Prince was born in New York City in 1868, the son of John Dyneley Prince and Anna Maria Prince. His paternal grandparents were John Dyneley Prince and Mary Prince. His maternal grandparents were Thomas H. Morris and Mary Morris. After the death of his father in 1883, his mother remarried to Dr. Alfred Lebbeus Loomis, who served as president of the Association of American Physicians. His step brother was Henry Patterson Loomis. He attended Columbia Grammar School. Prince had a strong interest in foreign languages as a child, acquiring basic skills in speaking the Romani and Shelta languages by the age of 12, after reading Charles Godfrey Leland's ethnographic accounts of the Gypsies. As retold in his 1939 memoir Fragments from Babel, he ran away with another boy from their families in New York to a gypsy camp near Newark, New Jersey, where they spent three days and were accepted because of his proficiency in their language. He also learned Welsh and Turkish in his youth. Prince attended Columbia University, graduating with a B.A. in 1888. He represented Columbia on the University of Pennsylvania's Babylonian expedition, where Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire heard of his language skills and made him an honorary captain of the troops that protected the expedition, after conversing with Prince in Turkish. He then studied Semitic languages at University of Berlin from 1888 to 1889 and received his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in 1892.
Career
He was professor of Semitic languages at New York University from 1892 to 1902 and dean of its Graduate School from 1895 to 1902. Prince served as a professor of Semitic languages on the faculty of Columbia University from 1902 to 1915, when he was named professor of Slavonic languages at Columbia from 1915 to 1921 and again from 1933 to 1935, whereupon he was named professor of East European languages from 1935 to 1937.
Political career
Prince entered New Jersey politics, using his language skills to reach out to various ethnic groups of constituents in their native tongues. He was a Republican member of the New Jersey General Assembly from 1906 to 1909, serving as Speaker of the Assembly in his final year. From 1910 to 1913 he served in the New Jersey Senate representing Passaic County, and was President of the Senate in 1912, in which role he served as Acting Governor while Governor Woodrow Wilson was out of state. While serving as Acting Governor, Prince found an anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript in the state archives containing a list of Delaware-based trade jargon. Prince analyzed the word list in a 1912 article in American Anthropologist entitled "An Ancient New Jersey Indian Jargon."
On October 5, 1889, Prince was married to his step-sister, Adeline E. Loomis, the daughter of Dr. Alfred L. Loomis. In 1891, they moved to Ringwood Manor in Ringwood in Passaic County, New Jersey. Their only child, John Dyneley Prince, Jr., was born that year. Prince died of a heart ailment at his Manhattan home in 1945 at the age of 77.
