Kārlis Mīlenbahs
Kārlis Mīlenbahs was the first native speaker of Latvian to devote his career to linguistics. Mīlenbahs studied classical philology at the University of Dorpat. He was the author of over a hundred scholarly articles on the language in Latvian, Russian, and German, but his main achievement was the Latvian-German dictionary that remains the most important lexicographical work on Latvian. His polemics with the poet Rainis led to an important essay on literary Latvian published in 1909, and he was also a translator of the Odyssey.
