Ivar Aasen
Ivar Andreas Aasen was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer, playwright, and poet. He is best known for having assembled one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, Nynorsk, from various dialects.
Background
Iver Andreas Aasen was born in 1813 in Åsen, in the parish of Ørsten, in the district of Sunnmøre, on the west coast of Norway. His father Ivar Jonsson, a peasant with a small farm, died in 1826. Young Iver was brought up doing farmwork, but he assiduously cultivated all his leisure in reading. An early interest of his was botany. When he was eighteen, he opened an elementary school in his native parish. In 1833, he entered the household of Hans Conrad Thoresen, the husband of the eminent writer Magdalene Thoresen, in the parish of Herø, where he picked up the elements of Latin. Aasen gradually mastered several languages, and began the scientific study of their structure. Ivar single-handedly created a new language for Norway, which later became its "literary" language.Career
When Aasen travelled to Bergen in 1841, he met bishop Jacob Neumann, who was very impressed with his work, and had excerpts of it published in Bergens Stiftstidende. His contacts with Bishop Neumann became Aasen's entrance ticket to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in Trondheim, and generous financial support, which made the extensive travel possible to study the Norwegian vernacular. It is said to have been the rector of Trondheim, Fredrik M. Bugge, who came across Neumann's articles while travelling in Bergen and persuaded the scientific society to grant the funding to Aasen.Therefore, quite early in his career, in 1842, Aasen had begun to receive a grant to enable him to give his entire attention to his philological investigations; he had ceased doing any farmwork by 1846. Aasen's first monograph in 1843 was a small collection of folk songs in the dialect of his native district, Sunnmøre, which attracted general attention. His Grammar of the Norwegian Dialects was the result of long studies, and of journeys taken to every part of the country. Aasen's well-known Dictionary of the Norwegian Dialects appeared in its original form in 1850, which became the basis of his construction of a popular language or definite folke-maal for Norway.
By 1853, he had created the norm for utilizing his new language, which he called Landsmaal, meaning "country language". With certain modifications, the most important of which were introduced later by Aasen himself, but also through a latter policy aiming to merge this Norwegian language with Dano-Norwegian, this language has become Nynorsk .
Aasen composed poems and plays in the composite dialect to show how it should be used. One of these dramas, The Heir, was frequently acted, and may be considered as the pioneer of dialectal literature of the second half of the 19th century, from Vinje to Garborg. In 1856, he published Norske Ordsprog, a treatise on Norwegian proverbs. Aasen continuously enlarged and improved his grammars and his dictionary. He lived very quietly in lodgings in Oslo, surrounded by his books and shrinking from publicity, but his name grew into wide political favour as his ideas about the language of the peasants became more and more the watch-word of the popular party. In 1864, he published his definitive grammar of Nynorsk and in 1873 he published the definitive dictionary.
The Storting, conscious of the national importance of his work, treated Aasen in this respect with more and more financial generosity as he advanced in years. He continued his investigations to the last, but it may be said that, after the 1873 edition of his Dictionary, he added but little to his stores.
He died in Christiania on 23 September 1896, and was buried with public honours.