Abel Hovelacque (14 November 1843 – 22 February 1896) was a 19th-century French linguist, anthropologist and politician.
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Biography
Abel Hovelacque was a representative of the naturalistic and anthropological linguistics. He studied languages with Honoré Chavée and comparative anatomy with Paul Broca. He was a founder of the École d'anthropologie, in which he was made professor of linguistic ethnography, and of which, after the death of Jules Gavarret, he became director (1890). He was a member of the Society of Anthropology of Paris. In 1886 Hovelacque and Chavée founded the Revue de Linguistique. That same year, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
He was also interested in politics. He served on the Conseil municipal de Paris which he presided in 1887–1888. He became MP for Paris (13th) from 1889 to 1894. He was an extreme Republican.
The rue Abel-Hovelacque in Paris was named after him as well as two others in Lille and Saint Etienne. The anatomist André Hovelacque (1880-1939) was his son.
Publications
Grammaire de la langue zende, Maisonneuve, 1868 Ré-edition Hachette BnF, 2013
La Linguistique, Reinwald, 1877
Notre ancêtre, recherches d'anatomie et d'ethnologie sur le précurseur de l'homme, Leroux, 1878
Études de linguistique et d'ethnographie, Reinwald, 1878
Les débuts de l'humanité : L'homme primitif contemporain, Doin, 1881
Les Races humaines, Cerf, 1882