Karl Adolf Verner (1846-1896) was a Danish linguist and a pioneer linguist in the study of phonetics. He was deeply interested in phonetic systems of the Indo-European languages. One of his linguistic fascinations was accentology.
Verner was born in Denmark and studied at the University of Copenhagen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1867. He was a famous linguist but he never worked for any university as a professor. Some universities asked him to work as professor for them, but he always refused and preferred his job in the library of Halle. In Halle, he met many young linguists from the University in Leipzig. Contacts with other linguists further directed him towards his linguistic future.
Verner’s work and influence on linguistics was so important that people still study him and use his ideas for their own books and articles. His greatest contribution to linguistics is called Verner’s Law. The discovery of this law explained some issues with Grimm’s Law whose rules were not enough to explain all exceptions in the historical development of languages.
Early life
Karl Adolf Verner was born in Aarhus on 7 March 1846. He was the son of Friedrich Wilhelm Werner, a German immigrant whose occupation was a sock-weaver, and Catharina Dorothea Hansen. He had five brothers, and he was the second oldest of them.
Verner obtained his secondary education at the Aarhus Cathedral School which he attended from 1857 to 1864. It was here that his interest in the field of linguistics started to emerge, and it was in the city of Aarhus where he would later in his life come up with the discovery that would make him known worldwide.
Verner’s interest in linguistics began to form, quite paradoxically, not through the typical scenario of meeting an advanced linguist who would become his mentor. His interest in linguistics would form during his school years in the lessons of geography that he attended. Unlike many other geography teachers, Mr Erslev also taught his students about linguistic and social aspects of life in the countries they covered in the programme. Mr Erslev thus treated his subject contrastively and given the fact that Verner appreciated Erslev’s teaching a lot, it is possible to say that Verner’s contrastive linguistic method was born in his geography lessons.
University years
However, he could not continue chasing his academic dream due to economic instability and lack of capital. Therefore he sought employment as a librarian in order to gain money for his studies. He worked as a university librarian in Halle, Germany. Eventually, his hard work and determination led him to become a docent of Slavic philology at the University of Copenhagen ending with a professor title in 1888. In 1864 Karl Verner began studying Nordic languages at the University of Copenhagen under the supervision of Konráð Gíslason, Svend Grundtvig, and Ludvig Wimmer. He began mainly as a linguist and later his school activities and interests shifted toward the literary site. Another shift in Verner’s language repertoire came with the influence of his teacher Professor Smith who motivated him to study Slavic languages which became his specialisation, eventually leading to the year 1872 when Verner went to St. Petersburg as a student of Slavic studies. Upon his arrival to Denmark, he composed essays such as “An exception to the first sound shift” and “The final question”, which became the basis for his scientific glory.
However, he could not continue chasing his academic dream due to economic instability and lack of capital. Therefore he sought employment as a librarian in order to gain money for his studies. He worked as a university librarian in Halle, Germany. Eventually, his hard work and determination led him to become a docent of Slavic philology at the University of Copenhagen ending with a professor title in 1888.
Verner as linguist
While attending the Aarhus Cathedral School, Verner already knew key linguistic texts such as those by Rasmus Rask or the Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen by August Schleicher.