Samuel Kleinschmidt was born on Greenland, the son of a German father and a Danish mother. He spent his childhood years on Greenland, but was sent to Germany for school at the age of eight. His teenage years abroad remain murky, but he appears again in Zeist, Holland, in 1828, where he likely recieved linguistic training. His father, Johan Conrad Kleinschmidt had worked on the translation of the New Testament, and Samuel followed in his footsteps. In 1837 he found work as a seminary teacher in Christianfeld, from he were he was sent out as a missionary to his native Greenland in 1841.Rosing & Preston, 1951. His orthography of 1851 became the official spelling of the Greenlandic language until the 1973 reform.Kleinschmidt, 1851.
Kleinschmidt’s orthography used the circumflex accent to indicate long vowels and the letter kra (“ĸ”) to write the [q] sound.Petersen, 1997, p. 198. A capital form of kra is not encoded separately in Unicode.Everson, n.d.
Kleinschmidt, S.P. (1851). Grammatik der grönländischen Sprache [Grammar of the Greenlandic language]. Berlin.
Everson, M. (n.d.). Greenlandic. In The Alphabets of Europe.
Kleinschmidt, S.P. (1871). Den Grønlandske Ordbog [The Greenlandic Dictionary). Ministeriet for Kirke- og Underviisningsvæsenet og meddet kongelige danske Videnskabernes Selskabs : Copenhagen.
Petersen, R. (1997). Det grønlandske sprog. In A. Karker, B. Lindgren, & S. Løland (Eds.), Nordens sprog (pp. 193–207). Novus.
Rosing, O., Preston, W.D. (1951). Kleinschmidt Centennial II: Samuel Petrus Kleinschmidt. In International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (p. 63). The University of Chicago Press.
