Roland Grubb Kent

Roland Grubb Kent was an American Educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America. He was the first to translate Varro's De Lingua Latina into English. His 1903 doctoral thesis on the history of Thessaly traces the history of the country with particular attention to the times between 600 and 300 BC. Unfortunately, only Chapter V and two appendices were published, and the bulk of his dissertation is currently lost. His Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon is one of the seminal works on the subject.^[1]

Biography

Kent was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1877 into the family of Lindley Coates Kent and Anna Grubb Kent. Lindley was a decorated Civil War officer and owner of a successful Wilmington lumber business. Anna was a descendant of John Grubb, the early Delaware settler.^[2] After receiving his M.A. from Swarthmore College in 1898, Roland continued his classical education at Berlin and Munich universities before completing his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1903, Roland obtained his Ph.D. with a thesis on the history of Thessaly.^[1]

Doctor Kent was appointed Instructor in Greek and Latin at the University of Pennsylvania in 1904, beginning a lifelong career at the university. In 1909 he became Assistant Professor of comparative philology, and he was promoted to full professor in 1916; from 1942 to his retirement in 1947 his title was Professor of Indo-European linguistics.^[1]

Roland was one of the founding fathers of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), and from the beginning in 1924 to 1940 he was its secretary-treasurer, before he was elected as president of the LSA for the year 1941.^[1]

Major works by Roland Kent

• A History of Thessaly from the Earliest Historical Times to the Accession of Philip V of Macedonia, Lancaster, Pa., 1904 (printing of Chap. V, Apps. I-II of the Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1903).^[1]
• “Studies in the Old Persian Inscriptions,” JAOS 35, 1918, pp. 321–52.^[1]
• (with James R. Ware) “The Old Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions of Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 55, 1924, pp. 52–61.^[1]
• The Textual Criticism of Inscriptions, Language Monographs 2, Philadelphia, 1926; repr., New York, 1966.^[1]
• “The Recently Published Old Persian Inscriptions,” JAOS 51, 1931, pp. 189–240.^[1]
• The Sounds of Latin: A Descriptive and Historical Phonology, Language Monographs 12, Baltimore, 1932; 3rd ed., 1945; repr., Millwood, N.Y., 1979.^[1]
• “The Name Ahuramazda,” in Jal Dastur Cursetji Pavry, ed., Oriental Studies in honour of Cursetji Erachji Pavry, London, 1933, pp. 200–208.^[1]
• “The Present Status of Old Persian Studies,” JAOS 56, 1936, pp. 208–25.^[1]
• Varro: On the Latin Language, with an English Translation, ed. Roland G. Kent, 2 vols., London and Cambridge, Mass., 1938 (The Loeb Classical Library, 333-334; many reprints).^[1]
• The Forms of Latin: A Descriptive and Historical Morphology, Baltimore, Md., 1946.^[1]
• Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon, New Haven, Conn., 1950 (American Oriental Series, 33; 2nd ed., 1953, many reprints).^[1]

References

External links

Varro, Marcus Terentius; Kent, Roland G. (1938). On the Latin language – with an English translation by Roland G. Kent, Ph. D. 1. London: William Heinemann Ltd.