CSOMA DE KOROS, ALEXANDER (1784-1842), or, as the name is written in Hungarian, KoROsl CSOMA SANDOR, Hungarian traveller and philologist, born Apr. 4, 1784, at Koros in Transylvania, belonged to a noble family which had sunk into poverty. He was educated at Nagy-Enyed and at Gottingen. In 1820, having received from a friend the promise of an annuity of ioo florins (about £Io) to support him during his travels, he set out for the East to investigate the origin of the Magyars. He visited Egypt and then disguising himself as an Armenian he crossed Central Asia to Tibet, where he spent four years in a Buddhist monastery studying the language and the Buddhist literature. To his intense disappointment he soon discovered that he could not thus obtain any assistance in his great object; but, having visited Bengal, his knowledge of Tibetan obtained him employment in the library of the Asiatic society there, which possessed more than one thousand volumes in that language ; and he was afterwards supported by the government of Bengal while he published a Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar (both of which appeared at Calcutta in 1834). He also contributed several articles on the Tibetan language and literature to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and he published an analysis of the Kali-Gyur, the most important of the Buddhist sacred books. Meanwhile his fame had reached his native country and procured for him a pension from the government, which, with character istic devotion to learning, he devoted to the purchase of books for Indian libraries. He spent some time in Calcutta studying Sanskrit and several other languages; but, early in 1842, he commenced his second attempt to discover the origin of the Magyars. He died at Darjiling on April 11, 1842. An oration was delivered in his honour before the Hungarian Academy by Eotvos, the novelist.
See Duka, Life and Travels of Alexander Csoma (i886).