Adelung

Adelung, Johann Christoph, born at Spantekow, in Pomerania, 1732; appointed professor at the gymnasium of Erfurt 1759, but resigning two years later, he resided as a private litterateur at Leipsic until 1787, when the Elector of Saxony made him his librarian, with the title of Hofrath. His life was devoted to study, and he did much to fix the standard of his native tongue, then despised and broken up into dialects. Somewhat arbitrarily he set up the idiom of Upper Saxony as the perfection of German, and attempted to force grammar and vocabulary into conformity with that ideal; still his Dictionary of the German Language remains a monument of industry and erudition. In his incomplete work Mithridates he laid the foundation of the science of comparative philology. He died in 1806.