Alexander Murray was a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and professor of Orient

Orient

The Orient means "the East." It is a traditional designation for anything that belongs to the Eastern world or the Far East, in relation to Europe. In English it is a metonym that means various parts of Asia.- Derivation :...

al languages in Edinburgh University (1812)

Murray was born at Dunkitterick, Kirkcudbrightshire

Kirkcudbrightshire

The Stewartry of Kirkcudbright or Kirkcudbrightshire was a county of south-western Scotland. It was also known as East Galloway, forming the larger Galloway region with Wigtownshire....

, and after graduating from Edinburgh University, became parish minister of Urr

Haugh of Urr

Haugh of Urr, is a village in the Urr parish, Kirkcudbrightshire, in South West Scotland. It is approximately NNW of Dalbeattie, NE of Castle Douglas, 12½ miles west of Dumfries and 12½ miles east of Kirkcudbright. It is pronounced hoch of ur, with Haugh rhyming with the Scottish pronunciation of...

 in his native shire

Shire

A shire is a traditional term for a division of land, found in the United Kingdom and in Australia. In parts of Australia, a shire is an administrative unit, but it is not synonymous with "county" there, which is a land registration unit. Individually, or as a suffix in Scotland and in the far...

. Amongst his works are his editions of Bruce

James Bruce

James Bruce was a Scottish traveller and travel writer who spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia, where he traced the origins of the Blue Nile.-Youth:...

's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773 (1805; new edition, 1813), wrote for his students Outlines of Oriental philology (1812), and contributed to the Edinburgh Review

Edinburgh Review

The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, was one of the most influential British magazines of the 19th century. It ceased publication in 1929. The magazine took its Latin motto judex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur from Publilius Syrus.In 1984, the Scottish cultural magazine New Edinburgh Review,...

. After his death appeared his chief work, History of the European Languages, with a memoir

Memoir

A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...

 and the fragment of an autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

(two volumes, Edinburgh, 1823).