Theodor Benfey

This is about the German philologist. For Theodor Benfey (born 1925) who developed a spiral periodic table of the elements in 1964, see Otto Theodor Benfey. Theodor Benfey (; 28 January 1809, in Nörten near Göttingen26 June 1881, in Göttingen) was a German philologist and scholar of Sanskrit. His works, particularly his Sanskrit-English dictionary, formed a major contribution to Sanskrit studies.

Early life and education Benfey was born into a Jewish family in the small town of Nörten, near the city of Göttingen in Lower Saxony. He was born during the political upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars, when Lower Saxony was occupied by the French Army (1806–1814). His father, Isaak Benfey (died 1832), was a merchant and Talmud scholar, In 1810, when Theodor was one year old, the family relocated to Göttingen. During his first few years lecturing at the University of Gottingen, he had also begun work on a lexicon of Greek roots. It was actually by chance that Benfey was first introduced to Sanskrit: There was a wager made that Benfey could not teach himself Sanskrit in time to review a new translation of a Sanskrit book, in a mere 4 weeks. But Benfey did manage and was able to review the Latin-Sanskrit edition of the Markandeya Purana for an academic journal.

Among his pupils was James Murdoch. Some of his ideas were developed in Russia by Fyodor Buslaev.

Works (titles translated into English) Selected works:

De Liguris, 1828, Ph.D. thesis. Observationes ad Anacreontis Fragmenta Genuina (Observations on Anacreontis and Genuine Fragments), 1830. Venia Legendi dissertation. Über die Monatsnamen einiger alten Völker (Month Names of Ancient Peoples), 1836, in collaboration with Moritz A. Stern. Griechisches Wurzellexikon (Lexicon of Greek Roots), 1839. Über das Verhältniss der ägyptischen Sprache zum semitischen Sprachstamm (On the relationship of the Egyptian language to the Semitic language group), 1844 The Cuneiform Inscriptions, 1847. The Hymns of Sama-Veda, 1848. The History of Oriental Philosophy in Germany, 1868. A Practical Grammar of the Sanskrit Language for the Use of Early Students, 1868. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary: With References to the Best Edition of Sanskrit Author and Etymologies and Comparisons of Cognate Words Chiefly in Greek, Latin, Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, 1866.