Peter A. Boodberg

Peter Alexis Boodberg (born April 8, 1903 in Vladivostok ; † June 29, 1972 ; also Peter von Budberg ; Russian Пётр Алексеевич Будберг ) was an American sinologist and linguist of German-Russian origin.

Life

Boodberg came from an old Baltic German family. He was born in Vladivostok, where his father, a senior military man, served in the Russian Army. Boodberg experienced the beginning of the First World War as a student at a cadet institute in St. Petersburg. In the course of the war, however, he and his brother were sent back to the Far East of the Russian Empire for security reasons . There he attended the University of Vladivostok and began to learn Chinese. In 1920, after the turmoil of the October Revolution had also reached the easternmost provinces of the country, Boodberg left Russia and moved to the USA. There he met his family again in San Francisco and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley . In 1924 he obtained a bachelor's degree in oriental languages and in 1930 his doctorate. From 1932 until his death he taught himself at Berkeleyer University, where he held an Agassiz professorship for oriental languages and literature. In 1952 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

John DeFrancis (1989) describes Boodberg's technical examination of the sinologist Herrlee Creel with all the necessary attention to detail. Creel's contributions are not reproduced in the collection of selected works by Peter A. Boodberg, edited by Alvin P. Cohen. This is one of the most instructive exhibition matches in Sinology of the twentieth century.

Works

Some Proleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 (1937), 329-372
"'Ideography' or Iconolatry?", T'oung Pao, Volume 35, 1940, pp. 266-288
The Chinese Script: An Essay on Nomenclature (the First Hecaton). Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 39 (1957), 113-120
"The Language of the T'o-Pa Wei", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 1, No. 2, 1936, pp. 167-185
"Two Notes on The History of The Chinese Frontier", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 1, No. 3/4, 1936, pp. 283-307
"Marginalia to The Histories of The Northern Dynasties", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 3, No. 3/4, 1938, pp. 223-253, Volume 4, No. 3/4, 1939, pp. 230-283
"Chinese Zoographic Names as Chronograms", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 5, No. 2, 1940, pp. 128-136
"An Early Mongolian Toponym", in: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3/4 (Dec., 1956), pp. 407-408
"Philological Notes on Chapter One of The Lao Tzu", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3/4, 1957, pp. 598-618
Alvin P. Cohen (ed.): Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 1979 ( Review )

literature

John DeFrancis : The Chinese language, fact and fantasy . Univ. of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1989, 2005. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6
Edward H. Schafer, Alvin P. Cohen: Peter A. Boodberg, 1903-1972 . In: Journal of the American Oriental Society . Vol. 94 (January-March 1974), No. 1, pp. 1-13.

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ see Schafer, Cohen (1974)
↑ see obituary of the University of California (1975)

personal data
SURNAME	Boodberg, Peter A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Boodberg, Peter Alexis (full name); Budberg, Peter von; Будберг, Пётр Алексеевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American sinologist and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH	April 8, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH	Vladivostok
DATE OF DEATH	June 29, 1972

[1] see Schafer, Cohen (1974)

[2] see obituary of the University of California (1975)