French philologist, born at Colmar in Alsace. Having held appointments at Douai and Lille, he was appointed professor of Sanskrit and comparative grammar in the university of Paris. A prolific and versatile writer, he is probably best known by the English translations of his Précis de Grammaire comparée de l’anglais et de l’allemand and Précis … du Grec et du Latin. Important works by him on India and Indian languages are the following: Manuel pour étudier le Sanscrit vedique (with A. Bergaigne, 1890); Éléments de Sanscrit classique (1902); Précis de grammaire Pâlie (1904); Les Littératures de l’Inde: Sanscrit, Pâli, Prâcrit (1904); La Magie dans l’Inde antique (1904); Le Parsisme (1905); L’Agnistoma (1906). Obscure languages (such as Innok, Quichua, Greenland) and local dialects (Lexique étymologique du Breton moderne; Le Dialecte Alaman de Colmar) also claimed his attention. Le Langage Martien is a curious book. It contains a discussion of some 40 phrases (amounting to about 300 words), which a certain Mademoiselle Hélène Smith (a well-known spiritualist medium of Geneva), while on a hypnotic visit to the planet Mars, learnt and repeated and even wrote down during her trance as specimens of a language spoken there, explained to her by a disembodied interpreter. He died at Sceaux, near Paris, in February 1907.
