Benfey, THEODOR, a great orientalist and comparative philologist, was born of Jewish parents near Göttingen in January 1809. He studied in Göttingen, Munich, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg, devoting himself especially to classical and comparative philology. In 1862 he was appointed to the chair of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology in the university of Göttingen, which he held till his death in June 1881. One of his earliest literary efforts was a translation of Terence (Stutt. 1837); after this, however, he turned his attention almost exclusively to comparative philology, oriental languages, especially Sanskrit, and mythology. In his fifty years devoted with rare enthusiasm and persistency to linguistic studies, he did more than any other scholar to enlarge the boundaries of Sanskrit philology. In comparative philology, though an adherent of Bopp, he deviated from his master in deriving all Indo-European words from monosyllabic primitive verbs. This conception depends on his theory of the origin of stem suffixes. These, he holds, are almost all derived from a fundamental form ant, which appears in the present participle of verbs. To support this view he assumes the most violent permutations of sounds which set all phonetic laws at defiance. For his theory, see his Lexicon of Greek Roots (Berl. 1839), Short Sanskrit Grammar
(Lond. 1868), and numerous essays. In Sanskrit he laid a foundation for the true study of the Veda by editing the Sāma Veda (Leip. 1848) with glossary and translation; and this work he continued by a scholarly translation of the first mandala of the Rig Veda in his magazine Orient und Occident (Gött. 1863-64). His Vedic grammar, for which he had been collecting materials for many years, was left unfinished. He also published a Complete Sanskrit Grammar, Chrestomathy and Glossary (Leip. 1854), and a Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Lond. 1866).
In comparative folklore his principal work is a translation of the Panchatantra (q.v.), published at Leipzig in two volumes in 1859. It is accompanied with elaborate notes, and the first volume consists entirely of an introduction in which he traces the course of these Indian stories in their wanderings and transformations both in eastern and western literatures.