Maurice Bloomfield, Ph. D., LL.D. (February 23, 1855 – June 12, 1928) was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
philologist and
SanskritSanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
scholar.
Biography
Bloomfield was born in Bielitz , in what was at that time
Austrian SilesiaAustrian Silesia , officially the Duchy of Upper and Lower Silesia was an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Austrian Empire, from 1867 a Cisleithanian crown land of Austria-Hungary...
(today it is in
PolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
). His sister was
Fannie Bloomfield ZeislerFannie Bloomfield Zeisler was an Austrian-born U.S. pianist.- Biography :Zeisler was born Fannie Blumenfeld on July 16, 1863, in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia. She emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 4 in 1867. The family settled in Chicago, Illinois where they later changed...
, and the linguist
Leonard BloomfieldLeonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...
was his nephew.
He went to the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1867, and 10 years later graduated from
Furman UniversityFurman University is a selective, private, coeducational, liberal arts college in Greenville, South Carolina, United States. Furman is one of the oldest, and more selective private institutions in South Carolina...
,
Greenville, South Carolina-Law and government:The city of Greenville adopted the Council-Manager form of municipal government in 1976.-History:The area was part of the Cherokee Nation's protected grounds after the Treaty of 1763, which ended the French and Indian War. No White man was allowed to enter, though some families...
. He then studied Sanskrit at
YaleRapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
, under W. D. Whitney, and at
Johns Hopkins UniversityThe Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
, to which university he returned as associate professor in 1881 after a stay of two years in
BerlinBerlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and
LeipzigLeipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
, and soon afterwards was promoted professor of Sanskrit and comparative
philologyPhilology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
. In 1896
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
bestowed the LL.D. degree upon him.
His papers in the
American Journal of Philology number a few in comparative
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, such as those on assimilation and adaptation in congeneric classes of words, and many valuable contributions to the interpretation of the
VedasThe Vedas are a large body of texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism....
, and he is best known as a student of the Vedas. He translated, for
Max MüllerFriedrich Max Müller , more regularly known as Max Müller, was a German philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion...
's
Sacred Books of the EastThe Sacred Books of the East is a monumental 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious writings, edited by Max Müller and published by the Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910...
, 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
Kauika-Sutra (1890), and in 1907 published, in the
Harvard Oriental series, A Vedic Concordance. In 1905 he published
Cerberus, the Dog of Hades, a study in comparative
mythologyThe term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
.
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.