Peter Stephen DuPonceau
Encyclopedia
Peter Stephen Du Ponceau or DuPonceau, born Pierre-Étienne Du Ponceau, (June 3, 1760, Saint-Martin-de-Ré
Saint-Martin-de-Ré
Saint-Martin-de-Ré is a commune in the Charente-Maritime department in southwestern France.It is one of the 10 communes located on the Île de Ré.-History:Saint-Martin-de-Ré has extensive fortifications, reflecting the strategic importance of the Île de Ré...

, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 – April 1, 1844, Philadelphia) was a French linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics 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....

, philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, and jurist
Jurist
A jurist or jurisconsult is a professional who studies, develops, applies, or otherwise deals with the law. The term is widely used in American English, but in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries it has only historical and specialist usage...

. He spent the majority of his life in the United States.

Early life and war career

DuPonceau's education took place at a Benedictine
Benedictine
Benedictine refers to the spirituality and consecrated life in accordance with the Rule of St Benedict, written by Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century for the cenobitic communities he founded in central Italy. The most notable of these is Monte Cassino, the first monastery founded by Benedict...

 college, where he gained an interest in linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics 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....

. However, he abruptly ended his education after only 18 months over a dissatisfaction with the scholarly philosophy taught at the college. He emigrated to America in 1777, at age 17, with Baron von Steuben. Once there, he served as a secretary for Steuben in the Revolutionary Army. After the American Revolution
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...

, he moved to Philadelphia, where he would spend the rest of his life.

Work in philosophy and linguistics

DuPonceau joined the American Philosophical Society
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...

 in 1791 and served as president of it from 1827 until his death. He became famous in the field of linguistics for his analysis of Indigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...

—as a member of Society's Historical and Literary Committee, he helped build a collection of texts detailing the native languages of the Americas. His book concerning their grammatical systems (Mémoire sur le systeme grammatical des langues de quelques nations Indiennes de l'Amérique du Nord) won the Volney Prize
Volney prize
The Prix Volney is awarded by the Institute of France after proposition by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres to a work of comparative philology....

 of the French Institute in 1835.

DuPonceau was also one of the first western linguists to hold the view that Chinese character
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

s represent spoken words, not ideas. He used the example of Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

 using chữ Nôm at the time to show that the Vietnamese employed Chinese characters primarily for sound and not for meaning. It would be over 100 years before this idea would become accepted in linguistic circles.

External links

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