Thomas Olander
I don't curate my academia.edu page. For an updated overview please visit my work home page (https://nors.ku.dk/english/staff/?pure=en/persons/106357) or my personal home page (https://sproghistorie.dk/publications).
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I am a historical linguist dealing with Indo-European languages. My research has a primary focus on Slavic, but I have a general interest in all ancient and some modern Indo-European languages, and in the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language. I am also working with the relationship between Slavic and Baltic and with the phylogenetics of the Indo-European language family in general. Another interest of mine is Danish and general phonology and morphology.
In my 2009 book Balto-Slavic accentual mobility I compared the so-called mobile accent paradigms of Baltic and Slavic (e.g. Russian nominative singular golová, accusative gólovu, genitive golový etc.), concluding that they have arisen as the result of an accent loss in final syllables with a certain structure. The main conclusion of the book may be expressed with the formula μ[+H] > [-H] / _C₀#.
My 2015 book Proto-Slavic inflectional morphology: A comparative handbook (based on my habilitation thesis, also from 2015) contains a reconstruction of the inflectional endings of Proto-Slavic and an analysis of their historical relationship with the corresponding endings of Baltic and the remaining Indo-European languages.
Currently I am the leader of the research project Connecting the Dots: Reconfiguring the Indo-European family tree (https://rootsofeurope.ku.dk/english/research/connecting-the-dots/), financed by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The purpose of the project is to examine the relationship between the Indo-European language branches, in particular the ramification after the separation of Anatolian and Tocharian. The project also examines to what extent the linguistic family tree can be correlated with the archaeological evidence.
I am also a core member of the project Languages and Myths of Prehistory (LAMP): Unravelling the speech and beliefs of the unwritten past (https://lamp-project.se/), financed by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The LAMP project aims to combine our linguistic knowledge of prehistoric stages of the Indo-European language family with archaeology and mythology.
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I am a historical linguist dealing with Indo-European languages. My research has a primary focus on Slavic, but I have a general interest in all ancient and some modern Indo-European languages, and in the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language. I am also working with the relationship between Slavic and Baltic and with the phylogenetics of the Indo-European language family in general. Another interest of mine is Danish and general phonology and morphology.
In my 2009 book Balto-Slavic accentual mobility I compared the so-called mobile accent paradigms of Baltic and Slavic (e.g. Russian nominative singular golová, accusative gólovu, genitive golový etc.), concluding that they have arisen as the result of an accent loss in final syllables with a certain structure. The main conclusion of the book may be expressed with the formula μ[+H] > [-H] / _C₀#.
My 2015 book Proto-Slavic inflectional morphology: A comparative handbook (based on my habilitation thesis, also from 2015) contains a reconstruction of the inflectional endings of Proto-Slavic and an analysis of their historical relationship with the corresponding endings of Baltic and the remaining Indo-European languages.
Currently I am the leader of the research project Connecting the Dots: Reconfiguring the Indo-European family tree (https://rootsofeurope.ku.dk/english/research/connecting-the-dots/), financed by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The purpose of the project is to examine the relationship between the Indo-European language branches, in particular the ramification after the separation of Anatolian and Tocharian. The project also examines to what extent the linguistic family tree can be correlated with the archaeological evidence.
I am also a core member of the project Languages and Myths of Prehistory (LAMP): Unravelling the speech and beliefs of the unwritten past (https://lamp-project.se/), financed by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The LAMP project aims to combine our linguistic knowledge of prehistoric stages of the Indo-European language family with archaeology and mythology.
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Books by Thomas Olander
Applying a redefinition of Proto-Slavic based on prehistoric loanword relations with neighbouring non-Slavic languages, Thomas Olander provides a new look at the Proto-Slavic inflectional system. The systematic, coherent and exhaustive approach laid out in the handbook paves the way for new solutions to long-standing problems of Slavic historical grammar.
Papers by Thomas Olander
Applying a redefinition of Proto-Slavic based on prehistoric loanword relations with neighbouring non-Slavic languages, Thomas Olander provides a new look at the Proto-Slavic inflectional system. The systematic, coherent and exhaustive approach laid out in the handbook paves the way for new solutions to long-standing problems of Slavic historical grammar.
This is a short web-article (https://navn.ku.dk/nyt-om-navne/fra-kiev-og-kijev-til-kyjiv-og-kyiv/) aimed to explain the changing historical naming in the Danish language of the capital of Ukraine. Until World War 1, Danish encyclopedias and atlasses used the German form 'Kiew'. In the Soviet period, the official Danish form was the Latin translitteration 'Kijev' from Russian 'Киев', but the alternative translitteration 'Kiev' (also known from English, French, Italian and Spanish) remained a more popular option, e.g. in newspapers and travel guides. The Danish use of 'Kijev' and 'Kiev' continued after Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, even if it was recognized in Denmark that a more correct translitteration from the Ukrainian endonym 'Київ' would be 'Kyjiv'. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 25 February 2022, the Danish Language Council (who is the official authority on Danish names on places outside Denmark) decided to recommend a change to 'Kyiv', a form preferred to 'Kyjiv' due to its already existing international prominence.
The article is co-written (in Danish) by Johnny G.G. Jakobsen and Thomas Olander, and published on the website "Nyt om navne" [News on Names], Dep. of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen.