Sanskrit in scientific terminology

[KJKARTTU]

To indology at liverpool.ac.uk
Subject: Sanskrit in scientific terminology, reply to P. Kiparsky

For various reasons I have only just joined the Indology list, but by 
kindness of colleagues I have obtained Kiparsky's question of 12th 
September and Wyzlic's notes of 13th September have reached me. I hope 
this answer will also reach Kiparsky.
Bollensen had moved to Kazan in 1852 and to Germany in 1858. Petrov 
taught in Moscow. Minaev (1840-90) was still student in Germany and 
started his teaching in St. Petersburg only in 1869. As was noted by 
Wyzlic, Boehtlingk never lectured and Roth did not even live in Russia. 
The man in charge of Sanskrit at the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg 
University was Kaetan Andreevich Kossovich (1815-1883), known of an 
unfinished Sanskrit-Russian dictionary (1854-56), of an edition of Old 
Persian cuneiform inscriptions (1872), of several Avestic studies and 
translations of Indian classics into Russian (parts of the Mbh and some 
dramas). He started his Sanskrit teaching at the Oriental Faculty in 
1858, became Professor in 1860, with chair in 1866. As far as I know he 
was the only teacher of Sanskrit in St.Petersburg in the 1860s. More 
about him can be found in JRAS 1883, p. xxiii-xxiv, in Biogr. slovar' 
S.-Peterb. univ. 1, 1896, 346-354 and in Bongard-Levin & Vigasin, The 
Image of India, Moscow 1984, 71-73. Further sources (not checked by me) 
are M._O. Marks in Russk. Star. 52, 1886, 605-620; I._B. in Zhurnal Min. 
Narodn. Prosv. 1883 March 226, 35-42, and A._Ja. Garkavi in Izv. Imp. 
Arh. Obshch. 10, 433-487.
P.S. After writing this I saw a message with suggestion that Sanskrit 
terms in question may have been learnt abroad. This is of course quite 
possible, too.

Klaus Karttunen