Vladimir Ivanov Georgiev was a prominent Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

n linguist, philologist, and educational administrator. He made multiple contributions to the field of Thracology

Thracology

Thracology is the scientific study of Ancient Thrace and Thracian antiquities and is a regional and thematic branch of the larger disciplines of ancient history and archaeology. A practitioner of the discipline is a Thracologist...

, including a linguistic interpretation of an inscription discovered at the village of Kyolmen in the Shoumen district of northeastern Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

. In the 1960s, Georgiev examined the names of the twenty-six largest rivers of central

Central Europe

Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...

 and eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

. He suggested that the names were reconstructible to Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

 and that the Indo-European

Indo-European

Indo-European may refer to:* Indo-European languages** Aryan race, a 19th century and early 20th century term for those peoples who are the native speakers of Indo-European languages...

 homeland was delimited on the west by the Rhine river and to the east by the Don river

Don River

- Australia :* Don River , a tributary of the Fitzroy River * Don River in North Queensland* Don River - United Kingdom :* River Don, South Yorkshire, England...

.

He also proposed that the Etruscan language

Etruscan language

The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...

 was related to Hittite

Hittite language

Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...

, a theory which is not generally accepted by scholars.

Sources

• Office of the Foreign Secretary, National Academy of Sciences (U.S.). The Eastern European Academies of Sciences: A Directory, 1963 (original from the University of Michigan).
• Ivanov, Teofil. Antique Tombs in Bulgaria. Sofia Press, 1980 (original from the University of Michigan).
• Georg Curtius, Henri Weil, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Aldo D. Scaglione, Terence H. Wilbur, and Jeffrey F. Huntsman. The Lautgesetz-controversy. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1978. ISBN 9027208719