Jens Peter Broch was a Norwegian orientalist and linguist that specialized in Semitic languages.
Background
Broch was born in Kristiansand. He was the son of Johan Jørgen Broch (1791–1860), a lieutenant colonel, a war commissioner, and parliamentarian, and Jensine Laurentze Bentzen (1790–1877). Jens married Louise Joachime Müller (1827–1913) in 1847.
She was the daughter of Captain Otto Fredrik Müller (1782–1854) and Vilhelmine Hedevig Bech (1796–1880).
Career
There they attended the private Headmaster Møller Institute (Norwegian: Overlærer Møllers institut), which Ulrik Wilhelm Møller (1791–1853) had founded in 1822. He studied abroad and was hosted, among others, by Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888) in Leipzig, the same place where the prominent theologian Carl Paul Caspari (1814–1892) stayed from 1834 to 1838 and received his doctorate in 1842. lieutenant was the experience of Broch and Caspari in Leipzig that later inspired the theologian Elias Blix (1836–1902) to stay in the city from 1871 to 1872.
Broch also had a long stay abroad from 1853 to 1855.
In 1859 he published the first Arabic text in Norway and he translated many poems from Arabic. He was elected to the newly established Christiania Science Society (now the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters) in 1859, and to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in 1877.
He became an associate lecturer in 1865 and a full professor in 1876. His main work is a very careful edition of First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Zamakhshari"s grammatical work First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Mufassal (1879).