Louis Hjelmslev’s other Danish contacts

(1887-1942) was an educated philologist and a professor in Romance languages and literature. Brøndal had a great interest the philosophical and mathematical fields, with which he used both to solve language theoretical issues. Brøndal’s linguistic analyses departed from philosophical terms with which he used to unfold semantics in the grammatical area. To Hjelmslev, this was a very wrong way to look at and research language, because bringing in the terms from Aristotle and Kant combined with Russell's and Whitehead's mathematical logic, would leave language as a subdepartment of other fields instead of being autonomous. Hjelmslev dedicated his research in ensuring linguistics as an autonomous science, which was in direct opposition to Brøndal’s research.  

Brøndal and Hjelmslev were both central characters in the Linguistic Circle, as Brøndal was a co-founder of the Circle with Hjelmslev. They also founded an international journal together in 1937 for structuralistic research on language: Acta Linguistica. Today, we know this journal as Acta Linguistica Hafniensia (ALH).

Louis Leonor Hammerich L.L.

L.L. Hammerich (1872-1975) very early became the Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Copenhagen (1922, he left the chair in 1955). Hammerich joined the Linguistic Circle from the start and was also very active in university politics. He became an opponent of Hjelmslev’s and they had public polemics which may be followed behind the scene in the digitized letters exchanged between the structuralists and between Hammerich and his younger friend, prominent structuralist Paul Diderichsen.