 March 1772, Hanover, Electorate of Hanover
Died: 12 January 1829 (aged 56), Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony
Alma mater: University of Göttingen; University of Leipzig
Era: 19th-century philosophy
Region: Western philosophy
School: Jena Romanticism; German idealism[1]; Epistemic coherentism[2]; Coherence theory of truth[3]; Historicism[4]; Romantic linguistics[5]; Republicanism (before 1808); Conservatism (after 1808)
Main interests: Epistemology, philology, philosophy of history
Notable ideas: Grounding epistemology on reciprocal proof (Wechselerweis), not original principle (Grundsatz)[6][2]; Coining the term "historicism", (Historismus)[4]; Out of India theory
Influences: Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder[7]
Influenced: Franz Bopp

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (after 1814: von) Schlegel (/ˈʃleɪɡəl/;[8] German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈʃleːgl̩];[8][9][10] 10 March 1772 – 12 January 1829) was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.

Born into a fervently Protestant family, Schlegel rejected Christianity as a young man in favor of atheism and individualism. He entered university to study law but instead focused on classical literature. He began a career as a writer and lecturer, and founded journals such as Athenaeum. In 1808 Schlegel converted to Catholicism. His religious conversion ultimately led to his estrangement from family and old friends. He moved to Austria in 1809, where he became a diplomat and journalist in service of Klemens von Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire. Schlegel died in 1829, at the age of 56.[11]

Schlegel was a promoter of the Romantic movement and inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Mickiewicz and Kazimierz Brodziński. The first to notice what became known as Grimm's law, Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, and morphological typology, publishing in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German languages under the Aryan group.[12][13]

Life and work


Hanover's Market Church
Oil painting after Domenico Quaglio (1832)

Karl Friedrich von Schlegel was born on 10 March 1772 at Hanover, where his father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was the pastor at the Lutheran Market Church. For two years he studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig, and he met with Friedrich Schiller. In 1793 he devoted himself entirely to literary work. In 1796 he moved to Jena, where his brother August Wilhelm lived, and here he collaborated with Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Fichte, and Caroline Schelling, who married August Wilhelm. Novalis and Schlegel had a famous conversation about German idealism. In 1797 he quarreled with Schiller, who did not like his polemic work.[14]

Schlegel published Die Griechen und Römer (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed by Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (History of the Poesy of the Greeks and Romans) (1798). Then he turned to Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare. In Jena he and his brother founded the journal Athenaeum, contributing fragments, aphorisms, and essays in which the principles of the Romantic school are most definitely stated. They are now generally recognized as the deepest and most significant expressions of the subjective idealism of the early Romanticists.[15] After a controversy, Friedrich decided to move to Berlin. There he lived with Friedrich Schleiermacher and met Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, and his future wife, Dorothea Veit, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and the mother of Johannes and Philipp Veit.[11] In 1799 he published Lucinde, an eccentric and unfinished novel, which is remarkable as an attempt to transfer to practical ethics the Romantic demand for complete individual freedom.[16] Lucinde, in which he extolled the union of sensual and spiritual love as an allegory of the divine cosmic Eros, caused a great scandal by its manifest autobiographical character, mirroring his liaison with Dorothea Veit, and it contributed to the failure of his academic career in Jena [15] where he completed his studies in 1801 and lectured as a Privatdozent on transcendental philosophy. In September 1800 he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy Alarcos (1802) in Weimar, albeit with a notable lack of success.

In June 1802 he arrived in Paris, where he lived in the house formerly owned by Baron d'Holbach and joined a circle including Heinrich Christoph Kolbe. He lectured on philosophy in private courses for Sulpiz Boisserée, and under the tutelage of Antoine-Léonard de Chézy and linguist Alexander Hamilton he continued to study Sanskrit and the Persian language. He edited the journal Europa (1803), where he published essays about Gothic architecture and the Old Masters. In April 1804 he married Dorothea Veit in the Swedish embassy in Paris, after she had undergone the requisite conversion from Judaism to Protestantism. In 1806 he and his wife went to visit Aubergenville, where his brother lived with Madame de Staël.

In 1808 he published an epoch-making book, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India). Here he advanced his ideas about religion and importantly argued that a people originating from India were the founders of the first European civilizations. Schlegel compared Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, Persian and German, noting many similarities in vocabulary and grammar. The assertion of the common features of these languages is now generally accepted, albeit with significant revisions. There is less agreement about the geographic region where these precursors settled, although the Out-of-India model has generally become discredited.


The unfinished Cologne cathedral (1856) with medieval crane on the south tower

In 1808, he and his wife joined the Roman Catholic Church in the Cologne Cathedral. From this time on, he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious freedom. He went to Vienna and in 1809 was appointed imperial court secretary at the military headquarters, editing the army newspaper and issuing fiery proclamations against Napoleon. He accompanied archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen to war and was stationed in Pest during the War of the Fifth Coalition. Here he studied the Hungarian language. Meanwhile he had published his collected Geschichte (Histories) (1809) and two series of lectures, Über die neuere Geschichte (On Recent History) (1811) and Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (On Old and New Literature) (1815). In 1814 he was knighted in the Supreme Order of Christ.


Schlegel's grave at the Old Catholic Cemetery, Dresden

In collaboration with Josef von Pilat, editor of the Österreichischer Beobachter, and with the help of Adam Müller and Friedrich Schlegel, Metternich and Gentz projected a vision of Austria as the spiritual leader of a new Germany, drawing her strength and inspiration from a romanticised view of a medieval Catholic past.[17]

Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), he was councilor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the Frankfurt Diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. In 1819 he and Clemens Brentano made a trip to Rome, in the company of Metternich and Gentz. There he met with his wife and her sons. In 1820 he started a conservative Catholic magazine, Concordia (1820–1823), but was criticized by Metternich and by his brother August Wilhelm, then professor of Indology in Bonn and busy publishing the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel began the issue of his Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works). He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his Philosophie des Lebens (Philosophy of Life) (1828) and in his Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History) (1829). He died on 12 January 1829 at Dresden, while preparing a series of lectures.


Dorothea von Schlegel (1790) by Anton Graff

Dorothea Schlegel

Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea von Schlegel, authored an unfinished romance, Florentin (1802), a Sammlung romantischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters (Collection of Romantic Poems of the Middle Ages) (2 vols., 1804), a version of Lother und Maller (1805), and a translation of Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807–1808) — all of which were issued under her husband's name. By her first marriage she had two sons, Johannes and Philipp Veit, who became eminent Catholic painters.

Selected works

• Vom ästhetischen Werte der griechischen Komödie (1794)
• Über die Diotima (1795)
• Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (1796)
• Georg Forster (1797)
• Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (1797)
• Über Lessing (1797)
• Kritische Fragmente („Lyceums“-Fragmente) (1797)
• Fragmente („Athenaeums“-Fragmente) (1797–1798)
• Lucinde (1799)
• Über die Philosophie. An Dorothea (1799)
• Gespräch über die Poesie (1800)
• Über die Unverständlichkeit (1800)
• Ideen (1800)
• Charakteristiken und Kritiken (1801)
• Transcendentalphilosophie (1801)
• Alarkos (1802)
• Reise nach Frankreich (1803
• Geschichte der europäischen Literatur (1803/1804
• Grundzüge der gotischen Baukunst (1804/1805)
• Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808)
• Deutsches Museum (as ed.), 4 Vols. Vienna (1812–1813)
• Geschichte der alten und neueren Literatur (lectures) (1815)

Letters

• Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe ed. by Edgar Lohner (München 1972)
Friedrich Schlegel's Sämtliche Werke appeared in 10 vols. (1822–1825); a second edition (1846) in 55 vols. His Prosaische Jugendschriften (1794–1802) have been edited by J. Minor (1882, 2nd ed. 1906); there are also reprints of Lucinde, and F. Schleiermacher's Vertraute Briefe über Lucinde, 1800 (1907). See R. Haym, Die romantische Schule (1870); I. Rouge, F. Schlegel et la genie du romantisme allemand (1904); by the same, Erläuterungen zu F. Schlegels „Lucinde“ (1905); M. Joachimi, Die Weltanschauung der Romantik (1905); W. Glawe, Die Religion F. Schlegels (1906); E. Kircher, Philosophie der Romantik (1906); M. Frank "Unendliche Annäherung". Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (1997); Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (1997).

Notes

1. Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 349.
2. Asko Nivala, The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History, Routledge, 2017, p. 23.
3. Elizabeth Millan, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy, SUNY Press, 2012, p. 49.
4. Brian Leiter, Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 175: "[The word 'historicism'] appears as early as the late eighteenth century in the writings of the German romantics, who used it in a neutral sense. In 1797 Friedrich Schlegel used 'historicism' to refer to a philosophy that stresses the importance of history ..."; Katherine Harloe, Neville Morley (eds.), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 81: "Already in Friedrich Schlegel's Fragments about Poetry and Literature (a collection of notes attributed to 1797), the word Historismusoccurs five times."
5. Angela Esterhammer (ed.), Romantic Poetry, Volume 7, John Benjamins Publishing, 2002, p. 491.
6. Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 81.
7. Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 9.
8. Wells, John C. (2008), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Longman, ISBN 9781405881180
9. "Friedrich – Französisch-Übersetzung – Langenscheidt Deutsch-Französisch Wörterbuch" (in German and French). Langenscheidt. Retrieved 20 October 2018.
10. "Duden | Schlegel | Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definition". Duden (in German). Retrieved 20 October 2018.
11. Speight (, Allen 2007). "Friedrich Schlegel". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy..
12. Watkins, Calvert (2000), "Aryan", American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.), New York: Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-395-82517-2, ...when Friedrich Schlegel, a German scholar who was an important early Indo-Europeanist, came up with a theory that linked the Indo-Iranian words with the German word Ehre, 'honor', and older Germanic names containing the element ario-, such as the Swiss [sic] warrior Ariovistus who was written about by Julius Caesar. Schlegel theorized that far from being just a designation of the Indo-Iranians, the word *arya- had in fact been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning [according to Schlegel] something like 'the honorable people.' (This theory has since been called into question.)
13. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1819. Review of J. G. Rhode, Über den Anfang unserer Geschichte und die letzte Revolution der Erde, Breslau, 1819. Jahrbücher der Literatur VIII: 413ff
14. Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, 1993, p. 36.
15. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Böhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von" . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.
16. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
17. Adam Zamoyski (2007), Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, pp. 242–243.

Further reading

• Berman, Antoine. L'épreuve de l'étranger. Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin., Paris, Gallimard, Essais, 1984. ISBN 978-2-07-070076-9
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, Albany: State University Press of New York, 1988. [A philosophical exegesis of early romantic theory focused on F. Schlegel, Novalis, and the Athenaeum.]

External links

• Works by Friedrich Schlegel at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Friedrich Schlegel at Internet Archive
• Works by Friedrich Schlegel at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Dictionary of Art
• "Schlegel, Friedrich von" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
• "Schlegel, Friedrich von" . The Nuttall Encyclopædia. 1907.
• "Friedrich von Schlegel" . Catholic Encyclopedia. 1913.
• "Schlegel, Friedrich von" . Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921.
• Works by Friedrich Schlegel at Projekt Gutenberg-DE (in German)
• "Works by Friedrich Schlegel". Zeno.org (in German).
• Franz Muncker (1891), "Schlegel, Friedrich von", Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) (in German), 33, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 737–752
• "Friedrich Schlegel". Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German).
• Literature by and about Friedrich Schlegel in the German National Library catalogue
• Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1841 "Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1772–1829; Robertson, James Burton, 1800–1877, 1846 "The philosophy of history : in a course of lectures, delivered at Vienna". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Schiller, Friedrich, 1759–1805; Körner, Christian Gottfried, 1756–1831; Simpson, Leonard Francis, translated 1849 "Correspondence of Schiller with Körner. Comprising sketches and anecdotes of Goethe, the Schlegels, Wielands, and other contemporaries". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1855 "The philosophy of life, and Philosophy of language, in a course of lectures". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Friedrich von Schlegel, Ellen J . Millington, 1860 "The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich Von Schlegel". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Samuel Paul Capen, 1903 "Friedrich Schlegel's Relations with Reichardt and His Contributions to "Deutschland"". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Wilson, Augusta Manie, 1908 "The principle of the ego in philosophy with special reference to its influence upon Schlegel's doctrine of "ironie"". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Calvin Thomas, 1913 "Friedrich Schlegel, Introduction to Lucinda". Retrieved 2010-09-28.

[admin]

August Wilhelm Schlegel
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/21/20

-- Lectures on Dramatic Art, by August Wilhelm Schlegel

August Schlegel
Born: 8 September 1767, Hanover, Electorate of Hanover
Died: 12 May 1845 (aged 77), Bonn, Rhine Province
Alma mater: University of Göttingen
Era: 19th-century philosophy
Region: Western Philosophy
School: Jena Romanticism; Historicism[1]
Institutions: University of Bonn
Main interests: Philology, philosophy of history
Influences: Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder[2]

August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel (/ˈʃleɪɡəl/; German: [ˈʃleːgl̩]; 8 September 1767 – 12 May 1845), usually cited as August Schlegel, was a German poet, translator and critic, and with his brother Friedrich Schlegel the leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His translations of Shakespeare turned the English dramatist's works into German classics.[3] Schlegel was also the professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe and produced a translation of the Bhagavad Gita.

Life


The Marktkirche at the beginning of the 19th century; oil painting after Domenico Quaglio, 1832

Schlegel was born in Hanover, where his father, Johann Adolf Schlegel, was a Lutheran pastor. He was educated at the Hanover gymnasium and at the University of Göttingen.[4] Initially studying theology, he received a thorough philological training under Heyne and became an admirer and friend of Bürger, with whom he was engaged in an ardent study of Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare. Schlegel met with Caroline Böhmer and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In 1790 his brother Friedrich came to Göttingen. Both were influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, Tiberius Hemsterhuis, Johann Winckelmann and Karl Theodor von Dalberg. From 1791 to 1795, Schlegel was tutor to the children of Mogge Muilman, a Dutch banker, who lived at the prestigious Herengracht in Amsterdam.[5]

In 1796, soon after his return to Germany, Schlegel settled in Jena, following an invitation from Schiller.[6] That year he married Caroline, the widow of the physician Böhmer.[4] She assisted Schlegel in some of his literary productions, and the publication of her correspondence in 1871 established for her a posthumous reputation as a German letter writer. She separated from Schlegel in 1801 and became the wife of the philosopher Schelling soon after.[6]

In Jena, Schlegel made critical contributions to Schiller's Horen and that author's Musen-Almanach,[4] and wrote around 300 articles for the Jenaer Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung. He also did translations from Dante and Shakespeare. This work established his literary reputation and gained for him in 1798 an extraordinary professorship at the University of Jena. His house became the intellectual headquarters of the "romanticists", and was visited at various times between 1796 and 1801 by Fichte, whose Foundations of the Science of Knowledge was studied intensively, by his brother Friedrich, who moved in with his wife Dorothea, by Schelling, by Tieck, by Novalis and others.[6]


Schlegel c. 1800

It is widely accepted that the Romantic Movement in Germany emerged, on the one hand, as a reaction against the aesthetical ideals defended in Classicism and Neoclassicism, and on the other, as a deviation from the rational principles of the Enlightenment with the consequent regression to the irrational spirit of the Middle Ages.[7]

Schlegel argues that, from a philosophical point of view, everything participates in an ongoing process of creation, whereas, from an empirical point of view, natural things are conceived as if they were dead, fixed and independent from the whole.[7]

In 1797 August and Friedrich broke with Friedrich Schiller. With his brother, Schlegel founded the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the organ of the Romantic school, in which he dissected disapprovingly the immensely popular works of the sentimental novelist August Lafontaine.[8] He also published a volume of poems and carried on a controversy with Kotzebue. At this time the two brothers were remarkable for the vigour and freshness of their ideas and commanded respect as the leaders of the new Romantic criticism. A volume of their joint essays appeared in 1801 under the title Charakteristiken und Kritiken. His play Ion, performed in Weimar in January 1802, was supported by Goethe, but became a failure.

When the work of art appears as if all its elements had been consciously chosen by a power above the artist, it has style; when the artist has not transcended his/her individuality, then s/he is categorized as a mannerist artist (SW III, 309–312).[7]

In 1801 Schlegel went to Berlin, where he delivered lectures on art and literature; and in the following year he published Ion, a tragedy in Euripidean style, which gave rise to a suggestive discussion on the principles of dramatic poetry. This was followed by Spanisches Theater (2 vols, 1803/1809), in which he presented admirable translations of five of Calderón's plays. In another volume, Blumensträusse italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie (1804), he gave translations of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian lyrics. He also translated works by Dante and Camões.[4][3]

Early in 1804, he made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël in Berlin, who hired him as a tutor for her children. After divorcing his wife Caroline, Schlegel travelled with Madame de Staël to Switzerland, Italy and France, acting as an adviser in her literary work.[9] In 1807 he attracted much attention in France by an essay in the French, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide, in which he attacked French classicism from the standpoint of the Romantic school. His famous lectures on dramatic art and literature (Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 1809–1811), which have been translated into most European languages, were delivered at Vienna in 1808.[4][6] He was accompanied by De Staël and her children. In 1810 Schlegel was ordered to leave the Swiss Confederation as an enemy of the French literature.[10]

For Schlegel, the magic of a work of art is that it brings us into a different world, with all its own internal coherence, and this is why it needs to become organic and complete unto itself. Therefore, its purpose should not be to reflect the real world with naturalism, but rather to create its own world, which could never be a question of applying a set of rules and principles to a particular matter (paintings, words, marble), such as classicist principles seemed to do.[7]

In 1812, he travelled with De Staël, her fiancé Albert de Rocca and her children to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Stockholm and acted as secretary of Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, through whose influence the right of his family to noble rank was revived. After this, he joined again the household of Mme. de Staël until her death in 1817, for like Mathieu de Montmorency he was one of her intimates until the end of her life. Schlegel was made a professor of literature at the University of Bonn in 1818, and during the remainder of his life occupied himself chiefly with oriental studies. He founded a special printing office for Sanskrit. As an orientalist, he was unable to adapt himself to the new methods opened up by Bopp.[4][6] He corresponded with Wilhelm von Humboldt, a linguist. After the death of Madame de Staël, Schlegel married (1818) a daughter of Heinrich Paulus, but this union was dissolved in 1821.[4]

Schlegel continued to lecture on art and literature, publishing in 1827 On the Theory and History of the Plastic Arts,[3] and in 1828 two volumes of critical writings (Kritische Schriften). In 1823–30 he published the journal Indische Bibliothek. In 1823 edited the Bhagavad Gita, with a Latin translation, and in 1829, the Ramayana. This was followed by his 1832 work Reflections on the Study of the Asiatic Languages.[3][4] Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare, begun in Jena, was ultimately completed, under the superintendence of Ludwig Tieck, by Tieck's daughter Dorothea and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin. This rendering is considered one of the best poetical translations in German, or indeed in any language.[4] In 1826, Felix Mendelssohn, at the age of 17, was inspired by August Wilhelm's translation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to write a homonymous concert overture. Schlegel's brother Friedrich's wife was an aunt of Mendelssohn.[11]

In 1835, Schlegel became head of the committee organising a monument in memory of Ludwig van Beethoven in Bonn, the composer's birthplace. Schlegel died in Bonn in 1845,[4] three months before its official unveiling.

Evaluations

According to Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition,

As an original poet Schlegel is unimportant, but as a poetical translator he has rarely been excelled, and in criticism he put into practice the Romantic principle that a critic's first duty is not to judge from the standpoint of superiority, but to understand and to "characterize" a work of art.[4]

Traugott Böhme, in his article for the 1920 Encyclopedia Americana, gives the following thoughts:

As a critic [Schlegel] carried on the tradition of Lessing and Herder. Without possessing Lessing's power of style and personality, [Schlegel] commanded a wider range of artistic susceptibility. His unerring linguistic and historical scholarship and the calm objectivity of his judgment enabled him to carry out, even more successfully than Herder himself, Herder's demand that literary criticism should be based on a sympathetic penetration into the specific individuality of each poetic production rather than on the application of preconceived aesthetic standards.

Schlegel established models for the new method of analytical and interpretative criticism in his essays on Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea and on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. His Vienna lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature were translated into most of the languages of Europe and stand as a permanent contribution to critical literature; his definition of the terms "classic" and "romantic" met with general recognition; his views on the so-called "three unities" and on the "correctness" of Shakespeare evoked an especially strong echo in England and finally made the Johnsonian attitude toward Shakespeare appear obsolete.

Formal perfection of language is the chief merit of his poems, which suffer from a lack of originality. In his drama Ion, he vainly attempted to rival Goethe's Iphigenie. He prided himself on being "model and master in the art of sonnets" among the Germans. He is at his best in sparkling literature parodies such as Ehrenpforte und Triumphbogen für Kotzebue (1801).[6]

The 1905 New International Encyclopedia, in its article on Schlegel, gives the following opinions:

• The Schlegel-Tieck translation is universally considered better than any other rendering of Shakespeare in a foreign language. Thanks to Schlegel and Tieck, Shakespeare has become a national poet of Germany.
• [Schlegel's] Spanisches Theater (1803-09), consisting of five pieces of Calderon's, admirably translated,... [made] that poet a favorite with the German people, and his Blumensträusse der italienischen, spanischen und portugiesischen Poesie (Berlin, 1804), a charming collection of southern lyrics, [marks] the appearance of . . . the naturalization in German verse of the metrical forms of the Romanic races.
• Schlegel was quarrelsome, jealous, and ungenerous in his relations with literary men, and did not even shrink from slander when his spleen was excited.

Honors

• Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1836.[12]

Portraits

• Portrait of A. W. Schlegel by Albert Gregorius (1774–1853), 1817, in Coppet Castle (Switzerland)

Works

• Ion (1803)[13]
• Rom Elegie(1805)
• Schlegel's Berlin lectures of 1801/1804 reprinted from manuscript notes by Jakob Minor (1884)[4]
• Poetische Werke (1811)
• Observations sur la langue et la littératures provençale (1818)
• Bhagavad Gita (1823, Latin translation)
• Kritische Schriften (1828, critical works)
• Sämtliche Werke (1846–1848) (Collected Works) issued in twelve volumes by Eduard Böcking
• Œuvres écrites en français (3 vols., 1846)
• Opuscula Latine scripta (1848)

Translation

Schlegel's Shakespeare translations have been often reprinted. The edition of 1871–72 was revised with Schlegel's manuscripts by Michael Bernays. See Bernays's Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare (1872); Rudolph Genée, Schlegel und Shakespeare (1903). Schlegel also translated plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, such as La banda y flor, which became the basis for E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1807 singspiel Liebe und Eifersucht.

A selection of the writings of both August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, edited by Oskar Walzel, will be found in Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, 143 (1892).

Letters

• Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe ed. by Edgar Lohner (München 1972)

Notes

1. Brian Leiter, Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 175.
2. Eugenio Coșeriu, "Zu Hegels Semantik," Kwartalnik neofilologiczny, 24 (1977), p. 185 n. 8.
3. Reynolds, Francis J., ed. (1921). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von" . Collier's New Encyclopedia. New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company.
4. Chisholm 1911.
5. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry by Roger Paulin, p. 59
6. Traugott Böhme 1920.
7. Hay, Katia D., "August Wilhelm von Schlegel", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/schlegel-aw/>
8. Dirk Sangmeister, Der Lieblingsdichter der Nation..., article in German newspaper Die Zeit no. 31, 1999.
9. She owed to him many of the ideas which she embodied in her work, De l'Allemagne, published in 1813.
10. L.M. Child (1836) The biography of Madame de Stael, p. 48
11. Portland Chamber Orchestra Archived August 7, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
12. American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
13. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1803). "Ion: Ein Schauspiel".

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von". Encyclopædia Britannica. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 328–329.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Böhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von" . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.

Further reading

• Paulin, R. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers (2016) ISBN 9781909254954
• Rudolf Haym, Romantische Schule (1870; new ed., 1914)
• Franz Muncker (1890), "Schlegel, August Wilhelm", Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) (in German), 31, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 354–368
• Strauss, D. Fr., Kleine Schriften (1862)
• Huch, Ricarda, ‘Blütezeit der Romantik (1899)
• Caroline, Briefe aus der Frühromantik (ed. by Erich Schmidt, 2 vols., 1913)
• Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred, Caroline Schlegel and her Friends (1889)
• Bernays, M., Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare (1872), new ed. Celtis Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-944253-02-2
• Genée, R., A. W. Schlegel und Shakespeare (1903)
• Gundolf, F, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911)
• Helmholtz, A. A., The Indebtedness of S. T. Coleridge to A. W. Schlegel (1907)
• da Rocha Abreu, Manuel: Zwischenruf - Rassistisch. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, 17 January 2006, P. 26.

External links

• Works by August Wilhelm von Schlegel at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about August Wilhelm Schlegel at Internet Archive
• Phelan, Anna Augusta von Helmholtz, 1907 "The indebtedness of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to August Wilhelm von Schlegel". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Francke, Kuno, Howard, William Guild, Schiller, Friedrich, 1913-1914 "The German classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries : masterpieces of German literature translated into English Vol 4". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Hay, Katia D. "August Wilhelm von Schlegel". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Translating Shakespeare - process and problems of translating the works of William Shakespeare, done by Schlegel
• Schlegel, August Wilhelm : von (1817). Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und literatur. ita. Milano: dalla stamperia di Paolo Emilio Giusti, nella contr. di s. Margherita, al n.o 1118.

[admin]

Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/22/20


Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy
Born: 21 September 1758, Paris, France
Died: 21 February 1838 (aged 79), Paris, France
Occupation: French Linguist, Orientalist, Councillor

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (French: [sasi]; 21 September 1758 – 21 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.

Life and works

Early life

Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist.[1] He was born into an ardently Catholic bourgeois family. The surname extension of "de Sacy" was added by the younger son after the name of Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, a famous Jansenist cleric who lived in the XVIIth century. Sacy's father died when he was seven years old, and he was educated on his own by his mother.

Philological studies

In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was promoted in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department.

The Cour des monnaies (French pronunciation: ​[kuʁ de mɔnɛ], Currency Court) was one of the sovereign courts of Ancien Régime France. It was set up in 1552. It and the other Ancien Régime tribunals were suppressed in 1791 after the French Revolution.

The regulation of coin-making was royal regulation par excellence and very soon became the object of strict surveillance and dedicated judicial institutions. Monetary crimes were particularly severely punished, and coin clipping and counterfeiting could be punishable by death. At first monetary justice was exercised by généraux des monnaies, but in 1346 this passed to a dedicated Chambre des monnaies, set up in 1358 at the Palais de la Cité in buildings adjoining the Chambre des comptes. Appeals against sentences passed in the Chambre des monnaies were taken to the Parlement until January 1552, when the Chambre was turned into a sovereign court called the Cour des monnaies. The pioneering historian of the French language and medieval French literature, Claude Fauchet, served as President of the Cour des monnaies from 1581-1599.

-- Cour des monnaies, by Wikipedia

Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787 and 1791 deciphered the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings.[2][3] In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages[4] (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes).

During this interval Sacy studied the religion of the Druze, the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Exposé de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). He published the following Arabic textbooks:[4]

• Grammaire arabe (2 vols., 1st ed. 1810)
• Chrestomathie arabe (3 vols., 1806)
• Anthologie grammaticale (1829)

In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days.[4]

Public offices and memberships

He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was created a baron of the French Empire by Napoleon in 1813; and in 1832, when quite an old man, be became a peer of France and regularly spoke in the Chamber of Peers (Chambre des Pairs). In 1815 he became rector of the University of Paris, and after the Second Restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. With Abel Rémusat, he was joint founder of the Société asiatique, and was inspector of oriental typefaces at the Imprimerie nationale.[4] In 1821 he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society[5]

Egyptian hieroglyphics research

Silvestre de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone. He made some progress in identifying proper names in the demotic inscription.

From 1807 to 1809, Sacy was also a teacher of Jean-François Champollion, whom he encouraged in his research.

But later on, the relationship between the master and student became chilly. In no small measure, Champollion's Napoleonic sympathies were problematic for Sacy, who was decidedly Royalist in his political sympathies.

In 1811, Étienne Marc Quatremère, also a student of Sacy, published his Mémoires géographiques et historiques sur l'Égypte… sur quelques contrées voisines.

There was some rivalry between Champollion and Quatremère. Champollion published a paper in 1814 that covered some of the same territory. The allegations then arose that Champollion had plagiarized the work of Quatremère. Silvestre de Sacy seemed to take the side of Quatremère, according to Champollion.[6]

There was also considerable rivalry between Champollion and Thomas Young, an English Egyptology researcher active in hieroglyphic decipherment. At first they cooperated in their work, but later, from around 1815, a chill arose between them. Again, Sacy took the side of Young.

Young started to correspond with Sacy, who advised Young not to share his work with Champollion and described Champollion as a charlatan. Consequently, Young avoided all direct contact with Champollion.[7]

When Champollion submitted his Coptic grammar and dictionary for publication in 1815, de Sacy also opposed this.

Another student of Sacy was Johan David Åkerblad. He was a Swedish scholar who also contributed significantly to the investigation of the Rosetta Stone. Early on, in 1802, Åkerblad published his version of the Demotic alphabet; sixteen of these letters later proved to be correct and were used by Champollion, as well as by Young. Sacy felt that Akerblad was not getting enough credit for the good work that he was doing.

Thus, the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics was being hampered by political and personal considerations. There were also big political rivalries between England and France at that time that also stood in the way of co-operation.

Nevertheless, when, in spite of all adversity, Champollion had made big progress in decipherment by 1822—resulting in his Lettre à M. Dacier—Sacy cast all politics aside and warmly welcomed the good work of his student.

Other scholarly works

Among his other works are his edition of Hariri (1822), with a selected Arabic commentary, and of the Alfiya (1833), and his Calila et Dimna (1816), the Arabic version of the Panchatantra which has been in various forms one of the most popular books of the world. Other works include a version of Abd-el-Latif, Relation arabe sur l'Egypte, essays on the history of the law of property in Egypt since the Arab conquest (1805–1818), and The Book of Wandering Stars, a translation of a history of the Ottoman Empire and its rule of Egypt, particularly its recounting of the various actions of and events under the Ottoman governors of Egypt. To biblical criticism he contributed a memoir on the Samaritan Arabic Pentateuch (Mém. Acad. des Inscr. vol. xlix), and editions of the Arabic and Syriac New Testaments for the British and Foreign Bible Society. His students include Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer.[4]

Critical studies

Edward Said and other modern scholars have given critical attention to the theoretical foundations of "orientalism" in works like Chrestomathie arabe.[8]

Famous students

• Jean-François Champollion, orientalist, translator of the Rosetta stone
• Étienne Marc Quatremère, a French orientalist who contributed to the research in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
• Johan David Åkerblad, a Swedish diplomat and orientalist; he contributed to the investigation of the Rosetta Stone.
• John Martin Augustine Scholz, Professor in Bonn
• Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Professor in Leipzig
• Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten, Professor in Jena and in Greifswald
• August Ferdinand Mehren, Professor in Copenhagen
• Justus Olshausen, Professor in Kiel
• Johann Gustav Stickel (1805–1896), Professor in Jena
• Carl Johan Tornberg [sv] (1807–77), Professor in Uppsala[9]
• Louis-Mathieu Langlès, Curator, Bibliothèque Nationale
• Adam Franz Lennig, German Catholic theologian, and one of the most influential German priests of his day.
• Samuel Gobat, Anglican-Lutheran Bishop of Jerusalem

Silvestre de Sacy assisted the young composer Fromental Halévy in his early career, giving him a testimonial during his application for the Prix de Rome.

Sacy died in his native city of Paris, aged 79.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 1,000+ works in 1,000+ publications in 16 languages and 3,000+ library holdings.[10]

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

• Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse: et sur les médailles des rois de la dynastie des Sassanides; suivis de l'histoire de cette dynastie (1793)
• Principes de grammaire générale : mis à la portée des enfans, et propres à servir d'introduction à l'étude de toutes les langues (1799)
• Mémoire sur divers événements de l'histoire des Arabes avant Mahomet (1803)
• Chrestomathie arabe, ou, Extraits de divers écrivains arabes, tant en prose qu'en vers, avec une traduction française et des notes, à l'usage des élèves de l'École royale et spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1806)
• Specimen historiae arabum by Bar Hebraeus (1806)
• Mémoire sur la dynastie des Assassins et sur l'origine de leur nom (1809)
• Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1810)
• Les séances de Hariri, publiées en arabe avec un commentaire choisi by Ḥarīrī (1822)
• Anthologie grammaticale arabe: ou, Morceaux choisis de divers grammairiens et scholiastes arabes, avec une traduction française et des notes ; pouvant faire suite a la Chrestomathie arabe (1829)
• Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1831)
• Exposé de la religion des druzes, tiré des livres religieux de cette secte, et précédé d'une introduction et de la Vie du khalife Hakem-biamr-Allah (1838)
• Les mille et une nuits; contes arabes (1839)
• Bibliothèque de M. le baron Silvestre de Sacy (1846)
• Mélanges de littérature orientale (1861)

References

1. Silvestre de Sacy. Le projet européen d'une science orientaliste, éditions du Cerf, 2014
2. Kramer, Samuel Noah (1971). The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. University of Chicago Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-226-45238-8.
3. Sacred Books of the East. Library of Alexandria. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-4655-1068-6.
4. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine Isaac". Encyclopædia Britannica. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 119.
5. American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
6. Adkins & Adkins 2000, p. 97–8.
7. Adkins & Adkins 2000, p. 129.
8. Spanos, William V. (2003). The Legacy of Edward W. Said, p. 101., p. 101, at Google Books
9. Carl Johan Tornberg (in Swedish)
10. WorldCat Identities Archived December 30, 2010, at the Wayback Machine: Silvestre de Sacy, A. I. (Antoine Isaac) 1758-1838
• Adkins, Lesley; Adkins, Roy (2000). The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-019439-1.

External links

• Works by or about Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy at Internet Archive
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 1 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. p. 8. Retrieved 2011-07-06.
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 2 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. Retrieved 2011-07-06.

[admin]

American Antiquarian Society
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/22/20


American Antiquarian Society
Country: United States
Type: Private
Established: 1812
Location: Worcester, Massachusetts
Branches: 1
Access and use
Population served: 1,052 (Membership, 2016)
Director: Ellen S. Dunlap
Staff: 79
Website: americanantiquarian.org

American Antiquarian Society
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
Location 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts
Area: 1.8 acres (7,300 m2)
Built: 1910
Architect: Winslow, Bigelow & Wadsworth
Architectural style: Colonial Revival, Other

The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), located in Worcester, Massachusetts, is both a learned society and national research library of pre-twentieth century American history and culture. Founded in 1812, it is the oldest historical society in the United States with a national focus.[3] Its main building, known as Antiquarian Hall, is a U.S. National Historic Landmark in recognition of this legacy.[4] The mission of the AAS is to collect, preserve and make available for study all printed records of what is now known as the United States of America. This includes materials from the first European settlement through the year 1876.[5]

The AAS offers programs for professional scholars, pre-collegiate, undergraduate and graduate students, educators, professional artists, writers, genealogists, and the general public.[6] AAS has many digital collections available, including "A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1788–1824."[7]

The collections of the AAS contain over three million books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, graphic arts materials and manuscripts. The Society is estimated to hold copies of two-thirds of the total books known to have been printed in what is now the United States from the establishment of the first press in 1640 through the year 1820; many of these volumes are exceedingly rare and a number of them are unique.[8] Historic materials from all fifty U.S. states, most of Canada and the British West Indies are included in the AAS repository. One of the more famous volumes held by the Society is a copy of the first book printed in America, the Bay Psalm Book.[9] AAS also has one of the largest collections of newspapers printed in America through 1876, with more than two million issues in its collection.[10]

History


Isaiah Thomas, the founder of the American Antiquarian Society

On the initiative of Isaiah Thomas, the AAS was founded on October 24, 1812, through an act of the Massachusetts General Court.[11] It was the third historical society established in America, and the first to be national in its scope.[4] Isaiah Thomas started the collection with approximately 8,000 books from his personal library.[12] The first library building was erected in 1820 in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts.[13] In 1853, the Society moved its collections to a larger building at the corner of Highland Street, also in Worcester.[14] This building was later abandoned and another new building was constructed. Designed by Winslow, Bigelow & Wadsworth, the Georgian Revival building was completed in 1910 and stands on the corner of Park Avenue and Salisbury Street. There have been several additions to this building to accommodate the growing collection, the most recent of which was completed in 2003.[15] AAS was presented with the 2013 National Humanities Medal by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House.[16]

History of printing

As part of AAS's mission as a learned society, it offers a variety of public lectures and seminars. One topic to which AAS dedicates significant academic energies is printing technology, especially in eighteenth-century British North America. Since Isaiah Thomas was a newspaper man himself, he collected a large number of printed materials.[17] With regard to printing, paper making, edition setting, and reprinting, not much had changed in European technology by the eighteenth century. It was not until the late eighteenth century that paper-making material began to evolve from a hand-woven cloth to an industrial pulp. AAS undertakes special efforts to preserve printed records from this time period, as the Society maintains an on-site conservation department with various sewing, cloth, and binding materials to aid in the preservation process.[18]

Notable members

The American Antiquarian Society's membership includes scholars, writers, journalists, filmmakers, collectors, American presidents, and civic leaders.[19] Notable members include the following individuals:

• Benjamin Abbot
• John Adams
• John Quincy Adams
• Herman Vandenburg Ames
• Roald Amundsen
• Ken Burns
• Jimmy Carter
• Bill Clinton
• Calvin Coolidge
• Walter Cronkite
• Moses Fisk
• Esther Forbes
• Henry Louis Gates
• Samuel Swett Green
• Annette Gordon-Reed
• Rutherford B. Hayes
• Washington Irving
• Andrew Jackson
• John Jay
• Thomas Jefferson
• Tobias Lear
• Jill Lepore
• James Madison
• Louis Masur
• David McCullough
• James Monroe
• Nathaniel Philbrick
• Dorothy B. Porter
• John Wesley Powell
• Franklin Pierce Rice
• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Theodore Roosevelt
• George Dudley Seymour
• William H. Taft
• Woodrow Wilson

See also

• Books in the United States
• History of books
• List of antiquarian societies
• Massachusetts Historical Society
• John Ratcliff
• List of National Historic Landmarks in Massachusetts
• National Register of Historic Places listings in northwestern Worcester, Massachusetts

References

1. "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. January 23, 2007.
2. "American Antiquarian Society". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Retrieved July 10, 2008.
3. Gura, Philip F. The American Antiquarian Society, 1812–2012: A Bicentennial History (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2012) p. x
4. http://tps.cr.nps.gov/nhl/detail.cfm?Re ... e=Building
5. aasmaster (March 28, 2017). "Mission Statement". Retrieved December 22, 2017.
6. aaswebsite (August 25, 2012). "Programs & Events". Retrieved December 22, 2017.
7. aaswebsite (August 25, 2012). "Digital AAS". Retrieved December 22, 2017.
8. aasmaster (October 2, 2012). "Tours". Retrieved December 22, 2017.
9. Gura, p. 24
10. aasmaster (October 22, 2012). "Newspapers". Retrieved December 22, 2017.
11. Gura, p. 1
12. Gura, p. 33
13. Gura, p. 32
14. Gura, pp. 98-99
15. "Development Department of the American Antiquarian Society". http://www.americanantiquarian.org. Retrieved December 22, 2017.
16. "President Obama Awards 2013 National Humanities Medals". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved December 22, 2017.
17. Gura, pp. 14, 33
18. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on November 16, 2010. Retrieved June 13, 2011.
19. aasmaster (February 28, 2018). "Members Directory". Retrieved February 28, 2018.

Further reading

• Goslow, Brian (January 30, 2014). "Worcester's best kept secret: The American Antiquarian Society belongs to everyone". Worcester Magazine. Archived from the original on October 17, 2014. Retrieved October 10, 2014.
• Gura, Philip F. The American Antiquarian Society, 1812–2012: A Bicentennial History (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 2012) 454 pp.
• Shipton, Clifford K. "The American Antiquarian Society." William and Mary Quarterly (1945): 164-172.
• Vail, R. W. G. "The American Antiquarian Society." Business History Review 7.6 (1933): 1-5.

External links

• Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. Worcester, Mass.: the Society, 1843–
• American Antiquarian Society Homepage
• Common-Place free online scholarly history journal focused on early US Republic

[admin]

Antoine-Léonard de Chézy
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/22/20



Antoine-Léonard de Chézy (15 January 1773 – 31 August 1832) was a French orientalist, and one of a small group of the first scholars of Sanskrit.


Title page of Yajnadattabada, translated by Antoine-Léonard Chézy.

Biography

He was born at Neuilly. His father, Antoine de Chézy (1718–1798), was an engineer who finally became director of the École des Ponts et Chaussées.

École des Ponts ParisTech (originally called École nationale des ponts et chaussées or ENPC, also nicknamed Ponts) is a university-level institution of higher education and research in the field of science, engineering and technology. Founded in 1747 by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, it is one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious French Grandes Écoles...

Following the creation of the Corps of Bridges and Roads in 1716, the King's Council decided in 1747 to found a specific training course for the state's engineers, as École royale des ponts et chaussées. In 1775, the school took its current name as École nationale des ponts et chaussées, by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, in a moment when the state decided to set up a progressive and efficient control of the building of roads, bridges and canals, and in the training of civil engineers.

The school's first director, from 1747 until 1794, was Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, engineer, civil service administrator and a contributor to the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Without lecturer, fifty students (among whom Lebon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Pierre-Simon Girard, Riche de Prony, Méchain and Brémontier), initially taught themselves geometry, algebra, mechanics and hydraulics. Visits of building sites, cooperations with scientists and engineers and participation to the drawing of the map of the kingdom used to complete their training, which was usually four to twelve years long.

During the First French Empire run by Napoleon I from 1804 to 1814, a number of members of the Corps of Bridges and Roads (including Barré de Saint-Venant, Belgrand, Biot, Cauchy, Coriolis, Dupuit, Fresnel, Gay-Lussac, Navier, Vicat) took part in the reconstruction of the French road network that had not been maintained during the Revolution, and in large infrastructural developments, notably hydraulic projects. Under the orders of the emperor, French scientist Gaspard Riche de Prony, second director of the school from 1798 to 1839, adapts the education provided by the school in order to improve the training of future civil engineers, whose purpose is to rebuild the major infrastructures of the country: roads, bridges, but also administrative buildings, barracks and fortifications. Prony is now considered as a historical and influential figure of the school. During the twenty years that followed the First Empire, the experience of the faculty and the alumni involved in the reconstruction strongly influenced its training methods and internal organisation. In 1831, the school opens its first laboratory, which aims at concentrating the talents and experiences of the country's best civil engineers. The school also gradually becomes a place of reflection and debates for urban planning.

As a new step in the evolution of the school, the decree of 1851 insists on the organisation of the courses, the writing of an annual schedule, the quality of the faculty, and the control of the students’ works. For the first time in its history, the school opens its doors to a larger public. At this time, in France, the remarkable development of transports, roads, bridges and canals is strongly influenced by engineers from the school (Becquerel, Bienvenüe, Caquot, Carnot, Colson, Coyne, Freyssinet, Résal, Séjourné), who deeply modernised the country by creating the large traffic networks, admired in several European countries.

-- École des ponts ParisTech, by Wikipedia

The son was intended for his father's profession; but in 1799 he obtained a post in the oriental manuscripts department of the national library.[1] In about 1803, he began studying Sanskrit, and although he possessed no grammar or dictionary, he succeeded in acquiring sufficient knowledge of the language to be able to compose poetry in it.[2]

In Paris sometime between 1800 and 1805, Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea introduced him to the Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, called Hermina or Hermine, who, extremely unusually for the time, was a very young divorcée who had come to Paris to be a correspondent for German newspapers.

Helmina von Chézy (26 January 1783 – 28 February 1856), née Wilhelmine Christiane von Klencke, was a German journalist, poet and playwright. She is known for writing the libretto for Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe (1823) and the play Rosamunde, for which Franz Schubert composed incidental music.

Helmina was born in Berlin, the daughter of Prussian officer Carl Friedrich von Klencke and his wife Caroline Louise von Klencke (1754–1802), daughter of Anna Louisa Karsch and herself a poet. The marriage of her parents had already broken up at her birth and she was partly raised by her grandmother. She started writing at the age of 14.

Married the first time in 1799, she divorced the next year and upon the death of her mother moved to Paris, where she worked as a correspondent for several German papers. From 1803 to 1807 she edited her own Französische Miszellen ("French Miscellanea") journal, commenting on political issues, which earned her trouble with the ubiquitous censors.

In Paris she befriended Friedrich Schlegel's wife Dorothea, who introduced her to the French orientalist Antoine-Léonard de Chézy. In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the later author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. In 1810, together with Adelbert von Chamisso, she translated several of Friedrich Schlegel's lectures from French into German. They had a short romantic fling, followed by another extramarital affair of Helmina with the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, probably the father of another son who died shortly after his birth in 1811.

As her second marriage too turned out to be an unhappy one, Helmina finally parted from her husband in 1810. She returned to Germany, where she alternately lived in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Aschaffenburg and Amorbach. In 1812 she settled in Darmstadt. She witnessed the German campaign of the Napoleonic Wars as a military hospital nurse in Cologne and Namur. After she had openly criticised the miserable conditions in the field, she was accused of libel, but was acquitted by the Berlin Kammergericht court under presiding judge E. T. A. Hoffmann.

From 1817 she lived in Dresden, where she wrote the libretto of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe. Weber appreciated her writing but disliked her unbound ambition, speaking of her as a "suave poetess but unbearable woman". Several of her Romantic poems were set to music and Franz Schubert wrote incidental music for her play Rosamunde, which however flopped when it premiered in 1823 at the Vienna Theater an der Wien. Living in Vienna from 1823, she again became politically involved, calling attention to the inhumane working conditions at the saltworks in the Austrian Salzkammergut region. She met Beethoven who was one of her heroes growing up and became good friends with Beethoven and attended his funeral in 1827

--Helmina von Chézy, by Wikipedia

In 1805 they married and Helmina subsequently gave birth to two sons: the author Wilhelm Theodor von Chézy (1806–1865) and Max von Chézy (1808–1846), who became a painter. However, the marriage was ultimately not a success, and the couple parted, although did not divorce, in 1810. De Chézy continued to make annual payments for her support until his death.

He was the first professor of Sanskrit appointed in the Collège de France (1815),[2] where his pupils included Alexandre Langlois, Auguste-Louis-Armand Loiseleur-Deslongchamps and especially Eugène Burnouf, who would become his successor at the Collège on his death in 1832. [3]

He was a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions. Among his works were:

• Medjnoun et Leïla (1807), from the Persian.
• Yadjnadatta-badha ou la mort d'Yadjnadatta (1814).
• La Reconnaissance de Sacountala (1830), from the Sanskrit.
• Anthologie érotique d'Amarou (1831), published under the pseudonym A. L. Apudy.[2]

See also

• Chézy (disambiguation)
• Louis-Mathieu Langlès

References

1. Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples by Alexander von Humboldt, J. Ryan Poynter, Giorleny D Altamirano Rayo, Tobias Kraft
2. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Chézy, Antoine Léonard de". Encyclopædia Britannica. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 116. This cites the Mémoires of the Académie des Inscriptions (new series, vol. xii.), where there is a notice of Chézy by Silvestre de Sacy.
3. Hindu Myth, Hindu History, Religion, Art, and Politics by Heinrich von Stietencron
• Arthur F. J. Remy (1913). "Antoine-Léonard de Chézy" . In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

[admin]

Louis-Mathieu Langlès
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/22/20


Louis-Mathieu Langlès

Louis-Mathieu Langlès (23 August 1763 – 28 January 1824) was a French academic, philologist, linguist, translator, author, librarian and orientalist. He was the conservator of the oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Napoleonic France[1] and he held the same position at the renamed Bibliothèque du Roi after the fall of the empire.[2]

Early life

Langlès was born in 1763 in Pérennes, a section of the commune of Welles-Pérennes in the department of the Oise. His youthful efforts to obtain a military position were unsuccessful. Instead, he went to Paris where he enrolled at the Collège de France, studying Arabic and Persian.[3]

Scholarly career

Along with Antoine Léonard de Chézy (1773–1832), Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) and Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), Langlès was a pupil and protégé of Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838).[4] Langlès's close links with the Collège de France were enhanced by Baron de Sacy's support, which also resulted in Chézy becoming the Collège's first Professor of Sanskrit, Rémusat becoming its first Professor of Chinese, and Champollion becoming its first Professor of Egyptology.[5] The faculty encompassed Langlès as the college's Professor of Persian.[6]

In 1785, he was attached to the Tribunal of the Marshals of France, which was at that time charged with suppressing duels.[6]

In 1795, Langlès became the founder-director the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes in Paris,[7] which is still operating under the revised name of Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO).[5]

Langlès was the provisional specialist on India at the Bibliothèque Nationale. France became a center for Indian studies when the accumulated Indian manuscripts languishing in the Bibliothèque Nationale began to be inventoried.[1]

Langlès corresponded with William Jones in Calcutta; and he was responsible for including the history and bibliography of the early publications of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the third volume of the Magasin Encyclopédique.[8]

The 1811 edition of Jean Chardin's Voyages de monsieur le chevalier Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l'Orient (The Travels of Sir John Chardin in Persia and the Orient), was edited by Langlès. This is still today considered the standard version of Chardin's work.

He died in Paris at the age of 81. His remains are interred in Père-Lachaise cemetery.[9]

Honors and awards

• Institut de France, Chevalier.[9]
• Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Academy of Humanities)
• Légion d'honneur.[9]
• Royal Asiatic Society, United Kingdom.[9]
• Asiatic Society of Bengal
• Order of St. Vladimir, Russia.

Selected works

• 1787 – Political and Military Institutions of Tamerlane.[10]
• 1788 – History of the Mahrattas.[6]
• 1790 – Alphabet Tartare Manchou.[10]
• 1790 – Tartare Manchou Française.[10]

See also

• Isaac Titsingh
• Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes

Notes

1. Tathagatananda, Swami. "How Vedanta Came to the West," Archived 2009-03-02 at the Wayback Machine Saveda. August 15, 2005.
2. International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, offering description[permanent dead link]
3. Redding, Cyrus. (1867). Personal Reminiscences of Eminent Men, pp. 284-285.
4. T. K. John, "Research and Studies by Western Missionaries and Scholars in Sanskrit Language and Literature," in the St. Thomas Christian Encyclopaedia of India, Vol. III, Ollur[Trichur] 2010 Ed. George Menachery, pp.79 - 83
5. Karttunen, Klaus. Expansion of Oriental Studies in the Early 19th Century. Melammu Symposia 4 (eds., A. Panaino and A. Piras). October 13–17, 2001.
6. Redding, p. 789.
7. "Garcin de Tassy: An Urduphile French Orientalist," citing M. Waseem's "Introduction" to Muslim Festivals in India and Other Essays] by Garcin de Tassy (1997).
8. Tathagatananda citing Raymond Schwab's The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Discovery of India and the East, 1836-1886 (1984), p. 55.
9. Redding, p. 283.
10. Redding, p. 285.

References

• Garcin de Tassy, Joseph-Héliodore-Sagesse-Vertu. (1997). Muslim Festivals in India and Other Essays (ed., Mohammad Tariq Waseem). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-564314-5
• Langlès, Louis J.-S. Merlin, F. Merlin, Louis Édouard Gauttier du Lys d'Arc. (1825) Catalogue des livres, imprimés et manuscrits, composant la bibliothèque de feu M. Louis-Mathieu Langlès: ... dont la vente se fera ... 24 mars 1825 et jours suivants. Paris: J. S. Merlin. OCLC 13616849
• Redding, Cyrus. (1867). Personal Reminiscences of Eminent Men. London: Saunders, Otley. OCLC 2096122
• Raymond Schwab, Raymond. (1984). The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Discovery of India and the East, 1836-1886. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-04138-6
• Tourneux, Maurice. (1890). Bibliographie de l'histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution française. Paris: Imprimerie nouvelle. OCLC 2077368

[admin]

Alexander Hamilton (linguist)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/22/20

-- A Key to the Chronology of the Hindus in a Series of Letters in Which an Attempt is Made to Facilitate the Progress of Christianity in Hindostan, by Proving That the Protracted Numbers of All Oriental Nations When Reduced Agree with the Dates Given in the Hebrew Text of the Bible, In Two Volumes, Volume I, by Alexander Hamilton, 1820

-- ART. V. [Book Review of:] A Key to the Chronology of the Hindus; in a Series of Letters, in which an Attempt is made to facilitate the Progress of Christianity in Hindustan, by proving that the protracted Numbers of all Oriental Nations, when reduced, agree with the Dates given in the Hebrew Text of the Bible. 2 vols. 8vo. Rivingtons. 1820. [by Anonymous (Alexander Hamilton), 1820], by F. and C. Rivington (Firm), The British Critic, Volumes 13-14, Editors: 1793-1813, Robert Nares, William Beloe; 1814-1825, T.F. Middleton, W.R. Lyall, and others. 1820, originally published 1792

As director of Europe's first school of modern Orientalism and curator of Europe's most important collection of oriental manuscripts, Langles became one of the heralds of modern Orientalism, who made the first Sanskrit lessons in Europe by Alexander Hamilton possible, helped Friedrich Schlegel make a start in Persian and Indian studies, managed the translation project of the first volumes of Asiatick Researches into French, collaborated with Hamilton on the catalogization of Oriental manuscripts for the National Library, and did much more. A new age of Orientalism was dawning whose founding manifestos were the first volumes of Asiatick Researches and their translator Langles's address to the French National Assembly about "The Importance of Oriental Languages for the Extension of Commerce and the Progress of Letters and Sciences" (Langles 1790b). In this pamphlet Langles tried to convince the deputies of France's national assembly that "the Orientals were knowledgeable and civilized long before we managed to escape from the sad state of nature or rather of barbarity" (Langles 1790b:6) and that the Europeans "owe these [Oriental] peoples our principal notions of science, philosophy, and the basic part of our religious system" (p. 7)....

Volney's enlarged perspective shows the profound effect exerted by the study of the Orient on the reevaluation of European identity. His Mediterranean-centered perspective began to give way to a much larger Eurasian vision. This was only a foretaste of a process in which nineteenth-century academic Orientalism was to play a central role. The similarity of major European languages to Sanskrit had been discussed in Paris since the late 1760s, when Abbe Barthelemy of the Academy asked Father Coeurdoux for his opinion about the question "why there are in the Samskroutane language so many words that it shares with Latin and Greek" (Anquetil-Duperron 1808:659). In the 1790s, the yearly discourses of William Jones in the first volumes of the Asiatick Researches (App 2009) provoked renewed and broader discussions about this question which had serious implications for European identity since Sanskrit was held to be far older than Latin and Greek. In 1795 Volney began to wonder if "the ancient language of India, Sanscrit, was not the primitive dialect of Tibet and India, and the stock of many dialects of the Mideast," and he expressed his desire to learn more about the genealogy of the Chinese and Malay languages (7.118). He was passionate about using the study and comparison of languages to penetrate the fog of early history and showed increasing interest in ancient India. Volney was one of the rare residents of continental Europe to become a member of the exclusive Asiatic Society of Bengal (Gaulmier 1951:485); and when fellow member Alexander Hamilton came to Paris in 1802, it was of course Senator Volney who assisted him in various ways (R. Rocher 1968:37-38). At the time, Hamilton was the only person in Europe capable of teaching Sanskrit, and Volney was among the chosen few instructed by him (pp. 54-55). He was interested in Indian religion and translated William Jones's first English rendering of an Upanishad into French.12

-- The Birth of Orientalism, by Urs App

NOT JUST RUSSIA BUT ALL EUROPE WAS DRAWN TO THE ESOTERIC religions and spiritual spices of the Orient. Starting in the Georgian Age, British merchant fleets sailed homeward with mystical creeds and Sanskrit grammars mixed with more earthbound cargoes. The timing was propitious: the light from the East arrived at a moment of moral crisis and revolutionary upheaval in the West. Chance seemed to clear the path. Alexander Hamilton, an East India Company servant fluent in Sanskrit, was taken prisoner in Paris during the Napoleonic wars, and taught Sanskrit, then almost unknown in Europe, to his fellow captives. One of his pupils was the Romantic poet Schlegel, who returned to Germany in 1808 and wrote the first book there on the language and creeds of the Indies, sparking a fashion. So smitten was the philosopher Schopenhauer on reading The Upanishads that he called it "the solace of my life," adding hopefully, "it will be the solace of my death."

-- Mystical Imperialism, Excerpt from "Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia", by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac

The records given by the Jesuit Fathers helped in the redaction of the general catalogue for the manuscripts kept in the Royal Library. This project was a strong wish of the Abbey Jean-Paul Bignon who wanted to follow the need of describing the collections at a time when the Scientists of the ‘Europe des Lumières’ were describing and organizing the species. In 1739 was published the first volume of the Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae dedicated to the oriental collections. It is a master piece in the field of library science. Etienne Fourmont had translated the brief records given by the Jesuits Fathers into Latin and gave some other bibliographical elements such as the material, paper or palm-leaves. Fourmont adopted the classification system given by Father Pons. In trying to make a concordance between the Jesuit lists and the Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae, it appears that the larger part of the catalogue, namely the ‘Books on Theology’ which contains 111 numbers on the 287 of the ‘Indian Codices’ described, gathers mostly all the manuscripts from South India, even the topics is far from ‘Thelogy’, as if the lack of classification had a direct impact on the cataloguing process. Despite these hesitations, very understandable due to the early date of publication, the Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae is very solid....

In 1807, Alexander Hamilton (1762-1824), after being enrolled in the East India Company, was obliged to stay in France after the break of the Traité d’Amiens which ensured the peace between France and England. He spent his time in describing the Sanskrit collection of the Imperial Library with the help of Langlès.11 The paradox is that the catalogue of Hamilton described less manuscripts than the Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae published seventy years before. The reason is that Hamilton described only the Sanskrit manuscripts in Devanagari and Bengali scripts. He did not treat the manuscripts from South India, in Tamil, Grantha, or Telugu scripts.

Hamilton had time to see all the manuscripts that he wanted to describe, but he gave a detailed description only for the texts he was interested in, like Purana or poetry. We can read this information after the manuscript number 23: “For the others manuscripts, we did not adopt any classification”. He also gave up the fundamental notion of material support. It is impossible to know in reading this catalogue if the manuscripts are written on paper or on palm-leaves while we had this information in the Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae. This catalogue is often seen as the first printed catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts. It is indeed the first catalogue which is entirely dedicated to the Sanskrit manuscripts but we have seen how the Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae, which is the very first printed catalogue for Indian manuscripts, is stronger from the point of view of the library science....

In November 1833, François Guizot (1787-1874), one of the most influential Minister of Education of the century, asked librarians to give a catalogue of the manuscripts of all kinds that were in their care. It is in this climax that worked Claude Fauriel and Auguste Loiseleur-Deslonchamps. They gave bibliographical details for the manuscripts left aside by Alexander Hamilton or freshly arrived in the library. A particular attention was given to describe the manuscript and the text that it contains. Incipit and explicit are sometimes given in original script or in transcriptions, the material used is mentioned (paper or palm leaves), the date in samvat era, the name of the author, the subject, and some bibliographical information are also given when it was possible.

-- For a History of the Catalogues of Indian Manuscripts in Paris, by Jérôme Petit

Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824) was a British linguist who was one of the first Europeans to study the Sanskrit language.[1] He taught the language to most of the earliest European scholars of Indo-European linguistics. He became the first professor of Sanskrit in Europe.

In India

Hamilton seems to have been born in India, but Scotland is not impossible. He was the first cousin of his namesake, the American statesman Alexander Hamilton.[2] He became a lieutenant in the navy of the East India Company and arrived in 1783.[3] While stationed in India he joined the Asiatic Society of Bengal founded by William Jones and Charles Wilkins. He also married a Bengali woman.[4]

In France

After the death of Jones in India, Wilkins and Hamilton were the only Europeans who had studied Sanskrit. Both returned to Europe around 1797.[3] Wilkins remained in England but Hamilton went to France after the Treaty of Amiens (1802) to collate Sanskrit manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

After war broke out between Britain and France in 1803 Hamilton was interned as an enemy alien, but was released to carry on his researches at the insistence of the French scholar Constantine Volney. Hamilton taught Sanskrit to Volney and others, including Friedrich Schlegel and Jean-Louis Burnouf, the father of Eugene Burnouf. Hamilton spend most of his time compiling a catalogue of Indian manuscripts in the library which was published in 1807.[3] Hamilton lived in Schlegel's house, the former house of Baron d'Holbach in Rue de Clichy, together with Sulpiz Boisserée and his brother.[5]

In 1806 he was appointed at Hertford College, becoming the first Sanskrit professor in Europe.[3] In 1808 Hamilton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He became professor of "Sanscrit and Hindoo literature" at Haileybury College.[6] He assisted Wilkins with his revisions to his translation of the Hitopadesha.[1][7]

In 1813, Hamilton completed his catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale manuscripts. Following the end of the Napoleonic wars many German scholars came to study with him, notably Franz Bopp, Othmar Frank and August Wilhelm Schlegel.

He died at Liscard on 30 December 1824.[8]

Works

Hamilton published:[6]

• The Hitopadesa in the Sanscrit Language, London, 1811;
• Terms of Sanscrit Grammar, London, 1815; and
• A Key to the Chronology of the Hindus, 1820.

He also wrote magazine articles on ancient Indian geography. The catalogue was translated, annotated, and published by Louis-Mathieu Langlès in the Magasin Encyclopédique, 1807.[6]

References

1. T. K. John, "Research and Studies by Western Missionaries and Scholars in Sanskrit Language and Literature," in the St. Thomas Christian Encyclopaedia of India, Vol. III, Ollur [Trichur] 2010 Ed. George Menachery, pp. 79–83
2. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, Penguin, 2004, p. 527
3. History of Linguistics. History of Linguistics. Vol. IV, p. 67. Nineteenth-Century Linguistics by Giulio Lepschy, Anna Morpurgo Davies
4. Hermione De Almeida, George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British romantic art and the prospect of India, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005, p. 60.
5. Behler, E. (1966) Friedrich Schlegel, p. 94
6. "Hamilton, Alexander (1762-1824)" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
7. Rosane Rocher, Alexander Hamilton, 1762–1824; a chapter in the early history of Sanskrit philology, American Oriental Society (1968).
8. Rocher, Rosane. "Hamilton, Alexander". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12044. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

Attribution

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Hamilton, Alexander (1762–1824)". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.

[admin]

Charles Wilkins
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/22/20


Sir Charles Wilkins KH FRS
Charles Wilkins, in an mezzotint engraving by John Sartain, after a painting by James Godsell Middleton. Published in 1830.
Born: Charles Wilkins, 1749
Died: 13 May 1836 (aged 86–87)
Nationality: England
Citizenship: England
Occupation: Orientalist, typographer

Sir Charles Wilkins, KH, FRS (1749 – 13 May 1836), was an English typographer and Orientalist, and founding member of The Asiatic Society. He is notable as the first translator of Bhagavad Gita into English, and as the creator, alongside Panchanan Karmakar,[1] of the first Bengali typeface.[2][3]

Karmakar was born in Tribeni village in Hooghly district. His ancestors were calligraphers; they inscribed names and decorations on copper plates, weapons, metal pots, etc. panchanan himself was a wordsmith at tribani.

Andrews, a Christian missionary, had a printing press at Hughli. In order to print Nathaniel Brassey Halhed's A Grammar of the Bengal Language, he needed a Bangla type.

Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (25 May 1751 – 18 February 1830) was an English Orientalist and philologist.

Halhed was born at Westminster, and was educated at Harrow School, where he began a close friendship with Richard Brinsley Sheridan. While at Oxford he undertook oriental studies under the influence of William Jones. Accepting a writership in the service of the East India Company, he went out to India, and there, at the suggestion of Warren Hastings, translated the Hindu legal code from a Persian version of the original Sanskrit. This translation was published in 1776 as A Code of Gentoo Laws. In 1778 he published a Bengali grammar, to print which he set up the first Bengali press in India.

In 1785 Halhed returned to England, and from 1790–1795 was Member of Parliament for Lymington, Hants. For some time he was a disciple of Richard Brothers, and a speech in parliament in defence of Brothers made it impossible for him to remain in the House of Commons, from which he resigned in 1795.

Richard Brothers (25 December 1757 – 25 January 1824) was an early believer and teacher of British Israelism, a theory concerning the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel...

He entered the Royal Navy and served under Keppel and Rodney. In 1783, he became lieutenant, and was honourably discharged on 28 July 1783, receiving a pension which amounted to half-pay (54 pounds per year). He then travelled on the continent of Europe and later married Elizabeth Hassall in 1786. His marriage was reported as being "unhappy" and so he returned to service in the Royal Navy.

Because he came to believe that military service was not compatible with his new calling to serve Christianity, in 1789 he once again left the Navy. Built upon the principle of individual revelation, Brothers believed that he could not serve the King as head of the Church of England.

In 1791, he began to question the oath he had been required to take for receipt of his military half-pay, and he found himself with little income as a result of his subsequent actions. Brothers then divided his time between the open air and the workhouse, where he developed the idea that he had a special divine commission. Brothers claimed to hear the voice of an attending angel which proclaimed to him the fall of Babylon the Great, which was in fact London. Apparently upon Brothers's plea for mercy, God decided to spare London for a time and the destruction was halted. Around this time, Brothers was also expectant of a heavenly lady who would descend from the clouds showering him with money, love and happiness. In February 1792 Brothers declared himself a healer and claimed he could restore sight to the blind. He drew large crowds, but not due to his healing ability as much as his small gifts of money to those he prayed for.

In 1793 Brothers declared himself to be the apostle of a new religion. He began to see himself as possessing a special role in the gathering of the Jews back into Palestine, in particular, the "Jews" who were hidden amongst the population of Great Britain. In similarity to modern British Israelists, Brothers asserted that the "hidden Israel" had no notion of its biological lineage and that part of his role would be to teach them of their true identity and lead them to the land of Canaan. Brothers proclaimed himself to be Prince of the Hebrews, literal descendant of the Biblical House of David, and the Nephew of the Almighty, who would rule over Israel until the return of Jesus Christ. Brothers declared he would achieve all this using a rod he had fashioned from a wild rosebush, with which he would perform miracles, as Moses had done...

Brothers began to attract quite a following, but due to his rejection of organisational work, and eccentric nature, he did not develop any sort of social movement. In consequence of prophesying the death of the King and the end of the monarchy, he was arrested for treason in 1795, and imprisoned on the grounds of being criminally insane. His case was, however, brought before Parliament by his ardent disciple, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, an orientalist and a member of the House of Commons. As a result Brothers was removed to a private asylum in Islington.

-- Richard Brothers, by Wikipedia

He subsequently obtained a home appointment under the East India Company. He died in London on 18 February 1830.[2]

-- Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, by Wikipedia

Under the supervision of English typographer Charles Wilkins, Karmakar[3] created the first Bengali typeface for printing.[4]

In 1779, Karmakar moved to Kolkata to work for Wilkins' new printing press.[1] in chuchura, Hoggly .In 1801, he developed a typeface for British missionary William Carey's Bangla translation of the New Testament.[5] In 1803, Karmakar developed a set of Devnagari script, the first Nagari type to be developed in India.[1]

-- Panchanan Karmakar, by Wikipedia

In 1788, Wilkins was elected a member of the Royal Society.[4]

Biography

He was born at Frome in Somerset in 1749.[5] He trained as a printer. In 1770 he went to India as a printer and writer in the East India Company's service. His facility with language allowed him to quickly learn Persian and Bengali. He was closely involved in the design of the first type for printing Bengali.[6] He published the first typeset book in the language, earning himself the name "the Caxton of India".[7] He also designed type for publications of books in Persian. In 1781 he was appointed as translator of Persian and Bengali to the Commissioner of Revenue and as superintendent of the Company's press. He successfully translated a Royal inscription in Kutila characters, which were thitherto indecipherable.

In 1784, Wilkins helped William Jones establish the Asiatic Society of Bengal.[6]


Title page of the first Bengali typeface printed book A Grammar of the Bengal Language, 1778


Decipherment of the Gopika Cave Inscription (6th century CE, Late Brahmi), with the original script in Late Brahmi, and proposed Devanagari line-by-line transliteration by Charles Wilkins in 1785.[8]

Wilkins moved to Varanasi, where he studied Sanskrit under Kalinatha, a Brahmin pandit. At this period he began work on his translation of the Mahabharata, securing strong support for his activities from the governor of British India, Warren Hastings. Though he never completed the translation, portions were later published. The most important was his version of the Gita, published in 1785 as Bhagvat-geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (London: Nourse, 1785). In his preface Wilkins argued that the Gita was written to encourage a form of monotheist "unitarianism" and to draw Hinduism away from the polytheism he ascribed to the Vedas.[9]

He had a hobby to learn about other religions. He was also a scholar of Islam. He stayed in India for 16 years (1770–1786). He also made visits to holy shrines of other religions to learn about their customs.

During a visit to Varanasi, he made a stop at Patna, and visited Patna Sahib Gurudwara, the birthplace of Guru Gobind Singh Ji. He wrote his account of this visit titled as 'Sikhs and their College at Patna'. He writes about Dasam Granth there and notes in this article.[10]

Meanwhile, inscriptions of the 6th century CE in late Brahmi script were deciphered in 1785 by Charles Wilkins, who published an essentially correct translation of the Gopika Cave Inscription written by the Maukhari king Anantavarman.[11][12] Wilkins seems to have relied essentially on the similarities with later Brahmic scripts, such as the script of the Pala period and early forms of Devanagari.[11]

His translation of the Gita was itself soon translated into French (1787) and German (1802). It proved to be a major influence on Romantic literature and on European perception of Hindu philosophy. William Blake later celebrated the publication in his picture The Bramins, exhibited in 1809, which depicted Wilkins and Brahmin scholars working on the translation.

With Hastings' departure from India, Wilkins lost his main patron. He returned to England in 1786, where he married Elizabeth Keeble. In 1787 Wilkins followed the Gita with his translation of The Heetopades of Veeshnoo-Sarma, in a Series of Connected Fables, Interspersed with Moral, Prudential and Political Maxims (Bath: 1787). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1788. In 1800, he was invited to take up the post of the first director of the India House Library, which became over time the world-famous 'India Office Library' (now British Library – Oriental Collections).[13][14] In 1801 he became librarian to the East India Company, He was named examiner at Haileybury when a college was established there in 1805. During these years he devoted himself to the creation of a font for Devanagari, the "divine script". In 1808 he published his Grammar of the Sanskrita Language. King George IV gave him the badge of the Royal Guelphic Order and he was knighted in recognition of his services to Oriental scholarship in 1833.[13] He died in London at the age of 86.

In addition to his own translations and type designs, Wilkins published a new edition of John Richardson's Persian and Arabic dictionary – A Vocabulary Persian, Arabic, and English; Abridged from the Quarto Edition of Richardson's Dictionary as Edited by Charles Wilkins, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S. – By David Hopkins, Esq., Assistant Surgeon on the Bengal Establishment in 1810.[15] He also published a catalogue of the manuscripts collected by Sir William Jones, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Wilkins.

See also

• Royal Society—Wilkins was elected to membership in the Society in 1788.[4] Those signing that nomination letter were: James Rennell, William Marsden, Charles Blagden, Alexander Dalrymple, Samuel Harper, George Staunton, Thomas Astle.

Notes

1. Ezra Greenspan; Jonathan Rose (2003). Book History. Penn State Press. pp. 26, 50. ISBN 9780271023304. Retrieved 2 June 2015.
2. Rost, Ernst Reinhold (1865). "Works [ed. by E.R. Rost]. – Horace Hayman Wilson –". Retrieved 2 June 2015.
3. Ross, Fiona G. E. (1999). The printed Bengali character and its evolution. Curzon. ISBN 070071135X. OCLC 40588429.
4. "Wilkins, Sir Charles". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 13 October 2015.
5. "DServe Archive Persons Show". Royalsociety.org. Retrieved 2 June 2015.[permanent dead link]
6. . (1837). "No. VIII, Sir Charles Wilkins, K.H.; D.C.L.; F.R.S.," The Annual biography and obituary for the year 1817–1837, pp. 69–72. Google Books
7. Franklin, William, Introduction to The Bhǎgvǎt-Gēētā; The Hěětōpǎdēs of Veěshnǒǒ-Sǎrmā, [translated by] Charles Wilkins, London : Ganesha Pub., c2001. pp.xxiv-v
8. Wilkins, Charles (1788). Asiatic Researches. London : Printed for J. Sewell [etc.] pp. 278-281.
9. "Questions and Answers". Bhagavad-gita.org. Retrieved 2 June 2015.
10. "Rebuttal of gurdarshan Dhillon comment about sikh scripture Sri Dasam Granth". sikhsangat.org. Retrieved 28 December 2016.
11. Salomon, Richard (1998). Indian Epigraphy. pp. 206-207.
12. Wilkins, Charles (1788). Asiatic Researches. London : Printed for J. Sewell [etc.] pp. 278-281.
13. "About". India9.com. Retrieved 2 June 2015.
14. "Charles Wilkins in India". India9.com. 14 December 2005. Retrieved 2 June 2015.
15. Zenker, Julius Theodor (1846). "Bibliotheca orientalis – Julius Theodor Zenker". Retrieved 2 June2015.

References

• ____________. (1837). The Annual biography and obituary for the year 1817–1837. London: Longmans. OCLC 162110842
• Rost, Reinhold. (1865). Works by the late Horace Hayman Wilson. London: Trubner. OCLC 65757936

External links

• Charles Wilkins at Banglapedia