Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Pyrlæus, John Christopher

PYRLÆUS, John Christopher, German missionary, b. in Pausa, Voigtland, in 1713; d. in Herrnhut, Saxony, 28 May, 1779. He studied at the University of Leipsic in 1733-'8, entered the ministry of the Moravian church, and was sent to Pennsylvania in 1740. He engaged in the study of the Mohawk and Mohican languages, and in 1744 organized a school for the instruction of missionaries in these dialects. In 1745 his first translations of hymns into Mohican appeared. He returned to Europe in 1751. His contributions to the department of American philology, for which his high scholarship well qualified him, were “A Collection of Words and Phrases in the Iroquois or Onondaga Language explained into German”; “Affixa Nominum et Verborum Linguæ Macquaicæ,” with which are bound Iroquois vocabularies; and “Adjectiva, Nomina et Pronomia Linguæ; Macquaicæ, cum nonnullis de Verbis, Adverbiis, ac Præpositionibus ejusdem Linguæ.”