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Louis Hjelmslev
Otto Jespersen
Rasmus Kristian Rask
Vilhelm Thomsen
Louis Hjelmslev, 1899-1965. While Danish linguistics had
concentrated on the development of languages over time, Hjelmslev
broke new ground by putting aside the historical approach to the
advantage of a synchronous study of language as a system, "the
language itself". His essay Omkring Sprogteoriens Grundlæggelse
(1943, On the Foundation of the Language Theory) is one of the
seminal works of modern linguistics and one of the few that have
persuaded foreign scholars to learn Danish.
Olaf Pedersen
Royal Library
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Rasmus Kristian Rask,1787-1832. Partly as the result of a stay in
Iceland 1813-1815, the linguist Rasmus Rask completed a seminal study
of the origins of the Scandinavian languages and the connections
between them. During a prolonged journey 1816-1823 through Sweden,
Finland and Russia to the Caucasus, India and Ceylon, he became
familiar with a large number of European and Asian languages, so that
in a study entitled Om Zendsproget (1826, On the Zend Language) he
was able to define the Indo-European family of languages and
distinguish it from for instance Finnish, Hungarian and Tamil. Rask
created a new basis for comparative linguistics by investigating not
only the languages' vocabularies, but also their phonetical and
grammatical idiosyncrasies. One of the results was that he discovered
the Germanic sound shift before J. Grimm, to whom the honour has
otherwise always been ascribed. From the long journey home, Rask
brought home with him a large number of ancient Iranian and
Singhalese manuscripts which he had collected, and which have since
made the Copenhagen Royal Library a centre for the study of
comparative philology for many scholars in Rask's tradition.
Olaf Pedersen
Polfoto
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Vilhelm Thomsen, 1842-1927. Vilhelm Thomsen was the last
important linguist in the Rasmus Rask tradition and like Rask he was
eager to use philology as a tool for the historian. In 1876 he gained
international attention with a series of lectures at Oxford in which he
examined the connections between ancient Russia and Scandinavia
and demonstrated the role played by the Scandinavians in fashioning
the first Russian states. 20 years later he founded modern turkology by
interpreting the Asian Orkhon inscriptions and demonstrating that they
were written in an ancient Turkish dialect.
Olaf Pedersen
Elfelt /Polfoto
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