Biography

He was born at Ebnat, Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

. His father, a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, was chaplain to King Leopold I of Belgium

Leopold I of Belgium

Leopold I was from 21 July 1831 the first King of the Belgians, following Belgium's independence from the Netherlands. He was the founder of the Belgian line of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha...

, and Jean Scheler, after studying at Bonn

Bonn

Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

 and Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

, became King's librarian, and professor at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Université Libre de Bruxelles

The Université libre de Bruxelles is a French-speaking university in Brussels, Belgium. It has 21,000 students, 29% of whom come from abroad, and an equally cosmopolitan staff.-Name:...

 (ULB). His investigations in Romance philology earned him a wide reputation. He died at Ixelles, Belgium, in 1890.

Works

The most important of his numerous philological works are:

• Mémoire sur la conjugaison française considérée sous le rapport étymologique (Brussels, 1847)
• Dictionnaire d'étymologie française d'après les résultats de la science moderne (Brussels, 1862)
• Étude sur la transformation française des mots latins (Ghent, 1869)

He also edited the fourth edition of Diez

Friedrich Christian Diez

Friedrich Christian Diez , German philologist, was born at Gießen, in Hessen-Darmstadt.He was educated first at the gymnasium and then at the university of his native town and Göttingen...

's Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen (Bonn, 1878), and completed Grandgagnage's Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue wallonne (Louvain, 1880). He also published several critical editions of Middle Ages texts, including one of Les Poésies de Froissart (Brussels, 1870–1872), and a monograph Sur le séjour de l'apôtre saint Pierre a Rome (Brussels, 1845), which was translated into German and English.