Kārlis Mīlenbahs [SEP] place of death
Kārlis Mīlenbahs
Kārlis Mīlenbahs (his surname was formerly also written as Mühlenbach, Mühlenbachs, Mǖlenbachs or Mīlenbachs) (18 January 1853 in Courland – 27 March 1916 in Võru, Estonia) was the first native speaker of Latvian to devote his career to linguistics. Mīlenbahs studied classical philology at the University of Dorpat (he did not remain at the university because of his poverty). He was the author of over a hundred scholarly articles on the language in Latvian, Russian, and German, but his main achievement was the
“Young Latvians” who popularized the use of Latvian language. Participants in this movement laid the foundations for standard Latvian and also popularized the Latvianization of loan words. However, in the 1880s, when Czar Alexander III came into power, Russification started. During this period, some Latvian scholars suggested adopting Cyrillic for use in Latvian. After the czar's death, around the start of the 20th century, nationalist movements reemerged.
In 1908, Latvian linguists Kārlis Mīlenbahs and Jānis Endzelīns elaborated the modern Latvian alphabet, which slowly