Peter A. Boodberg

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Peter Alexis Boodberg in American spelling, (April 8, 1903 - June 29, 1972) (originally Peter A. von Budberg, Russian: Baron Пётр Будберг, Пётр Алексеевич Будберг) was an American sinologist of Russian origin.

Boodberg came from a Baltic German family that traced their origins to 1006, and to German emigrants from Mainz to Estonia in the thirteenth century, fell under Russia when Russia annexed Estonia in the 1721, became a prominent diplomat and military family in the Imperial Russia, and had lived in Estonia for centuries. He was born in Vladivostok, where his father was commanding general of the Russian forces. At the outbreak of World War One he was a cadet at a military school in St. Petersburg. In 1915 he and his brother were sent for safety to Harbin in Manchuria, where he began the study of philology. From there he went to the Oriental Institute in Vladivostok and studied Chinese. In the summer of 1920 he left Russia and moved to San Francisco, where his family soon joined him; he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, getting a B.A. in Oriental Languages in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1930. In 1932 Berkeley hired him as an Instructor in Oriental Languages; he became an Associate Professor in 1937, Chairman of the department in 1940, and Full Professor in 1948, winning Guggenheim Fellowships in 1938, 1956, and 1963, in the latter year becoming President of the American Oriental Society. He continued to teach until his death (of a heart attack) in 1972, influencing several generations of sinologists, notably Edward H. Schafer, who wrote a long obituary article in the Journal of the American Oriental Society that was followed by a full bibliography by Alvin P. Cohen.

[edit] Publications

  • Some Proleptical Remarks on the Evolution of Archaic Chinese. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 (1937), 329-372.
  • Ideography� Iconolatry? Toung Pao 35 (1940), 266-288.
  • The Chinese Script: An Essay on Nomenclature (the First Hecaton). Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 39 (1957), 113-120
  • The Language of the T’o-Pa Wei
  • Two Notes on The History of The Chinese Frontier
  • Marginalia to The Histories of The Northern Dynasties
  • Chinese Zoographic Names as Chronograms
  • "An Early Mongolian Toponym", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 19(Dec. 1956), 407-408
  • Philological Notes on Chapter One of The Lao Tzu
  • Alvin P. Cohen, Selected Works of Peter A. Boodberg. University of California Press 1979 (Review)

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