He was born in the rectory of Lichtenau in southern Greenland (present-day
Alluitsoq) to a couple of
Moravian missionaries, Johann Konrad Kleinschmidt (1768–1832) from
Oberdorla in
Thuringia, Germany, and Christina Petersen (1780–1853) from Trudsø, now a part of
Struer, Denmark. As a youth, he went to school in
Kleinwelke,
Saxony, in Germany and subsequently for an apprenticeship to a pharmacy in
Zeist, Netherlands, studying during that period Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as Dutch, French, and English, all the while retaining his childhood languages, Danish, German, and Greenlandic. In 1837 he went to
Christiansfeld in Denmark working there for a couple of years as a teacher. Subsequently, he returned to Greenland in 1841. After two years he held his first sermon in Greenlandic, speaking it fluently and plainly rather than using old worn-out idioms of the previous ministers. From 1846 to 1848 he worked as a teacher in Lichtenfels (present-day
Akunnat), subsequently moving to
Neu-Herrnhut (Old
Nuuk). '' He already finished his grammar of Greenlandic in 1845 and sent it to printing at the University of Berlin but it was not published until 1851. It was exceptional because it did not use the traditional scheme of the Latin grammar to describe its subject, but rather devised a new scheme more suited for the Greenlandic language. This grammar was also the first work to employ the orthography which became the standard in writing Greenlandic until the reform of 1973. In 1859 he left the Moravian church to join the
Church of Denmark. For most of his time in Greenland, he served as a teacher rather than a priest. He also translated the better part of the Bible into Greenlandic. He died in 1886 at 72 years of age in Neu-Herrnhut (present-day Noorliit, a part of Nuuk), having spent 54 of them in Greenland. ==Works==