Friedrich August Rosen (2 September 1805 in

Hannover Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in Northern Germany ...

– 12 September 1837 in London) was a German Orientalist, brother of Georg Rosen and a close friend of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. He studied in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

, and from 1824 in Berlin under

Franz Bopp Franz Bopp (; 14 September 1791 – 23 October 1867) was a German linguist known for extensive and pioneering comparative work on Indo-European languages. Early life Bopp was born in Mainz, but the political disarray in the Republic of Mai ...

. He was briefly professor of oriental literature at the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

and became secretary of the

Royal Asiatic Society The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, commonly known as the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS), was established, according to its royal charter of 11 August 1824, to further "the investigation of subjects connected with and for the en ...

in 1831. His ''Rigvedae specimen'', excerpts from the

Rigveda The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts ('' śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one ...

based on manuscripts brought back from India by Colebrooke, were enthusiastically received by European academia as the first authentic evidence of the archaic

Vedic Sanskrit Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...

language. His most important work was an edition of the entire Rigveda, left incomplete at his premature death shortly after his 32nd birthday. His translation of the first book of the Rigveda appeared posthumously in 1838. The remaining books remained unedited for another five decades, until the ''editio princeps'' of

Max Müller Friedrich Max Müller (; 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a German-born philologist and Orientalist, who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic disciplines of Indian ...

in 1890-92. Rosen also produced the first English translation of the '' Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala'' of al-Khwārizmī, in 1831.

Works

*"Radices linguae sanscritae" (Berlin 1827). *Rigvedae specimen (London, 1830) *the

Algebra Algebra () is one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics. Elementary ...

of Mohammed ben Musa (London 1831) *Rigveda-Sanhita, "liber primus, sanscrite et latine" (London 1838)

References

Meyers Konversationslexikon
*''Rosen, Friedrich'' in ''Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Rosen, Friedrich August 1805 births 1837 deaths German orientalists Academics of the University of London German male non-fiction writers