Name Peter Du | Role Philosopher | |
 | ||
Born June 3, 1760 Saint-Martin-de-Re, France Books A Dissertation on the Nature and Extent of the Jurisdiction of the Courts of the United States: Being a Valedictory Address Delivered to the Students of the Law Academy of Philadelphia ... on the 22d April, 1824 | ||
Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (June 3, 1760, Saint-Martin-de-Ré, France – April 1, 1844, Philadelphia, United States) (also Pierre-Étienne du Ponceau) was a French-American linguist, philosopher, and jurist. After emigrating to the colonies in 1777, he served in the American Revolutionary War. Afterward, he settled in Philadelphia, where he lived the remainder of his years. He contributed significantly to work on the indigenous languages of the Americas, as well as advancing the understanding of written Chinese.
Contents
Early life and war career
Du Ponceau studied at a Benedictine college, where he gained an interest in linguistics. 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, who was 30 years his senior.
Du Ponceau served as a secretary to Steuben in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. After the war, he settled in Philadelphia, where he would spend the rest of his life. He was a good friend of Lafayette.
Work in philosophy and linguistics
Du Ponceau joined the American Philosophical Society in 1791 and later served as its president, from 1827 until his death. He became notable in the field of linguistics for his analysis of Indigenous languages of the Americas; as a member of Society's Historical and Literary Committee, he helped build a collection of texts that described and recorded 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 of the French Institute in 1835. In 1816 he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society, and he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1820.
Du Ponceau also worked on Asian languages. He was one of the first Western linguists to reject axiomatic classification of Chinese writing as ideographic. Du Ponceau stated:
- That the Chinese system of writing is not, as has been supposed, ideographic; that its characters do not represent ideas, but words, and therefore I have called it lexigraphic.
- That ideographic writing is a creature of the imagination, and cannot exist, but for very limited purposes, which do not entitle it to the name of writing.
- That among men endowed with the gift of speech, all writing must be a direct representation of the spoken language, and cannot present ideas to the mind abstracted from it.
- That all writing, as far as we know, represents language in some of its elements, which are words, syllables, and simple sounds. In the first case it is lexigraphic, in the second syllabic, and in the third alphabetical or elementary.
He used the example of Vietnamese (called "Cochinchinese" at the time) using chữ Nôm, a modified form of Chinese characters, showing that the Vietnamese used the Chinese characters to represent sound and not meaning. One hundred years later, his theory remained a source of controversy.