The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Buschmann, Johann Karl Eduard

BUSCHMANN, Johann Karl Eduard, a German philologist, born in Magdeburg, Feb. 14, 1805. He studied in Berlin under Böckh, Wolf, and Hegel, and at Göttingen under Bopp. In 1827-'8 he was a tutor in Mexico, where he gave much attention to the Aztec and other languages. On his return to Germany he was introduced by Bopp to Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom he assisted from 1829 to 1835 in the preparation of his celebrated work on the Kavi language in Java. After Humboldt's death (1835) he was the sole author of the third volume, containing a comparative grammar of the South sea and Malay languages, and was charged by the Berlin academy with editing the whole work (3 vols., Berlin, 1836-'40). Buschmann also published Humboldt's vocabulary of the Tahitian language in his Aperçu de la langue des îles Marquises et la langue taïtienne (1843). Alexander von Humboldt employed him to prepare the original manuscript of his Kosmos (1845-'59), of which the last MS. volume, corrected by Humboldt, was in 1866 presented by Buschmann to the emperor Napoleon, who gave it to the imperial library in Paris. Buschmann was made professor in 1840, and director of the royal library at Berlin in 1853. Among his principal works are: Die aztekischen Ortsnamen (Berlin, 1853); Die Spuren der aztekischen Sprachen im nördlichen Mexico und höhern amerikanischen Norden (1859); Das Apache und der athapaskische Sprachstamm (3 vols., 1860-'63); and Grammatik der sonorischen Sprachen (3 parts, Berlin, 1864-'8).