Samuel Kleinschmidt

Abstract

One hundred and fifty years ago, on February 27, 1814, Samuel Kleinschmid, the eminent Greenlandic linguist, was born in Lichtenau in southern Greenland. His father, Konrad Kleinschmidt, was a German belonging to the Moravian Brethren, who had sent him to Greenland as missionary in 1793. In 1812 Konrad lost his wife, but in the following year, during a stay in Scotland, he married a Danish woman, Christen Petersen, who became the mother of Samuel. Learning Greenlandic from his play fellows from birth Samuel became familiar with three languages. In addition, his father took a great interest in the Greenlandic language and his translations of the Holy Script were later mentioned with great respect by his son, who rated them considerably higher than most other translations made by the missionaries. Thus was laid in early childhood the germ for his future work that was destined to be of such great importance for the Greenlanders and their intellectual and social culture. ... Furthermore, he is said to have shown very good pedagogical abilities. All this was no doubt well known to the Moravian authorities, who finally sent Samuel back to Greenland in 1841, where he was destined to remain for the rest of his life. The first 5 years he spent again in Lichtenau as assistant in the missionary work, with the special task of studying the Greenlandic language. This he did with great zeal, which sometimes brought him into conflict with his superiors because he refused to perform some of the more trivial duties, as gardening, gathering of wood, beer brewing, etc. No doubt he worked hard, as can be deduced from the fact that the manuscript of his fundamental grammatical work, "Grammatik der gronlandischen Sprache", printed in Berlin in 1851, was in all essentials finished as early as 1846. ... In spite of many sincere efforts by the Brethren a mutual understanding proved to be impossible. Kleinschmidt was even invited to Germany by the highest Moravian authorities to plead for himself, but he only answered with the words: "One remains in Greenland!". The unavoidable consequence was that he was finally dismissed from his service with the Moravian Mission, although apparently with regret. This happened in 1859 and Kleinschmidt moved over to the Danes in Godthåb where from then on he was employed at the training college (seminarium) for Greenlandic catechists. ... In Godthåb Kleinschmidt found at once a more satisfactory field of action. He was very much concerned over the decline of the Greenlandic society that was then taking place in many respects and it became a matter of faith to him to exert all his strength to re-establish the old morale and self-reliance of the Greenlanders. ... In this connection the respect for the Greenlandic language in particular was felt by Kleinschmidt as something extremely important. He fully understood the close connection between language, way of thinking, and culture in general and he studied indefatigably the Greenlandic language with deep penetration to find what he called "its true nature". In the course of these studies he established the Greenlandic phonemic system, long before the concept of a phoneme had found its place in linguistic thinking, and on this he based his new orthography, which the ensuing hundred years have not been able to shake. The new and consequent orthography was used in the Greenlandic periodical atuagagdliutit, which has appeared uninterruptedly since 1861, as well as in schoolbooks written by Kleinschmidt himself, in literature and, first and foremost, in the new translation of the Bible, which Kleinschmidt no doubt felt to be his most important task. He based his translation on the original texts and managed in an admirable way to find expressions understandable to the Greenlanders for the many phenomena and ideas that were totally foreign to the native mind. Finally his mature linguistic results appeared in his Greenlandic dictionary "Den grønlandske Ordbog" in 1871, which, together with his grammar is basic for our understanding of the Greenlandic language. ...