Jørgen Rischel
Danish linguist
Jørgen Rischel (Danish pronunciation: [ˈjɶɐ̯ˀn̩ ˈʁiɕl̩]; 10 August 1934 – 10 May 2007) was a Danish linguist who worked extensively with different subjects in linguistics, especially phonetics, phonology, lexicography and documentation of endangered languages.
Childhood
As the third of four sons of Lutheran pastor Ejner Rischel, Rischel's early interest in other cultures was stimulated by a gifted primary school teacher in the Kullerup Public School on Fyn. From the age of 11 he attended the Nyborg Realskole (a private school with partial state funding), where he developed interests in chemistry, biochemistry and ornithology. In the garden of the Kullerup rectory he carefully recorded in musical notation the characteristic song and variations of over 20 different songbirds.
Having assembled a crystal radio receiver and transmitter, he once transmitted his mother Gunnild playing Schumann on her grand piano. Rischel's transmission accidentally interfered with a national Radio Denmark (Statsradiofonien) broadcast. His biographers suggest that this may have been "an early manifestation of what later became a serious research activity, namely the construction of the analog parallel synthesizer at the Institute of Phonetics in the late sixties."
Rischel's interest in linguistics developed whilst still at the Realskole in Nyborg. Aware of how the local Fyn dialect of Danish differed from the normative Copenhagen dialect, he also became interested in Norwegian after his school took a field trip to Norway. Having read Bernhard Karlgren’s introductory textbook on Chinese and a grammar of Old Norse, Rischel raised rabbits and sold them to earn the money to purchase a copy of Danmarks Runeinskrifter, a scholarly three-volume work on Danish runes edited by Lis Jacobsen and Erik Moltke and published during World War II.
University studies
From 1952 to 1956 he studied Nordic philology at the University of Copenhagen, specializing in West Nordic, obtaining two one-year government scholarships to continue his studies in Reykjavík and Oslo. He took classes in Danish dialectology with Poul Andersen and in phonetics with Eli Fischer-Jørgensen.
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