Peter Stephen Du Ponceau  Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (born Pierre-Étienne du Ponceau, June 3, 1760 – April 1, 1844) was a French-American linguist, philosopher, and jurist. After emigrating to the colonies in 1777, he served in the American Revolutionary War. Afterward, he settled in Philadelphia, where he lived the remainder of his years. He contributed significantly to work on the indigenous languages of the Americas, as well as advancing the understanding of written Chinese. Du Ponceau's fondness for languages began when he was six. He studied at a Benedictine college until he abruptly ended his education, after only 18 months, over a dissatisfaction with the scholarly philosophy taught there. When he was 17, he emigrated to America in 1777 with Baron von Steuben, who was 30 years older. Du Ponceau served as a secretary to Steuben in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. After the war, he settled in Philadelphia, where he spent the rest of his life. Among his acquaintances were many important figures of the American Revolution, including Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, Lafayette and James Monroe. Du Ponceau joined the American Philosophical Society in 1791 and served as its president, from 1827 to his death. He became notable in linguistics for his analysis of the indigenous languages of the Americas. As a member of the society's Historical and Literary Committee, he helped build a collection of texts that described and recorded native languages. His book on their grammatical systems ("Mémoire sur le systeme grammatical des langues de quelques nations Indiennes de l'Amérique du Nord") won the Volney Prize of the Institute of France in 1835. In 1816, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society, and in 1820, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Du Ponceau also worked on Asian languages and was one of the first Western linguists to reject the axiomatic classification of Chinese writing as ideographic. Du Ponceau stated: He used the example of Vietnamese, then called "Cochinchinese," which used Chữ Nôm, a modified form of Chinese characters. He showed that Vietnamese used the Chinese characters to represent sound, not meaning. A hundred years later, his theory was still a source of controversy. He died on April 1, 1844 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and is interred at Mount Vernon Cemetery.