Thomas Jarrett, DD, (1805–1882) was an English churchman and orientalist.

Life

He was educated at

St. Catharine's College, Cambridge St Catharine's College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1473 as Katharine Hall, it adopted its current name in 1860. The college is nicknamed "Catz". The college is lo ...

, where he graduated B.A. in 1827 as thirty-fourth wrangler, and seventh in the first class of the classical tripos. In the following year he was elected a Fellow of his college, where he stayed as classical and Hebrew lecturer until 1832. In 1832 he was presented by his college to the rectory of

Trunch Trunch is a village and parish in Norfolk, England, situated three miles north of North Walsham and two miles from the coast at Mundesley. At the Census 2011 the village had a population of 909. The parish covers an area of . The villages name ...

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...

. In 1831 he was elected

Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic is a title used at Cambridge University for the holder of a professorship of Arabic; Sir Thomas Adams, 1st Baronet (1586–1668), Lord Mayor of London in 1645, gave to Cambridge University the money needed to ...

, and held the chair until 1854, when he was appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew and canon of

Ely Cathedral Ely Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, is an Anglican cathedral in the city of Ely, Cambridgeshire, England. The cathedral has its origins in AD 672 when St Etheldreda built an abbey church. The presen ...

. He died at Trunch rectory on 7 March 1882.

Works

He knew at least twenty languages, and taught Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, Gothic, and indeed almost any language for which he could find a student. He spent much time on

Romanisation Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

of oriental languages according to a system of his own; and also in promoting a system of printing English with

diacritical mark A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic ...

s to show the sound of each vowel without changing the spelling of the word. He published in 1831 an ''Essay on Algebraic Development'', intended to illustrate and apply a system of algebraic notation submitted by him to the

Cambridge Philosophical Society The Cambridge Philosophical Society (CPS) is a scientific society at the University of Cambridge. It was founded in 1819. The name derives from the medieval use of the word philosophy to denote any research undertaken outside the fields of law ...

in 1827, and printed in the third volume of their ''Transactions''. It contained a suggestion for the notation for a

factorial In mathematics, the factorial of a non-negative denoted is the product of all positive integers less than or equal The factorial also equals the product of n with the next smaller factorial: \begin n! &= n \times (n-1) \times (n-2) \t ...

, written ''n'' as opposed to n! (a notation of German origin), that had wide currency in the nineteenth century. In 1830 he published ‘Grammatical Indexes to the Hebrew Text of Genesis;’ in 1848, a ‘Hebrew-English and English-Hebrew Lexicon;’ in 1857, ‘The Gospels and Acts so printed as to Show the Sound of each Word without Change of Spelling,’ a work which was intended to illustrate his ‘New Way of Marking Sounds of English words without Change of Spelling,’ published in 1858; in 1866, an edition of Virgil with all the quantities marked; in 1875, ‘Nalopākhyānam,’ or the Sanskrit text of the Story of Nala transliterated into Roman characters; and in 1882, the ‘Hebrew Text of the Old Covenant printed in a modified Roman Alphabet.’ He also transliterated editions, which were never published, of the

Rāmāyana The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th to 4th centuries BCE, and later stages ...

, the Shāhnāmah, and the

Korān The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , si ...

. He bequeathed his library to St Catharine's College, where it remains.

Notes

References

;Attribution {{DEFAULTSORT:Jarrett, Thomas Regius Professors of Hebrew (Cambridge) 1805 births 1882 deaths 19th-century English Anglican priests English orientalists Alumni of St Catharine's College, Cambridge Fellows of St Catharine's College, Cambridge Linguists from England 19th-century linguists Sir Thomas Adams's Professors of Arabic