Jean-Philippe Baratier
Jean-Philippe Baratier (also Johann Philipp Baratier; 19 January 1721 – 5 October 1740) was a German scholar. A noted child prodigy of the 18th century, he published eleven works and authored a great quantity of unpublished manuscripts.
Life
[edit]Jean-Philippe Baratier was born on 19 January 1721 in the town of Schwabach, near Nuremburg to Francois Baratier (1682–1751)[1], a Huguenot minister at the local French Church.[2] His father carefully conducted his early education, usually eschewing direct instruction for more subtle methods of teaching. He taught him in this manner to be able to read words at the age of 3, only after which he introduced him to book-reading. His father then taught him Latin by gradually incorporating more Latin in his conversations with him, so that by his 4th birthday he was as familiar with Latin as he was with his native French and German.[3] At the age of 4, his father began to teach him Greek, and by the end of 15 months (at the age of 5) he was reportedly able to translate the historical books of the Bible from Greek to Latin. He was at the age of 5 years and 8 months introduced to Hebrew, and by a year later he knew perfectly well entire parts of the Hebrew Bible.[4]
His progress was so rapid that by the time he was five years of age he could speak French, Latin and Dutch with ease, and read Greek fluently. He then studied Hebrew, and in three years was able to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin or French. He collected materials for a dictionary of rare and difficult Hebrew words, with critical and philological observations; and when he was about eleven years old translated from the Hebrew Tudela’s Itinerarium.[5]
At 14, he was admitted master of arts at Halle, and received into the Prussian Academy of Sciences, while working on a method to calculate longitude at sea. The last years of his short life he devoted to the study of history of the Jewish people and antiquities, did translations, and had collected materials for histories of the Thirty Years' War and of Antitrinitarianism, and for an inquiry concerning Egyptian antiquities. His health, which had always been weak, gave way completely under these labours, and he died at the age of nineteen.[5]
In 1741, Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey wrote a biography of him, published at Utrecht. Samuel Johnson also wrote a biography of him, first published in 1740 in The Gentleman's Magazine.
References
[edit]- ^ Brun-Durand, Justin (1900). Dictionnaire Biographique et Biblio-Iconographique de la Drôme (in French). Grenoble: Librairie Dauphinoise. p. 61.
- ^ Johnson 1744, p. 2.
- ^ Formey 1743, pp. 246–247.
- ^ Formey 1743, p. 247.
- ^ a b Chisholm 1911.
- Formey, Jean-Henri-Samuel (1743), The Life of John Philip Baratier,: The Prodigy of this Age for Genius and Learning; Created, at Fourteen Years Old, Master of Arts, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Berlin, London: J. Robinson, at the Golden Lion, in Ludgate-street.
- Johnson, Samuel (1744), An Account of the Life of John Philip Barretier, Who was Master of Five Languages at the Age of Nine Years (PDF), London: J. Roberts
Attribution:
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Baratier, Johann Philipp". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 380.
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