Roland Grubb Kent
American linguist; founder of the Linguistic Society of America
Roland Grubb Kent (February 24, 1877 – June 27, 1952) was an American educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). He was the first person to translate Marcus Terentius Varro's De Lingua Latina into English.
Kent's 1903 doctoral thesis on the history of Thessaly traces the history of the country with particular attention to the times between 600 and 300 BC. Unfortunately, only Chapter V and two appendices were published, and the bulk of his dissertation is currently lost. His Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon is one of the seminal works on the subject.
Biography
Kent was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1877 to Lindley Coates Kent and Anna Grubb Kent. Lindley Kent was a decorated American Civil War officer and owner of a successful Wilmington lumber business. Anna Kent was a descendant of John Grubb, an early Delaware settler.
After receiving his M.A. from Swarthmore College in 1898, Roland Kent continued his classical education at Berlin and Munich universities before completing his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1903, Roland obtained his Ph.D. with a thesis on the history of Thessaly.
Kent was appointed Instructor in Greek language and Latin at the University of Pennsylvania in 1904, where he taught for the rest of his career.
The public source identifies “Roland Grubb Kent” as american linguist; founder of the Linguistic Society of America. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Roland, Grubb and Kent.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roland Grubb Kent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.