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Thomas Olander

@sproghistorie.dk

Historical linguist. Associate professor of Indo-European Studies at the University of Copenhagen. – Telefon: 60 70 56 89.

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26.07.2023
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Latest posts by Thomas Olander @sproghistorie.dk

Ja, det er en god ide. Jeg skriver her hvis der kommer en opdatering.

06.03.2026 06:48 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Ja, det ødelægger det lidt. Men jeg orkede ikke at prøve at redigere partinavnene væk.

04.03.2026 09:38 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Er det derimod en kandidat med jakkesæt og pomadehår der med sit stålsatte blik signalerer at borgernes penge skal blive i borgernes (dvs. hans egne) lommer og for alt i verden ikke gå til fællesskabet? Så er man nok mere ovre i Liberal Alliance.

04.03.2026 07:39 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Vi kender det alle sammen. En valgplakat med en kandidat i en blomstret kjole der ser ud til at leve af spidskål og vegansk mozzarella i et kollektiv på Møn og vil tage turen frem og tilbage til Folketinget til fods for at udlede mindst muligt CO₂. Så tænker man: Det er sgu nok en fra Alternativet.

04.03.2026 07:39 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Kandidatquiz: Folketingsvalg 2026

⭐ KANDIDATQUIZ ⭐

Se om dine fordomme om folketingskandidater holder stik! Prøv kandidatquizzen på: sproghistorie.dk/kandidatquiz/

04.03.2026 07:39 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 1

Very glad that the volume ‘The Reconstruction of Indo-European Stop Systems: From the Traditional Model to Glottalic Theories’ (edited by Tijmen Pronk and myself) has now appeared.

brill.com/display/titl...

Looking forward to hearing reactions to it!

03.02.2026 10:21 👍 30 🔁 11 💬 0 📌 0
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Professorship in Indo-European Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen

The Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, has announced a position as Full Professor of Indo-European Studies: jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

08.12.2025 08:24 👍 12 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

Details can be found in these links:

PhD position (application deadline: 1 February 2026): candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Postdoc position (application deadline: 6 January 2026): candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Please forward the announcements to potential candidates!

01.12.2025 16:40 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Indo-European Dark Ages Illuminated – University of Copenhagen

Job announcements: PhD position and postdoc position in Indo-European Studies in Copenhagen

A PhD position (36 months) and a postdoc position (20 months) have been announced within the research project “The Indo-European Dark Ages Illuminated” (rootsofeurope.ku.dk/english/rese...).

01.12.2025 16:40 👍 17 🔁 12 💬 1 📌 0

Folk-etymological speculations aside, I would like to (once again) draw attention that in δεινόσαυρος the compound member δεινός often glossed as 'terrible' has semantics of 'fearful; awe-inspiring, awesome', so δεινόσαυροι are, in fact, etymologically 'awesome lizards'.

14.11.2025 08:10 👍 22 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

ODS nævner et tysk Augenstein »sten med øjeformede pletter, ell. rund, ægformet sten«. Ved ikke helt hvor det bringer os hen.

07.10.2025 07:59 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Sjove ord! Det danske ord ser gammelt ud (gammeldansk øghensten, jf. svensk ögonsten, oldnordisk aug(n)asteinn), og hverken ODS eller Katlev (Politikens etymologisk [sic] ordbog) nævner noget om tysk indflydelse.

07.10.2025 07:59 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0
Museum Tusculanums Forlag - Power, Gender, and Mobility

New Open Access Publication from my colleagues at UCPH!

Power, Gender and Mobility: Aspects of Indo-European Society. Edited by Riccardo Ginevra, Stefan Höfler, and Birgit Anette Olsen (Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European Volume 10).

29.09.2025 11:17 👍 14 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0
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📘Hvordan følger man det danske sprog 6000 år tilbage i tiden? Det forsøger sprogforsker Thomas Olander bla at besvare i sin nye bog ’Dansk fra nutiden til stenalderen’ om det danske sprogs udvikling 👉 bit.ly/4gDmYcj #dkforsk @sproghistorie.dk

24.09.2025 18:13 👍 13 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
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The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset - Scientific Data Scientific Data - The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset

Just about ten years now in the making: The IE-CoR database paper has finally been published.

C. Anderson, M. Scarborough, [ ... 96 further authors ... ], R. Gray & P. Heggarty. 2025. The Indo-European Cognate Relationships Dataset. Scientific Data 12:1541.

02.09.2025 15:23 👍 80 🔁 31 💬 8 📌 4
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A new book from Stockholm University Press, 'Indo-European Ecologies', is now available to read and download for free, completely #OpenAccess, here: www.stockholmuniversitypress.se/books/e/10.1...
@sproghistorie.dk olander.bsky.social

11.08.2025 11:18 👍 25 🔁 12 💬 0 📌 0

Upcoming project conference: New Perspectives on the Early History of Ancient Greek (Copenhagen, 4.–5. August 2025). Link to the programme in the alt-text.

17.05.2025 17:25 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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The Indo-European Language Family Cambridge Core - Classical Languages - The Indo-European Language Family

Open-access PDF: www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

Flyer for paperback: sproghistorie.dk/temp/ielf-fl...

13.05.2025 07:02 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Do you like real books? Is an open-access PDF on your hard drive not committing enough?

Is a hardback too inflexible (and too expensive: £88 😬)?

Very good news: the paperback version of “The Indo-European language family” is here!

You even get a discount with the code in the flyer 💸

13.05.2025 07:02 👍 38 🔁 11 💬 1 📌 0
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Our Jenny Larsson reports: "Finally out: the book about Proto-Indo-European by science journalist Laura Spinney. She's been following our work with combining languages, archaeology, and aDNA for a few years now. Very exciting to see the result!" #indoeuropean #humanpast @cschlebu.bsky.social

24.04.2025 09:46 👍 6 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
Transactions | The Philological Society Transactions of the Philological Society

Thanks to everyone who's read and engaged with my paper (🐐🪓 doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12308) 💙 I've summarised the comments, and there's now a little squib with the harvest of those fruitful discussions on philsoc.org.uk/transactions and doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

26.03.2025 07:31 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 0

Following a post by @linguisticdiscovery.com which claimed that "alligator pear" was specifically a british word for avocado, contrasting with what I had previously heard, namely that it was a US southern term - I started doing some digging.

What I found was surprising and very interesting:

24.03.2025 18:48 👍 17 🔁 3 💬 2 📌 0

I wanna find those guys.

07.03.2025 22:38 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Tobias har skabt to nye stenaldersprog til dansk spillefilm Sproghistoriker Tobias Søborg er dykket dybt ned i uddøde sprog fra flere lande og æraer for at skabe nye sprog til actionfilmen 'Fremmed - det første opgør' om stenalderen i Danmark.

Tobias har skabt to nye stenaldersprog til dansk spillefilm #dkvid #dkforsk

06.03.2025 12:31 👍 6 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
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Italian is a bit of an outlier among the major Romance languages.

Spanish has 'escuela', Portuguese has 'escola', French has 'école' - all starting with a vowel - but in Italian it's 'scuola'.

Did it never get a vowel?
It sure did: Old Italian had 'iscuola'!

Here's the story of this little vowel:

01.03.2025 19:24 👍 139 🔁 24 💬 16 📌 6
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Episode 9 (Matthew Scarborough) - Greek & Pre-Greek: in search of loanwords (nearly) lost to time Aegean Connections · Episode

Recently I was a guest on the Aegean Connections podcast hosted by Ester Salgarella. I had a chance to talk about my past research and also what I've been up to with my current MCSA project on non-IE substrata in Ancient Greek.

07.02.2025 22:02 👍 16 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 0
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Our papers, out today in @nature.com, show how ancient DNA from the Eneolithic and Bronze Age steppe points to a North Pontic origin of the Indo-European language family and a Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) origin of Indo-Anatolian (inclusive of the now extinct Anatolian languages). 1/

05.02.2025 18:33 👍 65 🔁 20 💬 5 📌 5

It's me, I'm the colleague, and I am now on Bluesky 🐐🪓💙

27.01.2025 17:07 👍 21 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1

Thomas Olander @olander.bsky.social asks:

"Was the Danish language invented by Big Language History to sell more sound change?"

Anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with Danish will answer "Yes". As far as I can tell, the Danes looked at English historical change and said, "Hold my beer."

09.01.2025 20:52 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0