Honours
Thomsen is honored on a stela set up in central Copenhagen along with three other Danish pioneers of modern linguistics, Rasmus Rask, N.L. Westergaard, and Karl Verner.
Thomsen was President of the Danish Academy from 1909 until his death, and was an honourary member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
A street is named after him in Ankara, Turkey, Wilhelm Thomsen Caddesi (= 'Vilhelm Thomsen Street'), on which the National Library of Turkey is located. This is apparently because Thomsen's deciphering of the Orkhon inscriptions was perceived as an important contribution during the formative period of modern Turkish national identity at the turn of the 20th century.
Read more about this topic: Vilhelm Thomsen
Famous quotes containing the word honours:
“If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelist honours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles rais’d by breath of Kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turn’d to that dirt from whence he sprung.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)