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Born in Glowe, a village on the on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea, Klaus Schmidt spent his childhood in Stettin till 1943, when the family was bombed out of their house and had to move to Pyritz and later to Stargard in Pomerania. In 1945, in fear of the Red Army, the family fled to the west. Schmidt passed his final school examination (Abitur) at Kiel in 1953. After two years' working in the German Railway, he was able to start studying Latin and Mathematics at the University of Kiel in view of becoming a high-school teacher. But Erich Hofmann, professor of Indo-European Studies there, having recognized his talents, suggested he'd better change to Göttingen University. There, Schmidt studied Comparative Grammar (with Erich Hofmann, Wolfgang Krause and Wolfgang P. Schmid), Latin Philology (with Erich Burck), and Indology (which in Göttingen was and still is combined with Buddhist Studies) (with Ernst Waldschmidt and Heinz Bechert). He soon focussed his interests on Tocharian and Buddhist Sanskrit, without neglecting the other Indo-European languages. He obtained his Ph.D. 1969 with a doctoral dissertation on Die Gebrauchsweisen des Mediums im Tocharischen (xviii + 562 p.). Unfortunately, this book, much more than a purely syntactic study, was only published privately as late as 1974. After years of employment in two Göttingen projects on Sanskrit manuscripts from Turfan, Schmidt went to Saarbrücken as collaborator with Klaus Stunk. For decades, he taught there various Indo-European languages, including Armenian...