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THEODOR BENFEY (1809-1881)

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Originally appearing in Volume V03, Page 729 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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THEODOR

BENFEY (1809-1881)  , German philologist, son of a Jewish trader at Norten, near
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Gottingen, was born on the 28th of
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January 1809 . Although originally designed for the medical profession, his taste for
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philology was awakened by a careful instruction in
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Hebrew which he received from his
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father . After brilliant studies at Gottingen he spent a
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year at Munich, where he was greatly impressed by the lectures of Schelling and Thiersch, and afterwards settled as a teacher in
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Frankfort . His pursuits were at first chiefly classical, and his attention was diverted to
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Sanskrit by an accidental wager that he would learn enough of the language in a few weeks to be able to review a new
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book upon it . This feat he accomplished, and rivalled in later years when he learned
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Russian in order to translate V . P . Vasilev's
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work on
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Buddhism . For the time, however, his labours were chiefly in classical and Semitic philology . At Gottingen, whither he had returned as privat-docent, he wrote a little work on the names of the Hebrew months, proving that they were derived from the Persian, prepared the
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great article on India in Ersch and Grtiber's
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Encyclopaedia, and published from 1839 to 1842 the
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Lexicon of Greek Roots which gained him the Volney prize of the Institute of France . From this time his attention was principally given to Sanskrit . He published in 1848 his edition of the Sama-veda; in 1852–1854 his
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Manual of Sanskrit, comprising a grammar and chrestomathy; in 1858 his
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practical Sanskrit grammar, after-wards translated into
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English; and in 1859 his edition of the Pantscha Tantra, with an extensive dissertation on the fables and mythologies of
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primitive nations . All these
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works had been produced under the pressure of poverty, the government, whether from parsimony or from prejudice against a Jew, refusing to make any substantial addition to his small
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salary as extra-professor at the university .

At length, in 1862, the growing appreciation of

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foreign scholars shamed it into making him an ordinary professor, and in 1866 Benfey published the laborious work by which he is on the whole best known, his great Sanskrit-English
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Dictionary . In 1869 he wrote a
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history of German philological research, especially
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Oriental, during the 19th century . In 1878 his jubilee as doctor was celebrated by the publication of a
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volume of philological essays dedicated to him and written by the first scholars in Germany . He had designed to close his
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literary labours by a grammar of Vedic Sanskrit, and was actively preparing it when he was interrupted by illness, which terminated in his
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death at Gottingen on the 26th of
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June 1881 . A collection of his various writings was published in 1890, prefaced by a memoir by his son .

End of Article: THEODOR BENFEY (1809-1881)
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