Maurice Bloomfield

Maurice Bloomfield, Ph.D., LL.D. (February 23, 1855 – June 12, 1928) was an Austrian Empire-born American philologist and Sanskrit scholar.

Biography

He was born Maurice Blumenfeld in Bielitz (Polish: Bielsko), in what was at that time Austrian Silesia[1] (today it is in Poland) to Jewish parents. His sister was Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, and the linguist Leonard Bloomfield was his nephew. He married Rosa Zeisler in 1885, and had a son and a daughter; Rosa died in 1920. In 1921, he married Helen Scott.[2][3]

He went to the United States in 1867, and 10 years later graduated from Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina. He then studied Sanskrit at Yale, under W. D. Whitney, and at Johns Hopkins University. He was part of the second graduating class to earn the PhD from Johns Hopkins; his degree was conferred in 1879.[4] He returned to Hopkins as associate professor in 1881 after a stay of two years in Berlin and Leipzig, and soon afterwards was promoted professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology. He was forced by ill health to retire in 1926 and was named Professor Emeritus in honor of his 45 years on the Hopkins faculty. After retirement he moved to San Francisco to be closer to his son, and he died there on June 13, 1928.[5] In 1896 Princeton University bestowed the LL.D. degree upon him.

His papers in the American Journal of Philology number a few in comparative linguistics, such as those on assimilation and adaptation in congeneric classes of words, and many valuable contributions to the interpretation of the Vedas, and he is best known as a student of the Vedas. He translated, for Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East, the Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (1897); contributed to the Buhler-Kielhorn Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde the section The Atharva-Veda and the Gopatha Brahmana (1899); was first to edit the Kausika-Sutra (1890), and in 1907 published, in the Harvard Oriental Series, A Vedic Concordance.[6][7][8][9][10][11] In 1905 he published Cerberus, the Dog of Hades, a study in comparative mythology. The Religion of the Veda appeared in 1908; Life and Stories of the Jaina Savior Parasvanatha and a work on the Rig Veda in 1916.

Bloomfield was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1904 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1914.[12]

References

  1. ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bloomfield, Maurice" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  2. ^ Edgerton, Franklin (1928). "Maurice Bloomfield, 1855-1928". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 48: 193–199. JSTOR 593142.
  3. ^ Baltimore Sun, June 14, 1928
  4. ^ Edgerton, Franklin (1928). "Maurice Bloomfield, 1855-1928". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 48: 193–199. JSTOR 593142.
  5. ^ Edgerton, Franklin (1928). "Maurice Bloomfield, 1855-1928". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 48: 193–199. JSTOR 593142.
  6. ^ E. B. (April–June 1967). "A Vedic Concordance by Maurice Bloomfield". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 87 (2): 210. doi:10.2307/597425. JSTOR 597425.
  7. ^ Tucci, Giuseppe (March–June 1967). "A Vedic Concordance by Maurice Bloomfield". East and West. 17 (1/2): 156. JSTOR 29755128.
  8. ^ J. C. W. (1965). "A Vedic Concordance by Maurice Bloomfield". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 28 (1): 210–211. doi:10.1017/s0041977x00057530. JSTOR 611786.
  9. ^ E. V. A. (March 1909). "A Vedic Concordance by Maurice Bloomfield". The Classical Review. 23 (2): 58. doi:10.1017/s0009840x00002833. JSTOR 693972. S2CID 246876556.
  10. ^ Keith, A. Berriedale (January 1908). "A Vedic Concordance by Maurice Bloomfield". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. 40: 200–204. doi:10.1017/S0035869X00037515. JSTOR 25210553. S2CID 197848065.
  11. ^ Zubatý, Josef (1907). "A Vedic Concordance by Maurice Bloomfield". Listy Filologické / Folia Philologica. 34 (6): 458–460. JSTOR 23444529.
  12. ^ "Maurice Bloomfield". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 2023-02-09. Retrieved 2023-08-11.

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