Editing Vilhelm Thomsen (section)

==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.
<ref>{{cite web|url=   https://runeberg.org/dbl/17/0240.html|title= Thomsen, Vilhelm Ludvig Peter f. 1842 |website= Dansk biografisk Lexikon  |access-date=August 1, 2020}}</ref>
 
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''.<ref>Vilhelm Thomsen, ''The Relations Between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia, and the Origin of the Russian State'' (B. Franklin, 1877)</ref>

Thomsen made a number of important contributions to linguistics, including his work on the Germanic, Baltic, and Indo-Iranian influences on Finnic.<ref>Konow 1927</ref> In 1893, he deciphered the Turkic [[Old Turkic epigraphy#Corpus|Orkhon inscriptions]] ahead of Russian linguist  [[Wilhelm Radloff]] (1837–1918). Thomsen first published the translation in French in 1899. He then published another interpretation in Danish in 1922 with a more complete translation.<ref>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.</ref>

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.