Johann Philipp Baratier

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Johann Philipp Baratier (January 10, 1721, Schwabach near Nuremberg – October 5, 1740) was a German scholar who in a very short life published eleven works and authored a great quantity of unpublished manuscript.

Baratier's early education was most carefully conducted by his father, the pastor of the French church at Schwabach, and so rapid was his progress that by the time he was five years of age he could speak French, Latin and Dutch with ease, and read Greek fluently. He then studied Hebrew, and in three years was able to translate the Hebrew Bible into Latin or French. He collected materials for a dictionary of rare and difficult Hebrew words, with critical and philological observations; and when he was about eleven years old translated from the Hebrew Tudela’s Itinerarium.

In his fourteenth year he was admitted master of arts at Halle, and received into the Royal Academy at Berlin. The last years of his short life he devoted to the study of history and antiquities, and had collected materials for histories of the Thirty Years' War and of Antitrinitarianism, and for an Inquiry concerning Egyptian antiquities. His health, which had always been weak, gave way completely under these labours, and he died at the age of nineteen.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.