Abel Hovelacque (14 November 1843 – 22 February 1896) was a 19th-century French linguist, anthropologist and politician.
Biography Abel Hovelacque was a representative of the naturalistic and anthropological linguistics. He studied languages with Honoré Chavée and comparative anatomy with Paul Broca. He was a founder of the , in which he was made professor of linguistic ethnography, and of which, after the death of Jules Gavarret, he became director (1890). He was a member of the Society of Anthropology of Paris. In 1886 Hovelacque and Chavée founded the Revue de Linguistique. That same year, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
He was also interested in politics. He served on the which he presided in 1887–1888. He became MP for Paris (13th) from 1889 to 1894.Notice biographique sur le site de l'Assemblée nationale, par Jean Jolly. He was an extreme Republican.
The in Paris was named after him as well as two others in Lille and Saint Etienne. The anatomist André Hovelacque (1880-1939) was his son.
Publications Grammaire de la langue zende, Maisonneuve, 1868 Ré-edition Hachette BnF, 2013 La Linguistique, Reinwald, 1877 Notre ancêtre, recherches d'anatomie et d'ethnologie sur le précurseur de l'homme, Leroux, 1878 Études de linguistique et d'ethnographie, Reinwald, 1878 Les débuts de l'humanité : L'homme primitif contemporain, Doin, 1881 Les Races humaines, Cerf, 1882
Sources Piet Desmet, La linguistique naturaliste en France (1867-1922). Nature, origine et évolution du langage, Louvain, 1994, p. 224-287. Read online.
References
External links
Abel Hovelacque on Wikisource