Jean-Philippe Baratier (also ''Johann Philipp Baratier''; 19 January 1721 in

Schwabach Schwabach () is a German city of about 40,000 inhabitants near Nuremberg in the centre of the region of Franconia in the north of Bavaria. The city is an autonomous administrative district (''kreisfreie Stadt''). Schwabach is also the name of th ...

near

Nuremberg Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...

– 5 October 1740) was a German

scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...

. A noted

child prodigy A child prodigy is defined in psychology research literature as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain at the level of an adult expert. The term is also applied more broadly to young people who are extraor ...

of the 18th century, he published eleven works and authored a great quantity of unpublished manuscripts.

Life

Baratier's early education was most carefully conducted by his father, François Baratier, a

Huguenot The Huguenots ( , also , ) were a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Be ...

minister at the French Church of Schwabach. His progress was so rapid that by the time he was five years of age he could speak French,

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

and

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

with ease, and read

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

fluently. He then studied

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

, and in three years was able to translate the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. Hebrew: ''Tān ...

into Latin or French. He collected materials for a dictionary of rare and difficult Hebrew words, with critical and philological observations; and when he was about eleven years old translated from the Hebrew Tudela’s ''Itinerarium''. At 14, he was admitted master of arts at Halle, and received into the

Royal Academy The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its pur ...

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

, while working on a method to calculate

longitude Longitude (, ) is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east–west position of a point on the surface of the Earth, or another celestial body. It is an angular measurement, usually expressed in degrees and denoted by the Greek letter l ...

at sea. The last years of his short life he devoted to the study of history of the Jewish people and antiquities, did translations, and had collected materials for histories of the

Thirty Years' War The Thirty Years' War was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (80 ...

and of

Antitrinitarianism Nontrinitarianism is a form of Christianity that rejects the mainstream Christian doctrine of the Trinity—the belief that God is three distinct hypostases or persons who are coeternal, coequal, and indivisibly united in one being, or essence ...

, and for an inquiry concerning

Egyptian antiquities Egyptology (from ''Egypt'' and Greek , ''-logia''; ar, علم المصريات) is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, architecture and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious p ...

. His health, which had always been weak, gave way completely under these labours, and he died at the age of nineteen. In 1741, Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey wrote a biography of him, published at Utrecht (NL)..

References

;Attribution :

External links

Dictionnaire Bouillet ''Dictionnaire Bouillet'' is the informal title of the ''Dictionnaire universel d'histoire et de géographie'' ("Universal Dictionary of History and Geography"), a French reference work in the public domain. The first edition was published in 18 ...

The Exchanges of Formey (In French)
1721 births 1740 deaths German antiquarians People from the Principality of Ansbach Christian Hebraists Members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences Members of the French Academy of Sciences German male non-fiction writers {{germany-astronomer-stub