Louis-Augustin Alemand

Louis-Augustin Alemand (* 1653 in Grenoble ; † 14 August 1728 ibid) was a French lawyer, doctor, Romance scholar and grammarian.

life and work

Alemand studied law in Valence and was a lawyer in Grenoble. Then he went to Paris and worked as a "remarqueur", ie as a participant in a discussion on the Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) by Claude Favre de Vaugelas . In 1693 Alemand received his doctorate in medicine in Aix-en-Provence and went back to Grenoble in 1695.

Alemand's contribution to the discussion of language usage initiated by Vaugelas consists of two books. In 1688 he published his own glossaries in alphabetical order from A to C under the title Nouvelles observations ou Guerre civile des François sur la langue . Two years later he published a posthumous gloss manuscript by Vaugelas: Nouvelles remarques de M. de Vaugelas sur la langue françoise . He put a 70-page appraisal of Vaugelas in front of the gloss section and in the main part commented in detail on each Vaugelas gloss from the point of view of its time. The critical dictionary of all doubtful French that he planned was never published.

Works

• Les Secrets de la medecine des Chinois , consistant en la parfaite connoissance du pouls, Grenoble 1671, Paris 2003 (authorship disputed)
• Nouvelles observations ou Guerre civile des François sur la langue , Paris 1688, 1691, Geneva 1968, Paris 1972 (482 pages)
• (Ed.) Claude Favre de Vaugelas, Nouvelles remarques de M. de Vaugelas sur la langue françoise. Ouvrage posthumous. Avec des observations de M. *****, avocat au Parlement , Paris 1690, 1971, 1973 (540 pages)
• Histoire monastique d'Irlande , Paris 1690
• (Translator) Santorio Santorio Science de la transpiration ou médecine statique , Lyon 1695 (from Latin)
• (announced, but never published) Dictionnaire général et critique de tous les mots, de toutes les phrases ou façons de parler et de toutes les règles de notre langue qui ont souffert quelque contestation jusqu'à présent , par M. Alemand l'aîné

literature

• Dictionnaire de biography française 1, 1933, col. 1395 f.
• Hans Sternischa, Deux grammairiens de la fin du XVIIe siècle: L. Aug. Alemand et Andry de Bois-Regard , Paris 1913 (Diss. Grenoble)
• Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Magali Seijido, Remarques et observations sur la langue française. Histoire et évolution d'un genre , Paris 2011 (including through Louis-Augustin Alemand)

Web links

• Literature by and about Louis-Augustin Alemand in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)