Thomsen, Vilhelm Ludvig

Thomsen, Vilhelm Ludvig

 

Born Jan. 25,1842, in Copenhagen; died there Mar. 12,1927. Danish linguist.

Thomsen was a professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1887 to 1913 and became president of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1909. A specialist in comparative historical linguistics, he dealt mainly with the Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and wrote major studies on Germanic and Baltic borrowings in Finnish. Thomsen deciphered the Orkhon-Enisei inscriptions in 1893 and established their relationship to Old Turkic.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Deshifrovka orkhonskikh i eniseiskikh nadpisei. St. Petersburg, 1894.
Istoriia iazykovedeniia do kontsa XIX veka. Moscow, 1938.
Samlede afhandlinger, vols. 1–4. Copenhagen-Kristiania, 1919–31.

REFERENCES

Pamiati V. Tomsena (collection). Leningrad, 1928.
Sandfeld, K. “Vilhelm Thomsen.” Indogermanisches Jahrbuch, 1929, vol. 13.
Festschrift Vilhelm Thomsen. Leipzig, 1912. (Contains a complete list of Thomsen’s works.)