Václav Blažek is a historical linguist. He is a professor at Masaryk University

Masaryk University

Masaryk University is the second largest university in the Czech Republic, a member of the Compostela Group and the Utrecht Network. Founded in 1919 in Brno as the third Czech university , it now consists of nine faculties and 42,182 students...

 (Brno

Brno

Brno by population and area is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the largest Moravian city, and the historical capital city of the Margraviate of Moravia. Brno is the administrative centre of the South Moravian Region where it forms a separate district Brno-City District...

, Czech Republic

Czech Republic

The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....

) and also teaches at the University of West Bohemia

University of West Bohemia

The University of West Bohemia is a university in Pilsen, Czech Republic. It was founded in 1991 and consists of seven faculties.-Organization:The faculties are the basic units of the university. The units implement their own academic programs...

 (Pilsen, Czech Republic).

His major interests include Indo-European languages

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

, Uralic languages

Uralic languages

The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...

, Altaic languages

Altaic languages

Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...

, Afroasiatic (Hamito-Semitic) languages

Afro-Asiatic languages

The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...

, Nostratic languages

Nostratic languages

Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...

, Dené–Caucasian languages, and mathematical linguistics (lexicostatistics

Lexicostatistics

Lexicostatistics is an approach to comparative linguistics that involves quantitative comparison of lexical cognates. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language...

 and glottochronology

Glottochronology

Glottochronology is that part of lexicostatistics dealing with the chronological relationship between languages....

).

In his book Numerals Blažek discusses words for numeral

Number names

In linguistics, number names are specific words in a natural language that represent numbers.In writing, numerals are symbols also representing numbers...

s in several language families of Eurasia and Africa (Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Egyptian, Berber, Nubian, and Saharan), with briefer discussions of numerals in other languages around the world.