Vilhelm Thomsen

Who was 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.

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,

The Danish scholar Vilhelm Thomsen was one of the greatest linguists of all times. He was active in an astoundingly great number of linguistic disciplines, and he was equally masterful in all of them.