Vilhelm Thomsen was born in Copenhagen. He was the son of Chamber Councillor (kammerråd) Ludvig Frederik Thomsen and the elder brother of painter and illustrator Carl Thomsen (1847–1912).[2]
He studied at the University of Copenhagen in 1859, graduating in 1867 and earning a PhD in 1869 with a dissertation on Germanic loanwords in Finnic.
Career
He taught Greek at the Borgerdyd school in Copenhagen before becoming a professor at the University of Copenhagen;
From 1875 he was an associate professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1887 he was appointed professor.
[3]
In 1876 he was invited to give the Ilchester Lectures at the University of Oxford, which were later published as The Relations Between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia, and the Origin of the Russian State.[4]
Thomsen made a number of important contributions to linguistics, including his work on the Germanic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian influences on Finnic.[5] In 1893, he deciphered the Turkic Orkhon inscriptions in advance of Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff (1837–1918).
Vilhelm Thomsen first published the translation in French in 1899. He then published another interpretation in Danish in 1922 with a more complete translation.
[6]
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.
Thomsen married Karen Charlotte Allen (22 August 1852 – 15 August 1934), a daughter of historian C.F. Allen (1811–71) and Ide Marie Dorph (1812–1910), on 5 May 1876 in Frederiksberg. Thomsen's daughter Kristiane Nicoline Thomsen (1877–1968) was the second wife of the Finnish linguist Emil Nestor Setälä.
The relations between ancient Russia and Scandinavia and the origin of the Russian state. Three lectures delivered at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, in May, 1876, in accordance with the terms of Lord Ilchester's bequest to the university
1896: Inscriptions De L'Orkhon Déchiffrées
On the influence of the Germanic languages on the Finnish-Lappish
^Ross, E. Denison (1930). "The Orkhon Inscriptions: Being a Translation of Professor Vilhelm Thomsen's Final Danish Rendering". Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London. 5 (4): 861–76.
Brøndal, Viggo. 1927. "L'œuvre de Vilhelm Thomsen." Acta philologica scandinavica 2:289–318. København.
Wickman, Bo. 1988. "The history of Uralic linguistics." In The Uralic Languages: Description, History and Foreign Influences, edited by Denis Sinor. Leiden: Brill.
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