Sylvester Primer

Sylvester Primer was a linguist and philologist. Born in Geneva, Wisconsin on December 14, 1842, but moved to New York as a child. He served in the American Civil War, first in Company E of the 105th Regiment New York Volunteer Infantry from Genesee County, New York when he was wounded during the Battle of Antietam. Sylvester later enlisted in and served with the Fifteenth New York Cavalry.

After the war, he took to language studies at Harvard (bachelor's degree, 1874), Leipzig, Göttingen, and Strasbourg, receiving his Ph.D at the last institution in 1880. He first directed scholarly attention towards the unique dialect of Charleston, South Carolina in a paper he delivered at the Modern Language Association of America in 1887. This pioneering work, Charleston Provincialisms, is one of the first attempts to describe the speech of an American community and besides being published as part of the Transactions of the Modern Language Association, vol. III, p. 84-99; was also published in Europe in Phonetische Studien, vol. i, p. 227; and in the American Journal of Philology, IX (1888), p. 198-213.

Another piece on Charleston is entitled, The Huguenot Element in Charleston's Provincialisms, published in Phonetische Studien, vol. iii, p. 139.

Besides teaching at the College of Charleston, he also taught at the Friend's School in Providence, RI and Colorado College. He joined the University of Texas at Austin in 1891, where he was professor of Germanic languages and director of the university's program in Romance languages. He died on August 13, 1912.

Among his other principal works are: Dialectical Studies in West Virginia, published in Colorado College Studies (1891); The Pronunciation of Fredericksburg, Va. in Pub. Modern Language Association, vol. v, p. 185.; also, The Pronunciation Near Fredericksburg, Va., published in the Proceedings of the American Philological Association (1889), p. xxv.

Also, Die Consonatische Deklination in den germanischen Sprachen (1880), and annotated scholarly editions of Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm (1889) and Nathan der Weise (1894) and Goethe's Egmont (1898).

His seminal works on Charleston's unique and vanishing dialect continue to be among the most important scholarly contributions to the subject today.