Ernst W. Selmer

Ernst Westerlund Selmer (23 April 1890 – 14 April 1971) was a Norwegian philologist and phonetician. A professor at the University of Oslo from 1937 to 1960, he was best known for his work on Low German and North Frisian.

He was born in Funbo, Sweden as a son of Ludvig Marius Selmer (1860–1931) and Nina Maria Mathilda Westerlund (1868–1954). He grew up in Kristiania. He was a nephew of Johan and Jens Selmer, and a second cousin of Fredrik Selmer.

In March 1919 in Kristiania he married Ella Sejersted (1895–1968), a daughter of Colonel Nils Johannes Sejersted. He then became an uncle of Francis Sejersted, and the couple had several children. Knut Sejersted Selmer became a law professor, and married Elisabeth Schweigaard Selmer. Another son Ernst Sejersted Selmer became a mathematics professor.

A third son, Nicolay Sejersted Selmer born 1921, studied at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, but during the Second World War he first fought in the Norwegian Campaign, then participated in the underground resistance before he fled to Little Norway in Canada in 1941 to undergo pilot training. His bomber plane crashed during training in January 1943.

Selmer finished his secondary education at Kristiania Cathedral School in 1908, and graduated with the cand.philol. degree in German language in 1913. He later studied in several cities abroad, such as Oxford, Montpellier, Leipzig and Marburg, in addition to being research assistant in Hamburg from 1915 to 1917. During this stay, when he studied languages under Conrad Borchling and experimental phonetics under Giulio Panconcelli-Calzia, he collected material in Low German, allowing him to release the doctoral thesis Sprachstudien im Lüneburger Wendland in 1918.

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