Holger Pedersen (linguist)


Holger Pedersen was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages.
He was born in Gelballe, Denmark, and died in Hellerup, next to Copenhagen.

Education and academic career


Pedersen studied at the University of Copenhagen with Karl Verner, Vilhelm Thomsen, and Hermann Möller. He subsequently studied at the University of Leipzig with Karl Brugmann, Eduard Sievers, Ernst Windisch, and August Leskien.
In the fall of 1893, Pedersen enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he studied with Johannes Schmidt. The following year he studied Celtic languages and Sanskrit with Heinrich Zimmer at the University of Greifswald.
In 1895 he spent several months in the Aran Islands in Ireland to study the conservative form of Gaelic spoken there.
Pedersen submitted his doctoral dissertation to the University of Copenhagen in 1896. It dealt with aspiration in Irish. It was accepted and published in 1897. The dissertation committee included Vilhelm Thomsen and Otto Jespersen.
Also in 1897, Pedersen took a position as a lecturer on Celtic languages at the University of Copenhagen. In 1900 he became a reader in comparative grammar there. In 1902 he was offered a professorship at the University of Basel, which he declined, but was able at the same time to persuade the University of Copenhagen to establish an extraordinary professorship for him. Pedersen also turned down the offer in 1908 of a professorship at the University of Strassburg. Following the retirement of Vilhelm Thomsen in 1912, Pedersen acceded to Thomsen's chair at the University of Copenhagen. He remained at the University of Copenhagen for the rest of his life.

Contributions to linguistics

In 1893, Pedersen traveled to Corfu with Karl Brugmann to study Albanian in place. Subsequently, Pedersen published a volume of Albanian texts collected on this journey. The publication was due to the recommendation of Brugmann and Leskien. He continued to publish work on Albanian for many years thereafter. Pedersen's work on Albanian is often cited in Vladimir Orel's Albanian Etymological Dictionary.
Among students of the Celtic languages Pedersen is best known for his Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen, 'Comparative Grammar of the Celtic Languages', which is still regarded as the principal reference work in Celtic historical linguistics.
His Hittitisch und die anderen indoeuropäischen Sprachen, 'Hittite and the Other Indo-European Languages', represented a significant step forward in Hittite studies, and is often relied on in Friedrich's Hethitisches Elementarbuch, the standard handbook of Hittite.
Also influential was his Tocharisch vom Gesichtspunkt der indoeuropäischen Sprachvergleichung, 'Tocharian from the Viewpoint of Indo-European Language Comparison'. For example, André Martinet states that his discussion of sound changes in Tocharian is "fondé sur la présentation du tokharien par Holger Pedersen," 'based on the presentation of Tocharian by Holger Pedersen'.
It was Pedersen who formulated the ruki law, an important sound change in Indo-Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic.
He is also known for the description of Pedersen's Law, a type of accentual shift occurring in Baltic and Slavic languages.
Pedersen endorsed the laryngeal theory at a time when it "was regarded as an eccentric fancy of outsiders". In his classic exposition of the theory, Émile Benveniste credits Pedersen as one of those who contributed most to its development, along with Ferdinand de Saussure, Hermann Möller, and Albert Cuny.
Two of Pedersen's theories have been receiving considerable attention in recent times after decades of neglect, often known today under the names of the glottalic theory and the Nostratic theory.

Origin of the glottalic theory

In a work published in 1951, Pedersen pointed out that the frequency of b in Indo-European is abnormally low. Comparison of languages, however, shows that it would be normal if it had once been the equivalent voiceless stop p, which is infrequent or absent in many languages.
He also posited that the Indo-European voiced aspirates, bh dh gh, could be better understood as voiceless aspirates, ph th kh.
Pedersen therefore proposed that the three stop series of Indo-European, p t k, bh dh gh, and b d g, had at an earlier time been b d g, ph th kh, and t k, with the voiceless and voiced non-aspirates reversed.
This theory attracted relatively little attention until the American linguist Paul Hopper and the two Soviet scholars Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov proposed, in a series of articles culminating in a major work by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov published in 1984, that the Indo-European b d g series had originally been a glottalized series, p' t' k'. Under this form, the theory has attracted wide interest. There seems to be a good chance that it will endure in one form or another.

Origin of the Nostratic theory

Pedersen seems to have first used the term "Nostratic" in an article on Turkish phonology published in 1903. The kernel of Pedersen's argument for Nostratic in that article was as follows :
Pedersen’s last sentence should be understood as referring to the article he was writing, not the rest of his career. Although he defined the Nostratic family, he himself never produced the work of synthesis the concept seemed to call for. That would await the work of the Russian scholars Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky in the 1960s for its first iteration. Nevertheless, Pedersen did not abandon the subject. He produced a substantial article on Indo-European and Semitic in 1908. He produced a detailed argument in favor of the kinship of Indo-European and Uralic in 1933. In effect, the three pillars of the Nostratic hypothesis are Indo-Uralic, Ural–Altaic, and Indo-Semitic. Pedersen produced works on two of these three, so the impression is incorrect that he neglected this subject in his subsequent career. His interest in the Nostratic idea remained constant amid his many other activities as a linguist.
English "Nostratic" is the normal equivalent of German nostratisch, the form used by Pedersen in 1903, and Danish nostratisk. His 1931 American translator rendered nostratisk by "Nostratian," but this form did not catch on.
In his 1931 book, Pedersen defined Nostratic as follows :
In his view, Indo-European was most clearly related to Uralic, with "similar, though fainter, resemblances" to Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchu; to Yukaghir; and to Eskimo. He also considered Indo-European might be related to Semitic and that, if so, it must be related to Hamitic and possibly to Basque.
In modern terms, we would say he was positing genetic relationship between Indo-European and the Uralic, Altaic, Yukaghir, Eskimo, and Afro-Asiatic language families.
However, in Pedersen's view the languages listed did not exhaust the possibilities for Nostratic :