Vilhelm Thomsen, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Vilhelm Thomsen

Danish linguist

Date of Birth: 25-Jan-1842

Place of Birth: Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark

Date of Death: 12-May-1927

Profession: university teacher, linguist

Nationality: Denmark

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius

Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen (25 January 1842 – 12 May 1927) 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 (1988:808), The Danish scholar Vilhelm Thomsen (1842–1927) 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.