Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy

Silvestre de Sacy.

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (21 September 1758 – 21 February 1838), was a French linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.

Life and works

Early life

Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Abraham Silvestre, of Jewish origin.^[1] The additional name of de Sacy was taken by the younger son after a fashion then common with the Parisian bourgeoisie. Sacy's father died when he was seven years old, and he was educated in isolation by his mother.

Philological studies

In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was advanced in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department. Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787-1791 worked on the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes).

During this interval Sacy studied the religion of the Druze, the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Exposé de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). He published the following Arabic textbooks:

• Grammaire arabe (2 vols., 1st ed. 1810)
• Chrestomathie arabe (3 vols., 1806)
• Anthologie grammaticale (1829)

In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days.

Silvestre de Sacy was a contemporary and teacher of Champollion. He made some progress in identifying proper names in the demotic inscription on the Rosetta Stone.

Public offices

He was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions from 1832 onwards; in 1808 he had entered the corps législatif; he was made a baron in 1813; and in 1832, when quite an old man, be became a peer of France and was regular in the duties of the chamber. In 1815 he became rector of the University of Paris, and after the Second Restoration he was active on the commission of public instruction. With Abel Rémusat, he was joint founder of the Société asiatique, and was inspector of oriental types at the Imprimerie nationale.

Other scholarly works

Among his other works are his edition of Hariri (1822), with a selected Arabic commentary, and of the Alfiya (1833), and his Calila et Dimna (1816), the Arabic version of that famous collection of Buddhist animal tales which has been in various forms one of the most popular books of the world. A version of Abd-el-Latif, Relation arabe sur l'Egypte, and essays on the history of the law of property in Egypt since the Arab conquest (1805–1818). To biblical criticism he contributed a memoir on the Samaritan Arabic of the Pentateuch (Mém. Acad. des Inscr. vol. xlix), and editions of the Arabic and Syriac New Testaments for the British and Foreign Bible Society. His students include Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer.

Critical studies

Modern scholars like Edward Said and others have given critical attention to the theoretical foundations of "orientalism" in works like Chrestomathie arabe.^[2]

Famous students

• Jean-François Champollion, orientalist, translator of the Rosetta stone
• John Martin Augustine Scholz, Professor in Bonn
• Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Professor in Leipzig
• Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten, Professor in Jena and in Greifswald
• August Ferdinand Mehren, Professor in Copenhagen
• Justus Olshausen, Professor in Kiel
• Johann Gustav Stickel (1805–1896), Professor in Jena
• Carl Johan Tornberg (1807–77), Professor in Uppsala^[3]
• Louis-Mathieu Langlès, Curator, Bibliothèque Nationale
• Adam Franz Lennig, German Catholic theologian, and one of the most influential German priests of his day.

De Sacy assisted the young composer Fromental Halévy in his early career, giving him a testimonial during his application for the Prix de Rome.

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 1,000+ works in 1,000+ publications in 16 languages and 3,000+ library holdings.^[4]

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 2 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. http://books.google.com/books?id=97tCAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 1 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. pp. 8. http://books.google.com/books?id=BlPRAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 2 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. http://books.google.com/books?id=HdoUAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 2 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. http://books.google.com/books?id=YJBAAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 1 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. pp. 8. http://books.google.com/books?id=atwUAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1831). Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes: avec figures, Volume 1 (2 ed.). Imprimerie royale. pp. 8. http://books.google.com/books?id=zZBAAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• Mémoires sur diverses antiquités de la Perse: et sur les médailles des rois de la dynastie des Sassanides; suivis de l'histoire de cette dynastie (1793)
• Principes de grammaire générale : mis à la portée des enfans, et propres à servir d'introduction à l'étude de toutes les langues (1799)
• Mémoire sur divers événements de l'histoire des Arabes avant Mahomet (1803)
• Chrestomathie arabe, ou, Extraits de divers écrivains arabes, tant en prose qu'en vers, avec une traduction française et des notes, à l'usage des élèves de l'École royale et spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1806)
• Specimen historiae arabum by Bar Hebraeus (1806)
• Mémoire sur la dynastie des Assassins et sur l'origine de leur nom (1809)
• Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1810)
• Les séances de Hariri, publiées en arabe avec un commentaire choisi by Ḥarīrī (1822)
• Anthologie grammaticale arabe: ou, Morceaux choisis de divers grammairiens et scholiastes arabes, avec une traduction française et des notes ; pouvant faire suite a la Chrestomathie arabe (1829)
• Grammaire arabe à l'usage des élèves de l'Ecole spéciale des langues orientales vivantes (1831)
• Exposé de la religion des druzes, tiré des livres religieux de cette secte, et précédé d'une introduction et de la Vie du khalife Hakem-biamr-Allah (1838)
• Les mille et une nuits; contes arabes (1839)
• Bibliothèque de M. le baron Silvestre de Sacy (1846)
• Mélanges de littérature orientale (1861)

References

1. ^ Ruth Jordan,Fromental Halevy, London (1994) ISBN 187108251X, p. 13,
2. ^ Spanos, William V. (2003). The Legacy of Edward W. Said, p. 101. at Google Books
3. ^ sv:Carl Johan Tornberg
4. ^ WorldCat Identities: Silvestre de Sacy, A. I. (Antoine Isaac) 1758-1838

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Persondata
Name	Sacy, Silvestre De
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Date of birth	21 September 1758
Place of birth
Date of death	21 February 1838
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