- Sylvester Primer
Sylvester Primer was a linguist and philologist. Born in
Geneva, Wisconsin onDecember 14 ,1842 , but moved to New York as a child. He served in theAmerican Civil War underSheridan andCuster in the 108th New York Infantry and the Fifteenth New York Cavalry and was wounded atAntietam . After the war, he took to language studies atHarvard (bachelor's degree, 1874),Leipzig ,Göttingen , andStrasbourg , receiving his Ph.D at the last institution in 1880.He first directed scholarly attention towards the unique dialect of
Charleston, South Carolina in a paper he delivered at theModern Language Association of America in 1887. This pioneering work, "Charleston Provincialisms", is one of the first attempts to describe the speech of an American community and besides being published as part of the "Transactions of the Modern Language Association", vol. III, p. 84-99; was also published in Europe in "Phonetische Studien", vol. i, p. 227; and in the "American Journal of Philology", IX (1888), p. 198-213.Another piece on Charleston is entitled, "The
Huguenot Element in Charleston's Provincialisms," published in "Phonetische Studien", vol. iii, p. 139.Besides teaching at the
College of Charleston , he also taught at the Friend's School inProvidence, RI andColorado College . He joined theUniversity of Texas at Austin in 1891, where he was professor of Germanic languages and director of the university's program in Romance languages. He died onAugust 13 ,1912 .Among his other principal works are: "Dialectical Studies in
West Virginia ," published in "Colorado College Studies" (1891); "The Pronunciation ofFredericksburg, Va. " in "Pub. Modern Language Association", vol. v, p. 185.; also, "The Pronunciation Near Fredericksburg, Va.," published in the "Proceedings of the American Philological Association" (1889), p. xxv.Also, "Die Consonatische Deklination in den germanischen Sprachen" (1880), and annotated scholarly editions of
Lessing 's "Minna von Barnhelm" (1889) and "Nathan der Weise" (1894) andGoethe 's "Egmont" (1898).His seminal works on Charleston's unique and vanishing dialect continue to be among the most important scholarly contributions to the subject today.
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