Una Canger (''

née The birth name is the name of the person given upon their birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name or to the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a births registe ...

'' Una Rasmussen; born May 14, 1938) is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of

Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...

. She has published mostly about the

Nahuatl language Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...

with a particular focus on the

dialectology Dialectology (from Ancient Greek, Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , ''-logy, -logia'') is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages. Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now c ...

of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area. She held tenure at the

University of Copenhagen The University of Copenhagen (, KU) is a public university, public research university in Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia, after Uppsala University. ...

, leading the department for Native American Languages and Cultures until she reached the age of 70 in 2008 and was forced into retirement. In 2012 she was awarded the

Order of the Aztec Eagle The Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle () forms part of the Mexican Honors System and is the highest Mexican order awarded to foreigners. History It was created by decree on December 29, 1933, by President Abelardo L. Rodríguez as a reward to ...

for her contributions to the study of Mexican culture. In 2005 she received the teaching prize of Copenhagen University, the Harald. Daughter of the famous Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen, she was admitted as the first female student in the department of

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

at the

, where she became interested the theories of

Louis Hjelmslev Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studi ...

. She received her PhD from Berkeley in 1968, her thesis being a glossematic grammar of the Mayan language Mam. She worked with

Mayan languages The Mayan languages In linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and a ...

for a while, particularly Mam, Teco, and Lacandón. After being offered a position at the University of Copenhagen, she began studying

Classical Nahuatl Classical Nahuatl, also known simply as Aztec or Codical Nahuatl (if it refers to the variants employed in the Mesoamerican Codices through the medium of Aztec Hieroglyphs) and Colonial Nahuatl (if written in Post-conquest documents in the Lat ...

, leading to her later descriptive and dialectological work on modern Nahuatl. She also has 4 kids whom all have their own kids, most notably the danish kid actor “Sylvester Canger”

Bibliography

* 1980. ''Five Studies inspired by nahuatl Verbs in -oa.'' Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 19. Copenhagen: . * 1985. w. Dakin, Karen. ''An inconspicuous basic split in Nahuatl''. International Journal of American Linguistics JAL51. 358–361. * 1988. ''Another look at Nahuatl -āškā ‘possession’.'' IJAL 54.2. 232–235. * 1988. ''Nahuatl dialectology: A survey and some suggestions.'' IJAL 54.1. 28–72. * 1988. ''Subgrupos de los dialectos nahuas.'' Smoke and Mist: Mesoamerican Studies in Memory of Thelma D. Sullivan. Ed. by J. Kathryn Josserand and Karen Dakin, eds.. 473–498. Oxford: BAR International Series 402. Part ii. * 1992. ''Copenhagen Nahuatl Dictionary Project''. Description and Manual. 85s. Inst. for Religionshistorie, København * 1993. ''In tequil de morrales. El trabajo de morrales.'' 135 s. C.A. Reitzels Boghandel A/S, København. * 1994. '' Fieldwork and Field Methods.'' in: The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics s. 1219–1221. R.E. Asher. Pergamon Press, Oxford-New York-Seoul-Tokyo * 1996. ''Is there a passive in nahuatl.'' in: Content, expression and structure: studies in Danish functional grammar s. 1–15. Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth, et al. John Benjamin's Publishing Co., Amsterdam * 2000. ''Review: J. Lockhart, C.M. Stafford Poole & Lisa Sousa (eds. and translators): The Story of Guadalupe.'' C.M. Stafford Poole: Our Lady of Guadalupe. Tidsskriftet Antropologi 41, s. 122–123. * 2000. '' Stress in Nahuatl of Durango. Whose Stress?'' in: Uto-Aztecan: Structural, Temporal, and Geographic Perspectives s. 373–386. E.H. Casad & T.L. Willett. Universidad de Sonora, Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico * 2001. ''Mexicanero de la Sierra Madre Occidental.'' Archivo de Lenguas Indígenas de México 180 s. El Colegio de México, Mexico * 2001. ''Le rôle de Francis Whitfield.'' in: Louis Hjelmslev a cent´anni dalla nascita s. 229–243. Romeo Galassi & Margherita De Michiel. Imprimitur, Padova, Italien * ''In Tequil de Morrales. Working with maguey.'', C.A. Reitzels Boghandel A/S, København 1993. * 2002. ''An Interactive Dictionary and Text Corpus for Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl''. in: Making Dictionaries. Preserving Indigenous Languages of the Americas s. 195–218. William Frawley, Kenneth C. Hill, Pamela Munro. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Canger, Una Linguists from Denmark Scholars of the Aztecs Danish Mesoamericanists Women Mesoamericanists 1938 births Living people Linguists of Mesoamerican languages 20th-century Mesoamericanists Linguists of Uto-Aztecan languages