AARON MARSHALL ELLIOTT

Background

Aaron Marshall Elliott was a son of Aaron and Rhoda (Mendenhall) Elliott, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States.

Education

Aaron Marshall Elliott received his early schooling in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Sent in 1862 by his Quaker parents past the military lines to co-religionists in the North, he was graduated from Haverford College in 1866 and again from Harvard in 1868.

He then spent eight years in Europe, following Oriental and Indo-European philological courses in the great university centers, studying at first hand the languages and the peoples of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and supporting himself the while by tutoring and writing travel sketches. After his return he still spent his summers in study abroad, and in addition to his command of the languages of western Europe, he learned Roumanian, Arabic, Russian and modern Greek, as well as Canadian French.

Career

In 1876 Elliott was appointed associate in languages in the first faculty of the Johns Hopkins, and in 1892 professor of the Romance languages.

He was the American pioneer in organizing the scientific study of the modern languages and literatures.

In 1886 he founded the first American technical journal in his field, Modern Language Notes, with at the beginning but one subscriber; he employed his own typesetter and during the first seventeen years issued this periodical from his own small press.

Contributions from his pen to the literature of his subject appeared in numerous journals and ranged from the most general themes to the most technical.

It was, however, as a trainer of scholars and teachers that Elliott made his deepest impression.

The graduate school of Romance languages, which he built up at Johns Hopkins’ sent out the majority of the leaders in that domain for a generation, and in addition he frequently, through correspondence, guided for years the studies of promising men whom he had not so much as seen.

As a token of the appreciation in which he was held by his fellows, several of his friends published a two-volume memorial, which appeared shortly after his death under the title, Studies in Honor of A. Marshall Elliott, His was a moral as well as an intellectual leadership.

Achievements

• In 1886 he founded the first American technical journal in his field, Modern Language Notes, with at the beginning but one subscriber. He employed his own typesetter and during the first seventeen years issued this periodical from his own small press.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Methods of Teaching Modern Languages: Papers On the Value and On Methods of Modern Language Instruction

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Studies in honor of A. Marshall Elliott

    (This book is a replica, produced from digital images of t...)

  • University Work In The Romance Languages (1892)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

Views

To a wide range of knowledge and a keen appreciation of scholarship and of the severe discipline which underlies it, he combined inexhaustible patience and geniality. These qualities, along with his sympathetic understanding, faith in men, tenacity in building with the material at hand, and his enduring optimism, secured for him the unquestioned leadership throughout the country in the development not alone of the Romance languages, but of all modern-language work, and he fortunately lived long enough to see this discipline assume in some measure the place he firmly believed that it merited in the intellectual activities of the nation.

Membership

In 1883 he brought about the establishment of the Modern Language Association, was for nine years its secretary and the editor of its publications, and was in 1894 its president.

Connections

He married, on June 14, 1905, Lily Tyson Manly, daughter of James E. Tyson of Ellicott City, Maryland.

Father:

Aaron Elliot

Mother:

Rhoda (Mendenhall) Elliot

Wife:

Lily Tyson Manly