Victor Henry

Victor Henry (1850 - 1907), French philologist, was born at Colmar in Alsace.

Having held appointments at Douai and Lille, he was appointed professor of Sanskrit and comparative grammar in the university of Paris. A prolific and versatile writer, he is probably best known by the English translations of his Précis de Grammaire comparée de l'anglais et de l'allemand and Précis ... du Grec et du Latin.

Important works by him on India and Indian languages are:

• Manuel pour étudier le Sanscrit védique (with Abel Bergaigne, 1890)
• Elements de Sanscrit classique (1902)
• Précis de grammaire pâlie (1904)
• Les littératures de l'Inde: sanscrit, pâli, prâcrit (1904)
• La Magie dans l'Inde antique (1904)
• Le Parséisme (1905)
• L'Agni,ftoma (1906)

Obscure languages (such as Innok, Quechua, Greenland) and local dialects (Lexique Étymologique du Breton modern; Le Diaiecte Alaman de Colmar) also claimed his attention.

Le Langage Martien is a curious book. It contains a discussion of some 40 phrases (amounting to about 500 words), which a certain Mademoiselle Héléne Smith (a well-known spiritualist medium of Geneva), while on a hypnotic visit to the planet Mars, learnt and repeated and even wrote down during her trance as specimens of a language spoken there, explained to her by a disembodied interpreter.

---