Hans Jørgen (John) Uldall

Hans Jørgen (John) Uldall (1907-1957) lived an eventful life, and most of it took place outside Denmark. He first studied English with Otto Jespersen at the University of Copenhagen but then joined Daniel Jones at University College in 1928. From there he went to the United States where he studied the Californian language which is now called Nisenan; back then it was called Maidu. He returned home from the USA in 1933 and joined Hjelmslev in the Linguistic Circle, with whom he had a close and trusting collaboration. Uldall was undoubtedly Hjelmslev's most important interlocutor, in that he both had a different background and yet had the same interest in formalization and general theories.

In the correspondence between Uldall and Hjelmslev, we see a clear academic discussion about how to formalize linguistics - at the same time as expanding the perspective to include the entire humanities, based on the autonomy of linguistics. Nor should one underestimate Uldall and Hjelmslev's creative – perhaps even exotic – terminology; among these can be mentioned 'pleremics' and the word ‘glossematics’, where 'glosseme' is an overall common term for morpheme and phoneme.

While Hjelmslev lived in Aarhus and worked at Aarhus University in the years 1934-1937, Uldall and Hjelmslev worked on their glossematic linguistic theory, first to get it finished for the Linguists' Congress in Copenhagen in 1936 and then they failed to get it out before the war broke out. Uldall moved abroad in 1939 to find another job. This meant that Hjelmslev and Uldall's collaboration was interrupted during the war, but it resumed in 1945 and continued with interruptions until 1952. Uldall died in 1957, only 50 years old.