He studied theology and philology at the universities of Halle and Leipzig, obtaining his habilitation in 1825.
[2] Later on, he served as a professor of oriental languages at Kharkov University (1829–35), then in 1835 relocated to St. Petersburg as a professor of history and geography in the Asiatic department of the Russian Ministry of foreign affairs.
[3] In 1839 he became an adjunct at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he eventually attained the level of academician in 1852.
[4] Dorn wrote a book Über die Verwandtschaft des persischen, germanischen und griechisch-lateinischen Sprachstammes (1827), in which he argued in detail that the Persian language was related to Germanic, Greek, and Latin.
[5] This thesis would later be confirmed by the findings of Indo-European studies, although many of Dorn's supposed cognate pairs are mistaken.