Steinar Schjøtt
Encyclopedia
Steinar Schjøtt was a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 educator, philologist and lexicographer.

Personal life

Steinar Schjøtt was born to priest and politician Ole Hersted Schjøtt
Ole Hersted Schjøtt
-Personal life:Ole Hersted Schjøtt was born in 1805 to shipmaster Niels M. Schjøtt and his wife Anne Hersted. The family moved from their native Jutland to Christiania in 1808....

 (1805-1848) and his wife Anna Jacobine, née Olrog, in Porsgrund
Porsgrunn
is a town and municipality in Telemark county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Grenland. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Porsgrunn....

 where his father was stationed as vicar
Vicar
In the broadest sense, a vicar is a representative, deputy or substitute; anyone acting "in the person of" or agent for a superior . In this sense, the title is comparable to lieutenant...

. He was named Stener Johannes Stenersen Schjøtt after professor of theology Stener Johannes Stenersen. In 1845 the family moved to Skien
Skien
' is a city and municipality in Telemark county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Grenland. The administrative centre of the municipality is the city of Skien. Skien is also the administrative centre of Telemark county....

. His older brother Peter Olrog Schjøtt became a politician and philology professor. From that marriage Steinar was brother-in-law of writer Mathilde Schjøtt
Mathilde Schjøtt
Mathilde Schjøtt was a Norwegian writer, literary critic, biographer and feminist. She made her literary debut with the anonymous Venindernes samtale om Kvindens Underkuelse in 1871. She was a literary critic for the magazine Nyt Tidsskrift, and her play Rosen was published anonymously in this...

 and uncle of jurist Sofie Schjøtt.

Career

Steinar Schjøtt enrolled at the University of Christiania
University of Oslo
The University of Oslo , formerly The Royal Frederick University , is the oldest and largest university in Norway, situated in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The university was founded in 1811 and was modelled after the recently established University of Berlin...

 in 1862 and graduated as cand.mag.
Cand.mag.
Candidatus magisterii , Candidata magisterii , i.e. Latin Candidate of Arts, abbreviated cand.mag., is an academic degree used in Denmark, and formerly in Norway and Iceland, roughly corresponding to an American Master of Arts and officially translated as such...

 in 1870. He used eight languages in academics: Old Norse
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

, Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Latin, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 and of course Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...

. Within the Norwegian language, he preferred the Landsmål
Landsmål
Landsmål, meaning "language of the land/country", was the name Ivar Aasen gave the Norwegian orthography he created in the 19th century. In 1885 it was adopted as an official language in Norway alongside Danish. In 1929, Landsmål was renamed Nynorsk...

 form, hence he Norwegianized his name from the Dano-Norwegian
Dano-Norwegian
Dano-Norwegian is a linguistic term for a koiné that evolved among the urban elite in Norwegian cities during the later years of the union between the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway . It is from this koiné that Riksmål and Bokmål developed...

 Stener to Steinar.

He was not appointed to a university position, but worked as an upper secondary school teacher. He was a teacher at Heltbergs studentfabrikk, then in Levanger
Levanger
Levanger is a town and municipality in Nord-Trøndelag county, Norway. It is part of the Innherred region. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Levanger...

 and Kristiansand
Kristiansand
-History:As indicated by archeological findings in the city, the Kristiansand area has been settled at least since 400 AD. A royal farm is known to have been situated on Oddernes as early as 800, and the first church was built around 1040...

. From 1874-1893 he was a teacher in Fredrikshald
Fredrikshald
Fredrikshald may refer to:* Fredrikshald Bay, Nunavut, Canada* Fredrikshald, Norway, former name of the town of Halden...

, then in Skien
Skien
' is a city and municipality in Telemark county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Grenland. The administrative centre of the municipality is the city of Skien. Skien is also the administrative centre of Telemark county....

.

He helped translating the Heimskringla
Heimskringla
Heimskringla is the best known of the Old Norse kings' sagas. It was written in Old Norse in Iceland by the poet and historian Snorri Sturluson ca. 1230...

to Landsmål, and published books in Norwegian and global history. He then published two large dictionaries in 1908 and 1914.
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