In January 1948, a Social Democrat and classically schooled academic altered  the way Danish is spelled

Sixty-two years ago a new letter in the Danish language was born. The official introduction of the letter ‘å’ in Danish spelling brought the total number of letters to 29.

Placed at the end of the Danish alphabet after ‘z’, ‘æ’, and ‘ø’; ‘å’ replaced ‘aa’ (pronounced somewhat like ‘o’) in all words that were not proper names, where there was a free choice between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ system.

For example, the official spelling of Denmark’s largest city is Århus, but its university is spelled ‘Aarhus’.

At the same time, Germanic letters at the start of nouns were also abolished in nearly all instances.

The change from ‘aa’ to ‘å’ (known as ‘bolle-å’ because of the bun-like ring above the ‘a’, and also referred to as ‘Swedish a’) was not universal, as the old spelling is retained in reprints of old books, and many people who learnt to read and write before the new rules (and for a number of years after), still use ‘aa’.

Although ‘å’ is the youngest member of the Danish alphabet, it has been used in written Danish since the 19th century following discussions during the 18th century about replacing ‘aa’.

But the letter can actually be traced back to Swedish documents in the 15th century as a combination of ‘a’ and ‘o’ and ‘å’ was included in printed Swedish in 1526.

In 1743, the Danish grammatical expert Jens Høysgaard was the first to argue for the introduction of ‘å’ into written Danish, while linguist and educationalist Rasmus Rask started to use the letter in the 1820s.

Later, Rask and NM Petersen prepared an argument for including ‘å’ in the official spelling test, and Svend Grundtvig included it (and small initial letters for nouns!) in his spelling dictionary in 1870.

The January 1948 spelling reform was the work of Hartvig Marcus Frisch who was minister of education in Hans Hedtoft’s government.

Born in the city of Hillerød in 1893 into an academic family and trained as a classical philologist, Frisch was a Social Democratic politician as well as an author and book editor.

He worked as a teacher from his graduation in 1917. It was during a study trip to Italy and Greece in 1920-21 that Fritsch experienced the strong social tensions and burgeoning fascism that helped form his later scientific and political work.

His written works include a number of books about societies in antiquity and democracy, and he is perhaps best remembered for ‘Plague on Europe: Bolshevism – Fascism – Nazism’, an analysis of totalitarianism in the 1930s.

Although it is probably more of a debate book than proper academic literature, ‘Plague on Europe’ is still considered essential reading among Danish historians. The book contains Frisch’s warnings about the growing mentality of discrimination based on the race and cultural background of the people discriminated against.

It was in this book that Frisch formulated his most famous axiom: ‘Culture is Habits’.

Unsurprisingly, Frisch’s critical attitude to fascism, Nazism and bolshevism caused him to keep a low profile during the German occupation of Denmark in 1940-45, when ‘Plague on Europe’ was banned and confiscated by the Gestapo.

He also published a cultural history of Europe (1928) in which he described the economic and social conditions for the development of societies and noted the international aspects of cultural movements.

Frisch was a member of parliament from 1926 and was political spokesman for and chairman of the Social Democrats in parliament from 1935 to the start of the German occupation.

He lost his parliamentary seat in 1945 following sharp attacks on the Danish resistance movement. These attacks included a radio interview and subsequent comments in an article in the left-wing newspaper Information, in which he accused the resistance movement of murder following its execution of a number of collaborators that Frisch believed was unnecessary. However, not long afterwards, in 1947, he was made education minister.

Frisch died in 1950, and for many his description by Hedtoft following his 1940 resignation was a fitting epigraph, albeit a decade too early: ‘The scientist, educationalist, academic, the cold, sharp and clear-thinking Hartvig Frisch who is a Socialist through theory and confession.’

However, what Hedtoft did not describe, was the thread running through Frisch’s ideas – power, rights, morality and justice- and which took its basis from Frisch’s studies of classical texts.