George Hempl

George Hempl (born June 6, 1859 in Whitewater , Wisconsin , † August 14, 1921 in Stanford , California ) was an American philologist , especially English .

Life

George Hempl was the son of German immigrants from Saxony, Henry Theodore Hempl (Hempel) and Anna geb. Hantzsche. He grew up in Whitewater, Chicago and Battle Creek (Michigan) and studied at the University of Michigan . He then taught at high schools, from 1879 to 1882 in Saginaw (Michigan) and from 1882 to 1884 in La Porte (Indiana) . In 1884 he moved to Johns Hopkins University as an Instructor of German . From 1886 to 1889 he undertook a long educational trip through Europe and studied at the universities of Berlin , Göttingen , Jena , Strasbourg and Tübingen . in Jena he was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD .

After returning to the United States, Hempl became Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan in 1889. In 1893 he was appointed Junior Professor and in 1897 Professor of English and General Linguistics. On January 1, 1907, he moved to Stanford University , where he was Professor of German Philology until his death. He was a member of several academic societies, including the American Philological Association (President 1903/04), the Archaeological Institute of America , the Modern Language Association , the American Dialect Society, and the International Phonetic Association .

Hempl dealt intensively with the phonology and orthography of English and German. On this subject he wrote numerous essays, several handbooks and also a four-part edition of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (1900), which offered the German text phonetically and orthographically on the left side and two English translations on the right: an interlinear translation (word for word ) and a target language oriented translation. In addition, Hempl studied numerous extinct Indo-European languages , including the Hittite and Italian languages . Some of these studies appeared posthumously under the title Mediterranean Studies .

Fonts (selection)

• Chaucer's Pronunciation and the Spelling of the Ellesmere Ms . Boston 1893
• Old English Phonology . Boston 1893
• German Orthography and Phonology. A Treatise with a Word List . Boston / London 1897
• The Easiest German Reading for Learners Young or Old. English Nursery Rimes in German . Boston / London 1899
• Wilhelm Tell by Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. In four parts . New York 1900
• Mediterranean Studies . 3 volumes, Stanford 1930–1931

literature

• Starr Willard Cutting: Modern Philology . Volume 19 (1921), pp. 223f.
• Caryn Hannan, Jennifer L. Herman: Wisconsin Biographical Dictionary. 2008–2009 edition . State History Publication 2008, p. 176

Web links

• Literature by and about George Hempl in the WorldCat bibliographic database