Vilhelm Thomsen


Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen was a Danish linguist and Turkologist. He initially began studying theology at the Danish University in 1859, but soon switched his focus to philology. He learned Hungarian and Finnish, and received his doctoral degree in 1869 with a dissertation on Germanic loanwords in Finnic. He taught Greek at the Borgerdyd school in Copenhagen before becoming a professor at the University of Copenhagen; among his students at the university was Otto Jespersen.
In 1876 he was invited to give the Ilchester Lectures at the University of Oxford, and they were later published as The Relations Between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia, and the Origin of the Russian State.
Thomsen made a number of important contributions to linguistics, including his work on the Germanic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian influences on Finnic. In 1893, he deciphered the Turkic Orkhon inscriptions in advance of his rival, Wilhelm Radloff.
According to an article on "The history of Uralic linguistics" by Bo Wickman,

Honours

Thomsen is honored on a stela set up in central Copenhagen along with three other Danish pioneers of modern linguistics, Rasmus Rask, N.L. Westergaard, and Karl Verner.
Thomsen was President of the Danish Academy from 1909 until his death, and was an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
A street is named after him in Ankara, Turkey, Wilhelm Thomsen Caddesi, on which the National Library of Turkey is located. This is apparently because Thomsen's deciphering of the Orkhon inscriptions was perceived as an important contribution during the formative period of modern Turkish national identity at the turn of the 20th century.

Selected publications