Everything about Theodor Benfey totally explained
Theodor Benfey (
January 28,
1809 -
June 26,
1881) was a
German philologist and the son of a
Jewish trader from
Nörten, near
Göttingen.
Although originally destined for the medical profession, Benfey's taste for philology was awakened by a careful instruction in
Hebrew which he received from his father. After brilliant studies at
Göttingen he spent a year at
Munich, where he was greatly impressed by the lectures of
Schelling and
Thiersch, and afterwards settled as a teacher in
Frankfurt.
Benfey's pursuits were at first chiefly classical, and his attention was diverted to
Sanskrit by an accidental wager that he'd learn enough of the language in a few weeks to be able to review a new book upon it. This feat he accomplished, and rivalled in later years when he learned
Russian in order to translate
V. P. Vasilev's work on
Buddhism. For the time, however, his labours were chiefly in classical and
Semitic philology. At Göttingen, whither he'd returned as
Privatdozent, he wrote a little work on the names of the Hebrew months, proving that they were derived from the
Persian, prepared the great article on India in Ersch and Gruber's
Encyclopaedia, and published from 1839 to 1842 the
Lexicon of Greek Roots which gained him the
Volney prize of the
Institute of France.
From this time Benfey's attention was principally given to Sanskrit. He published in 1848 his edition of the
Sama-veda; in 1852-1854 his
Manual of Sanskrit, comprising a grammar and chrestomathy; in 1858 his practical Sanskrit grammar, afterwards translated into English; and in 1859 his edition of the
Pantscha Tantra, with an extensive dissertation on the fables and mythologies of primitive nations. All these 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 salary as extra-professor at the university.
At length, in
1862, the growing appreciation of foreign scholars shamed it into making him an ordinary professor, and in
1866 Benfey published the laborious work by which he's on the whole best known, his great
Sanskrit-English Dictionary. In
1869 he wrote a history of German philological research, especially Oriental, during the
19th century. In 1878 his jubilee as doctor was celebrated by the publication of a volume of philological essays dedicated to him and written by the first scholars in Germany. He had designed to close his literary labours by a grammar of Vedic Sanskrit, and was actively preparing it when he was interrupted by illness, which terminated in his death at Göttingen.
A collection of Benfey's various writings was published in 1890, prefaced by a memoir by his son. Among his pupils was
James Murdoch
.
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