Hans Jørgen Uldall

Who was Hans Jørgen Uldall?

Hans Jørgen Uldall was a Danish linguist known for developing the linguistic theory of glossematics with Louis Hjelmslev.

Having studied English at the University of Copenhagen he went to London to study phonology with Daniel Jones. In 1929 he had a lectureship at the University of Cape Town, and then went back to London to teach phonetics in 1930. In 1931-32 he went to the California to do field work on the Maidu language under the auspices of the Archaeological and Ethnographic Survey of California, established by A. L. Kroeber in 1901. He became fluent in Maidu and accumulated a large body of notes and texts, but only published one article on Maidu phonetics in 1954. His texts and word lists were published in 1966 by William Shipley as "Nisenan texts and dictionary". In his period in the US, he also studied anthropology with Franz Boas at Columbia receiving an MA degree in 1944.

In the years 1951-52 he wrote the first part of his and Hjelmslev's coauthored work Outline of Glossematics. Uldall's views differed from Hjelmslev's in several important points.

He went on to have teaching posts in Athens and to work for the British council in Nigeria, where he died.