Casimir Mondon-Vidailhet (February 1, 1847 - November 30, 1910) was a French journalist,
philologist
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...
and author.
Life
François Marie Casimir Mondon-Vidailhet was born in
Saint-Gaudens, in
Haute-Garonne
Haute-Garonne (; , ; ''Upper Garonne'') is a department in the southwestern French region of Occitanie. Named after the river Garonne, which flows through the department. Its prefecture and main city is Toulouse, the country's fourth-largest. ...
.
He was journalist for ''
Le Temps
' (, ) is a Swiss French-language daily newspaper published in Berliner format in Geneva by Le Temps SA. The paper was launched in 1998, formed out of the merger of two other newspapers, and (the former being a merger of two other papers), ...
''. In this role, he left France for
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...
in 1891, and stayed there from 1892 to 1893 and from 1894 to 1897.
He was professor at
École nationale des langues orientales vivantes
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (; ), abbreviated as INALCO, is a French Grand Etablissement with a specializing in the teaching of languages and cultures from the world. Its coverage spans languages of Central Europ ...
, where he was the first occupant of the chair of
Amharic
Amharic is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amhara people, and also serves as a lingua franca for all other metropolitan populati ...
, which he taught from 1898 to 1910. He was succeeded by
Marcel Cohen
Marcel Samuel Raphaël Cohen (February 6, 1884 – November 5, 1974) was a French linguist. He was an important scholar of Semitic languages and especially of Ethiopian languages. He studied the French language and contributed much to general lin ...
.
Works
Works by Mondon-Vidailhet include:
*Over 65 articles published in ''Le Temps'' between 1892 and 1910
*
*
* (reprint of posthumous 1922 article)
See also
*
Ethiopian manuscript collections
Ethiopian manuscript collections are found in many parts of the world, the monasteries and modern institutions in Ethiopia maintaining extensive collections with some monasteries still centres of manuscript production.
Parchment (''berānnā'') ...
*
Harari language
Harari is an Ethio-Semitic language spoken by the Harari people of Ethiopia. Old Harari is a literary language of the city of Harar, a central hub of Islam in the Horn of Africa. According to the 2007 Ethiopian census, it is spoken by 25,810 pe ...
Notes
References
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Further reading
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1847 births
1910 deaths
French philologists
19th-century philologists
20th-century French philologists
19th-century French journalists
20th-century French journalists
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