Arsène Darmesteter

Arsène Darmesteter

Arsène Darmesteter (born January 5, 1846 in Château-Salins , † November 16, 1888 in Paris ) was a French Romance scholar, linguist and lexicographer.

life and work

Darmesteter came from a Jewish family from Lorraine; his mother was from Prague. In the Talmud school he discovered a text from the 11th century (by Rabbi Raschi von Troyes) and turned to medieval studies, which he studied from 1865 at the École des Chartes and from 1868 with Gaston Paris at the École pratique des hautes études. There he was a tutor from 1872 to 1877. In 1874 he published a Traité de la formation des mots dans la langue française, comparée aux autres langues romanes et au latin (2nd edition 1894). In 1877 he defended the two Thèses de doctorat De la création actuelle de mots nouveaux dans la langue française et des lois qui la régissent (reprinted Geneva 1972), as well as De Floovante, vetustiore gallico poemate et de Merovingo cyclo, scripsit et adjecit nunc primum edita Olavianam Flovents sagae versionem et excerpta e Parisiensi codice "il libro de Fioravante" and became Maître de conférences for French language and literature of the Middle Ages, from 1883 professor at the Sorbonne. In addition, he taught grammar from 1881 at the École Normale Supérieure de Sèvres and from 1882 French at the École Normale. In 1887 he published La Vie des mots étudiée dans leurs significations (numerous editions, reprinted Paris 1979), in 1888 a short text La Question de la réforme orthographique .

After his untimely death, Ernest Muret and Léopold Sudre published their teacher's Cours de grammaire historique de la langue française in 4 volumes (1891–1897). His brother, the orientalist James Darmesteter , published posthumous writings, his biography (pp. V-LXXII) and a bibliography (pp. LXXIII-LXXVI) under the title Reliques scientifiques (2 vols. 1890, divided into Jewish, French-Jewish and French studies).

The Dictionnaire général de la langue française du commencement du XVIIe siècle à nos jours, précédé d'un traité de la formation de la langue , begun with Adolphe Hatzfeld , in which Darmesteter took on the historical part, was finished by Hatzfeld together with Antoine Thomas and by Published in 2 volumes from 1890 to 1900.

Other works

• Le Talmud , Paris 1889 [written 1866, published in a journal 1888], (with a foreword by Moshé Catane, Paris 1991; 1997; 2003; 2005)
• (together with David Simon Blondheim [1884–1934]), Les Gloses françaises dans les Commentaires talmudiques de Raschi , Paris 1929

literature

• Dictionnaire de biography française sv
• Gabriel Bergougnioux: Arsène Darmesteter (1846–1888) in: Histoire, Epistémologie, Langage 8, 1986, pp. 107–123 ( http://kaali.linguist.jussieu.fr/HEL_public_domain/HEL_08_1/HEL_08_1_pp107-123.pdf )
• Revue des langues romanes 108, 2004 (“Arsène Darmesteter, un author, une œuvre, un milieu”)

Web links

• Literature by and about Arsène Darmesteter in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)