ABSTRACT
I have dedicated my book to our honoured President, my well-loved and admired teacher Professor Vilhelm Thomsen as a poor partpayment of that debt of gratitude which I, as well as all other living Danish linguists, owe to the Grand Old Man of our subject. It is not the first time I have thought of dedicating one of my works to Vilhelm Thomsen. On the contrary, the thought has several times been in my mind when I was planning or compiling a new book that I should like to offer it to him publicly as a homage. But every time when the book went through the ordeal of proof-reading, when the author sees his work again after a lapse of some time and reviews it more critically than he did before-each time I have at this stage been so dissatisfied with my product that I did not find it worthy to bear the name of Vilhelm Thomsen on one of the first pages. This time, however, I thought that now I must do something serious about it if I was ever going to dedicate a work to him, and that I should hardly ever write anything that was more worthy of him than this volume in which I have gathered together all the essentials which I have thought about and studied
during all the many years since as an undergraduate I sat in lecture room No. 1 and listened to his lectures on linguistics. My disciple relationship has lasted many years, and I may add that it began before I myself was able to attend his lectures, as one of the first things I did when I began to study languages was to copy from a friend’s notebook the lectures which Thomsen had given during the immediately preceding years on the history of the Romance languages. These notes still stand to-day in a place of honour on a book-shelf in my study beside Diez’s grammar, and I still consider them as my real introduction to linguistics and the scientific method. Since then I have always considered myself first of all as Thomsen’s pupil, even when (as also in the greater part of the present book) I have ventured into fields which he has not treated himself, and even when he, as nearly always in his published works, concentrated on subjects of which I have only a very superficial knowledge. However much I have learnt from other linguists both at home and abroad, it is to Vilhelm Thomsen that I owe the greatest debt of my life as a linguist, and I know with certainty that the same applies to many other linguists and philologists. We all look up to Vilhelm Thomsen with admiration and gratitude.
