Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Tafel, Johann Friedrich Leonhard

TAFEL, Johann Friedrich Leonhard, educator, b. in Sulzbach, Würtemberg, Germany, 6 Feb., 1800. He was graduated at Tübingen in 1820, and was professor for many years at the gymnasia of Stuttgart, Ulm, and Schorndorf, introducing the Hamiltonian interlinear method of teaching languages, and editing several periodicals, among which was the “Beobachter,” a daily paper devoted to the interests of the Liberal party (1849-'53). He came to this country in 1853, was for three years professor in Urbana university, Ohio, and then removed to St. Louis, Mo. He is the author of several text-books of ancient and modern languages, translated into German the works of Xenophon and Dion Cassius, and select novels of Charles Dickens, William M. Thackeray, and James Fenimore Cooper, and published “Staat und Christenthum” (Tübingen, 1851); “Der Christ und der Atheist” (Philadelphia, 1856); and with his son, Ludwig H. Tafel, a “German-English and English-German Pocket Dictionary” (1870). — His son, Rudolph Leonhard, educator, b. in Ulm, Germany, 24 Nov., 1831, came to the United States in 1847, and in 1860-'1 was teacher of French and German in Washington university, St. Louis, Mo. He held the chair of modern languages and comparative philology there from 1862 till 1868, and since the last-named year has been a Swedenborgian minister in London, England. He has published “Latin Pronunciation and the Latin Alphabet” with his father (New York, 1860); “Investigation into the Laws of English Pronunciation and Orthography” (1862); and “Emanuel Swedenborg as a Philosopher and Man of Science ” (Chicago, 1867).