Samuel Kleinschmidt

Kleinschmidt, photograph by J. A. D. Jensen c. 1885

Samuel Petrus Kleinschmidt (27 February 1814 – 9 February 1886) was a German/Danish missionary linguist born in Greenland known for having written extensively about the Greenlandic language and having invented the orthography used for writing this language from 1851 to 1973. He also translated parts of the Bible into Greenlandic.

Life

Neu-Herrnhut / Ny Herrnhut
(Old Nuuk) around 1770.

He was born in the rectory of Lichtenau in southern Greenland (today, Alluitsoq) to a couple of Moravian missionaries, Johann Konrad Kleinschmidt (1768 – 1832) from Oberdorla in Thuringia, Germany and Christina Petersen (1780-1853) from Trudsø, now a part of Struer, Denmark. As a youth he went to school in Kleinwelke, Saxony in Germany and subsequently for an apprenticeship to a pharmacy in Zeist, Holland studying during that period Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as Dutch, French, and English, all the while retaining his childhood languages, Danish, German, and Greenlandic. In 1837 he went to Christiansfeld in Denmark working there for a couple of years as a teacher. Subsequently, he returned to Greenland in 1841. After two years he held his first sermon in Greenlandic, speaking it fluently and plainly rather than using old worn out idioms of the previous ministers. From 1846 to 1848 he worked as a teacher in Lichtenfels (present-day: Akunnat), subsequently moving to Neu-Herrnhut (Old Nuuk).

Death notice in Atuagagdliutit

He already finished his grammar of Greenlandic in 1845 and sent it to printing at the University of Berlin but it was not published until 1851. It was exceptional because it did not use the traditional scheme of the Latin grammar to describe its subject, but rather devised a new scheme more suited for the Greenlandic language. This grammar was also the first work to employ the orthography which became the standard in writing Greenlandic until the reform of 1973. In 1859 he left the Moravian church to join the Church of Denmark. Most of his time in Greenland he served as a teacher rather than as a priest. He also translated the better part of the Bible into Greenlandic. He died in 1886 at 72 years of age in Neu-Herrnhut (present-day Noorliit, a part of Nuuk), having spent 54 of them in Greenland.

Works

• 1968 (1851): Grammatik der grönländischen Sprache : mit teilweisem Einschluss des Labradordialekts. Hildesheim: Olms.
• 1858: Nunalerutit, imáipoĸ: silap píssusianik inuinigdlo ilíkarsautíngui (Geography: A little book about the world and mankind). Godthåb/Nuuk: nûngme.
• 1871: Den grønlandske ordbog / omarbeidet af Sam. Kleinschmidt ; udgiven paa foranstaltning af Ministeriet for Kirke- og Underviisningsvæsenet og meddet kongelige danske Videnskabernes Selskabs understøttelse ved H.F. Jørgensen. Kjøbenhavn:L. Kleins bogtrykkeri.

Further reading

• Harper, Kenn (25 February 2010). "Samuel Kleinschmidt, Greenlandic Language Pioneer". Nunatsiaq Online. Iqaluit: Nortext Publishing Corporation. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017.
• Holtved, Erik (1964). "Samuel Kleinschmidt" (PDF). Arctic. 17 (2): 142–144. doi:10.14430/arctic3498. Archived (PDF) from the original on 15 September 2015.
• Miller, D. Gary (1999). "Samuel Kleinschmidt as Syntactician". In Embleton, Sheila; Joseph, John E.; Niederehe, Hans-Josef (eds.). The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies on the Transition from Historical-Comparative to Structural Linguistics in Honour of E.F.K. Koerner. Vol. 1: Historiographical Perspectives. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 41–54. doi:10.1075/z.emls1.06mil. ISBN 1-55619-759-4.
• Nowak, Elke (1987). "Towards a Greenlandic Point of View — A Re-discovery of Kleinschmidt's 'Grammatik der grönländischen Sprache'". Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics in Helsinki, August 18–22, 1986. The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics. Vol. 6. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. pp. 289–299. ISBN 951-45-4169-3.
• Nowak, Elke (1996). "Historiography: Samuel Kleinschmidt's grammar". Transforming the Images: Ergativity and Transitivity in Inuktitut (Eskimo). Empirical Approaches to Language Typology. Vol. 15. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 58–64. doi:10.1515/9783110808926.51. ISBN 3-11-014980-X.
• Sadock, Jerrold M. (2016). "Samuel Petrus Kleinschmidt, 1814–1886: The Originator of Scientific Inuit Grammar". In Krupnik, Igor (ed.). Early Inuit Studies: Themes and Transitions, 1850s–1980s. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. pp. 55–71. ISBN 978-1-935623-70-0.

External links

• (in Danish) Dansk biografisk leksikon Kleinschmidt, Samuel Petrus, runeberg.org
• (in Danish) Salmonsens konversationsleksikon: Kleinschmidt, runeberg.org