author
Joseph Wright
1855–1930
Rising from a Yorkshire mill town to a chair at Oxford, this self-taught scholar became one of the great champions of English dialects. His work opened up older forms of English and Germanic languages for generations of students and readers.
1 Audiobook
A Middle High German Primer Third Edition
by Joseph Wright
About the author
Born in 1855 near Bradford, Joseph Wright grew up in poverty and began working as a child, but educated himself through night study and sheer persistence. He went on to become an English philologist and later Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford.
Wright is especially remembered for editing the monumental English Dialect Dictionary and for writing influential grammars and primers on Old and Middle English, Gothic, and other Germanic languages. His scholarship helped preserve regional speech at a time when many local dialects were disappearing from everyday life.
His life story is often noted as remarkable in itself: a boy from industrial Yorkshire who, through self-education and scholarship, became one of Britain’s leading language scholars. He died in 1930, leaving behind a body of work still valued by historians of language and literature.