Arsène Darmesteter (5 January 184616 November 1888) was a distinguished French

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

and man of letters.

Biography

He studied under

Gaston Paris Bruno Paulin Gaston Paris (; 9 August 1839 – 5 March 1903) was a French literary historian, philologist, and scholar specialized in Romance studies and medieval French literature. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, ...

at the

École pratique des hautes études The (), abbreviated EPHE, is a French postgraduate top level educational institution, a . EPHE is a constituent college of the Université PSL (together with ENS Ulm, Paris Dauphine or Ecole des Mines). The college is closely linked to É ...

, and became professor of

Old French language Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th Sorbonne, where he met his wife, the painter University of Paris">Sorbonne, where he met his wife, the painter Héléna Hartog. His ''Life of Words'' appeared in English in 1888. He also collaborated with Adolphe Hatzfeld in a ''Dictionnaire général de la langue française'' (2 vols., 1895–1900). Among his most important work was the elucidation of Old French by means of the many glosses in the medieval writings of Rashi">Gloss (margin text)">glosses in the medieval writings of Rashi and other French Jews. His scattered papers on Romance languages">Romance Romance may refer to: Common meanings * Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings ** Romantic orientation, the classification of the sex or gender with which a pers ...

and Jewish philology were collected by James Darmesteter as ''Arsène Darmesteter, reliques scientifiques'' (2 vols., 1890). His valuable ''Cours de grammaire historique de la langue française'' was edited after his death by E. Muret and Leopold Sudre, L. Sudre (1891–1895; English edition, 1902).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Darmesteter, Arsene 1846 births 1888 deaths People from Moselle (department) 19th-century French Jews Academic staff of the University of Paris French philologists École Nationale des Chartes alumni