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Kierkegaard Resources

Græsk-Dansk OrdbogThe “Resources” page on this website is getting better and better. It now includes links not only to the most recent edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works in Danish and the crucially important Ferrall-Repp Danish-English Dictionary from 1845, but also links to the venerable Ordbog Over Det Danske Sprog (the Danish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary), Christian Molbech’s Dansk Ordsprog, a lexicon of Danish saying from Kierkegaard’s time and earlier, Peter Erasmus Müller’s Dansk Synonymik, a Danish thesaurus from 1853, Christian Molbech’s Dansk Ordbog, the definitive Danish-Danish dictionary from Kierkegaard’s lifetime, B.C. Grønberg’s Tydsk-Dansk og Dansk-Tydsk Haandorbog, the more comprehensive of the two German-Danish and Danish-German dictionaries Kierkegaard owned, J.C. Lindberg’s Hebraisk-Dansk Haand Lexicon, the Hebrew-Danish dictionary Kierkegaard owned, and Paul Arnesen’s Ny Latinsk Ordbog, the Latin-Danish dictionary that Kierkegaard owned.

Meyers FremmedordbogThere are two conspicuous absences, however, among these resources, because they appear not to be available yet online. The first is Ludvig Meter’s Fremmedordbog from 1853. This is a dictionary of foreign words that had come into Danish by the mid-nineteenth century. This is an absolutely indispensable resource for Kierkegaard scholars because Kierkegaard frequently uses such words and they are generally not found in Molbech. Fortunately, Ferrall-Repp lists many such words in a supplement at the back. Still, the Ferrall-Repp supplement is less comprehensive than Meyer’s and the definitions are very short. The good news is that Meyer’s is still easily available from many Danish antiquarians at reasonable prices. If you click on the image of Meyer to the left, it will take you to the page of an antiquarian where you can purchase the book.

The other conspicuous absence is Paul Arnesen’s Græsk-Dansk Ordbog from 1830. This is a crucial resource not merely for scholars interested in how Kierkegaard understood and used concepts from the New Testament, but also for those who are interested in how Kierkegaard understood and used concepts from classical philosophy. I am very fortunate to own a copy of this book myself. Like Meyer, however, it is still possible to obtain a copy of this book at a reasonable price. Click on the image of Arnesen at the beginning of this post and you will be taken to a page of a Danish antiquarian where you can purchase this book.

I will continue adding resources to the “Resources” page over time and will endeavor to let readers know when new links go up.

 

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You Read Norwegian Too!: On the Danish Language

A reader wrote in response to the post from Feb. 2, where I quoted the Norwegian paper Morgenbladet. “You read Norwegian as well as Danish!” Unfortunately, I had to explain that I was not quite the polyglot I might appear to be. Modern Norwegian, or Bokmål as it is known in Norway, is essentially koine Danish. The Danes ruled Norway for something like 400 hundred years. With the Danes came the Danish language, eventually supplanting, at least in the more urban areas, the various indigenous dialects. “Bokmål” translates literally as “book language/tongue. “Mål,” I was informed by Ebba Mørkeberg, a member of the Danish Modersmåls-Selskabet (Society of the Mother Tongue), is an old Danish word for “tongue”  (though strangely, this is not among the definitions of “mål/Maal” in the otherwise comprehensive online edition of the Ordbog Over Det Danske Sprog [Dictionary of the Danish Language]. I had to go to the first edition of Molbech’s Danish-English dictionary from 1833 to find it.

Bokmål, is simply regularized Danish with a few spelling changes (e.g., the Danish b often appears in Norwegian as p and the Danish d as t, etc.), in contrast to Nynorsk, which is essentially a reconstruction of the older indigenous Norwegian dialects. Bokmål is easy for anyone fluent in Danish. The pronunciation of Danish words is as strange and irregular as is the pronunciation of English words. Bokmål is different though. It’s Danish pronounced the way it looks like it ought to be pronounced. That means, if you know Danish, you will be able to read Norwegian, and even understand it spoken with very little difficulty.

Of course you may fear that you will never master Danish and that the point is thus moot. I’m here to tell you otherwise. The problem with learning Danish does not relate to its inherent difficulty but to the fact that, outside Denmark, it’s hard to find competent instruction in Danish. Danish, while it looks like German, is actually much simpler and can be mastered much more quickly.

One of the biggest problems in Kierkegaard scholarship is how few scholars have even an elementary knowledge of Danish. One doesn’t have to be fluent in Danish. Enormous use can be made even of only rudimentary knowledge, so long as the scholar in question remains conscious of the fact that his knowledge is only rudimentary. Take the subject, for example, of Kierkegaard’s epistemology. Danish, like German, has several words for knowledge: “viden,” “kendskab,” and “erkendelsen” (I’m using the modern spellings here) are the main ones, but there are several other expressions, as I explain in the introduction to Ways of Knowing, that are also sometimes translated as “knowledge.” You don’t have to be able to read an entire passage in Danish to identify which of these words is being used and then to look up its meaning. It can make a great deal of difference in a philosophical sense, which word Kierkegaard uses, so even a little knowledge of Danish can get you on your way to doing some very good scholarship.

The first thing you should know if you would like to learn Danish is that the Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College offers a course every summer specifically designed to teach Danish to Kierkegaard scholars. The second thing is that if you can’t make it to Northfield, Rosetta Stone has a Danish language program. I have no first-hand experience with the program. I have used two different computer programs for German, though, and found them both really outstanding. Most top-of-the-line computer language instruction programs have all the bells and whistles of a standard university-level foreign language course, including the equivalent of a language lab where you can record and play back your own speech. If you can’t find an ordinary Danish class in your area, try a computer course. Finally, don’t rule out Norwegian. You won’t learn to speak Danish, but you’ll learn to read it.

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More about Dictionaries

I did the junior year abroad thing when I was an undergraduate, except at my college it was actually a six-month program. I chose the Germany-Austria program because I was a philosophy major and everyone told me that all philosophers had to know German.

Learning German was rough, particularly during the Austria half of the program. I took a German language class at the Dolmetscher Institut at the University of Vienna and my professor was brutal. He used to walk up and down the rows, standing directly in front of the person whose turn it was to do the exercise in question. You got one chance to look at your book and then you had to look up at him and do whatever it was the exercise required (e.g., changing the tense of the verb or the number of the subject). I remember once some poor guy in the row behind me made the mistake of trying to look down at his book a second time. Wham! The professor slammed his book down on top of the poor guy’s book obscuring the page.

That class was always suspenseful because the professor also liked to make fun of students who had done the exercise correctly but whom he suspected did not understand the meaning. He’d try to strike up a conversation on the subject of the exercise with the sole purpose of humiliating his victim by exposing the person as shabby automaton, with no real understanding of what he was doing.

Now what does all this have to do with Kierkegaard, you ask. Well, I will tell you. That sadistic German professor insisted that we throw out our bilingual dictionaries and begin, as soon as possible, to work exclusively with a German-German dictionary. He was right.

I know I directed you to the wonderful Ferrall-Repp A Danish-English Dictionary, and you will certainly want to use it as your primary Danish-English dictionary. There is a lot to be said, however, for working with Danish-Danish dictionaries as well. Christian Molbech’s Dansk Ordbog from 1833 is available as a pdf from Google books. That’s the dictionary most Kierkegaard scholars have traditionally used when contemporary Danish-English dictionaries failed them. Molbech’s dictionary is certainly useful (with the 1859 edition being the more useful of the two given that dictionaries tend to document usage from a slightly earlier period than their publication date). An even better resource, however, is the monumental Ordbog Over det Danske Sprog, the Dane’s equivalent of the OED. Unfortunately it takes up an enormous amount of bookshelf space and is prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, the Danes are more egalitarian than the Brits, so the ODS is actually freely accessible in a searchable online version. I guarantee it will help your Danish, plus, it’s a lot easier than trying to use the pdf of Molbech because it is searchable, while Molbech, because it is in Fraktur, is not. Check it out!