Otto Jespersen

Template:Short description Template:For Template:Infobox person Jens Otto Harry Jespersen ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 16 July 1860 – 30 April 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. Steven Mithen describes him as "one of the greatest language scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Early lifeEdit

Otto Jespersen was born in Randers in Jutland, to Jens Bloch Jespersen (1813–70) and Sophie Caroline Bentzien (1833–74).<ref name="leksikon">Template:Cite website</ref> He was one of nine children.Template:Sfnp As a boy, he was inspired by works of the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask and Template:Ill biography of Rask,Template:Sfnp and with the help of Rask's grammars taught himself some Icelandic, Italian, and Spanish.Template:Sfnp

Academic life and workEdit

Jespersen entered the University of Copenhagen in 1877 when he was 17, initially studying law but not forgetting his language studies.<ref name="warwick">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> in his first year at university, he attended a lecture course by Template:Ill on the history of Evolutionism since the Greeks; this introduced him to the ideas of Herbert Spencer, and later in life he looked back on the course warmly.Template:Sfnp Jespersen taught languages in a lower secondary school,Template:Sfnp and from 1880 to 1887 was a stenographer for the Rigsdag (Danish parliament). The income from these allowed him in 1881 to shift his focus completely to languages.<ref name="leksikon" /> Following the introduction of a new degree, Skoleembedseksamen, Jespersen switched to this, choosing French as the major subject and English as the second minor subject, the first compulsorily being Latin (a language that he hated from then onTemplate:Sfnp). He was one of a large number of students who appealed for Latin to be made voluntary, but the appeal was unsuccessful.Template:Sfnp Jespersen studied under Karl Verner, Hermann Möller and particularly Vilhelm Thomsen among linguists; and more broadly, under Harald Høffding: it was thanks to Høffding that Jespersen was further exposed to the writings and ideas of Darwin, Mill and Spencer, and to introspective psychology.Template:Sfnp

In 1887 he passed Skoleembedseksamen. For French, he chose to be examined on Diderot, reflecting a lasting enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. Throughout his life Jespersen remained faithful to the ideals and methods of his early teachers. Positivist and evolutionary attitudes, physiological and psychological methods in their classical form, and finally, liberal humanism were essential to his character.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's views on language owed less to theoretical considerations than to a practical and thus largely functional conception of language; as a language theorist, Jespersen could remain tethered to reality thanks to the common sense fundamental to his character. Even when making such bold proposals as that of the "progress" of a language, he could avoid extremes.Template:Sfnp

In 1887–1888, he traveled to England, Germany and France, meeting linguists like Henry Sweet and Paul Passy and attending lectures at institutions such as Oxford University.Template:Citation needed Following a tip from his mentor Vilhelm Thomsen that not many years would pass before there would be a vacancy for a specialist in English, he returned to Copenhagen in August 1888 and began work on his doctoral dissertation on the English case system, which he defended in 1891. His doctorate entitled Jespersen to teach in the university without pay as a Privatdocent; he took this opportunity to teach classes on Chaucer and Old English, thereby adding to his qualifications for the post; he also wrote a book on Chaucer.Template:Sfnp

On the resignation of George Stephens as Docent, his newly vacant post was upgraded to that of Professorship of English language and literature. Jespersen was one of four applicants; the others were Template:Ill and Jón Stefánsson (both rather lacklustre), and William Craigie (then very young).Template:Sfnp This was "a no-holds-barred contest", during which Jón Stefánsson even published a bookTemplate:Efn charging Jespersen with plagiarizing Georg von der Gabelentz. (Gabelentz himself denied this.)Template:Sfnp Up to date in English philology, familiar with English literature, and "[speaking] English perfectly", Jespersen was chosen.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen was a professor of English at the University of Copenhagen from 1893 to his retirement in 1925. This was not such a comfortable position: in 1911 he published an article in the newspaper PolitikenTemplate:Efn describing poor conditions for academic work (serious underfunding, and the lack of a compulsory retirement age for professors), and also how he had got his wife to promise to shoot him if he failed to retire at 65.Template:Sfnp He remained something of a radical, in a magazine article published in 1914Template:Efn he made further recommendations: that Denmark should have more than one university (its second would only arrive in 1928), that a Faculty of Divinity did not belong in a modern university, that there should be financial incentives for students to proceed to postgraduate work, and more. However, although Jespersen succeeded in having Latin removed as a compulsory minor, it can be inferredTemplate:Efn that he backed the compulsory inclusion of Chaucer, Spenser and Milton in the English course.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from November 1904 to November 1906; and Rector (vice-chancellor, or president) of the university from November 1920 to November 1921. Among his engagements while Rector was an address at the inauguration in March 1921 of the Institute of Theoretical Physics (later renamed Niels Bohr Institute). Another was a speechTemplate:Efn welcoming new students in September 1921 "he exhorts [them] to absorb the scholarly and scientific tradition (to the extent of being critical of their professors!), the only genuine hallmark of academics".Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's early work focused primarily on language teaching reform and on phonetics, but he is better known for his later work on syntax and on language development.

Language teachingEdit

At the end of the 19th century the teaching in Denmark of contemporaneous foreign languages was ossified, and very similar to that of long-dead classical languages. This was despite the belief of Template:Ill, expressed decades earlier, that pupils should be encouraged to acquire a second language as they had acquired their first, and indeed despite the writings of Jan Amos Comenius in the 17th century.Template:Sfnp

In 1886, Jespersen, Template:Ill and Johan August Lundell cofounded a Scandinavian group for a revitalization of language teaching, naming the group "Quousque Tandem" after Wilhelm Viëtor's pseudonym as author of the 1882 pamphlet Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren! ("Language teaching must start afresh!").Template:Efn Template:Sfnp The group opposed the use of theoretical grammar and translation exercises, advocating in its place the teaching of a language in its spoken and living form by the "direct" method, informed by phonetics:Template:Sfnp

The pupils should begin by recognizing words and short sentences by ear, and repeating them, and only then should they learn to read them. A correct pronunciation should be secured with the help of phonetic transcription.

As a campaigner, he was an extremist: Hjelmslev writes that this was an area where Jespersen's normal moderation and common sense were counterbalanced by a revolutionary fervour, and that he was a "Jacobin" among linguists.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's first book (1884) was a Danish translation, Praktisk tilegnelse af fremmede sprog ("Practical acquisition of foreign languages"), of Die praktische Spracherlernung,Template:Sfnp by Felix Franke. Both Franke (also born in 1860) and Jespersen first assumed that the other was much older than himself, but from its start in 1884 their correspondence quickly became a lively discussion (about two hundred letters and postcards survive) of such matters as second language education and phonetic scripts; it was cut short in 1886 when Franke succumbed to tuberculosis.Template:Sfnp Template:Efn

In an article published in 1886Template:Efn (and elaborated in his 1901 book Sprogundervisning, translated as How to teach a foreign language, 1904), Jespersen argued for the following principles in language teaching:

Teaching should be based on spoken rather than written language. To this end, at early stages of language teaching, only a phonetic script should be used, and this script should be clear and precise.
Material for reading should not consist of unrelated sentences. It should instead constitute coherent texts, preferably designed so that the meanings of unfamiliar words can be inferred from their contexts.
At early stages the teaching of grammar should be minimized, and the pupils encouraged to infer grammatical patterns for themselves. Grammar may be examined and practised later, but time should not be spent on grammatical curios, and form and function should not be separated.
Exercises in translating the second language into the first should not be emphasized; exercises in translating the first into the second are of very little utility.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen followed his 1884 translation of Franke with Kortfattet engelsk grammatik for tale- og skriftsproget (1885), Fransk læsebog efter lydskriftsmetoden (1889), and (with Template:Ill) Engelsk begynderbog (1895): books which, together with those written by others that similarly used the "direct method", soon took over from the "grammar–translation" material against which Jespersen and Quousque Tandem had rebelled:Template:Sfnp

For some years Denmark saw a heated contest between proponents of the grammar–translation method and those of the direct method, but the latter won, as recognized by the Secondary Schools Act of 1903.Template:Sfnp

PhoneticsEdit

Jespersen's interest in phonetics was prompted by Henry Sweet's Handbook of Phonetics (1877), and the lectures of Vilhelm Thomsen.Template:Sfnp In the 1880s, inspired by Melville Bell and other British phoneticians, he developed what he first called an "analphabetic" systemTemplate:Efn – which, "to avoid ridicule", he later termed an "antalphabetic" system – that used a series of three variables for any phone: lowercase Roman for the passive articulator, lowercase Greek for the active articulator, and numerals and more for "the degree and shape of the aperture at a place of constriction". Jørgen Rischel points out that a given "anatomical feature" can be labelled according to its use: thus rather than simply "uvular", the role of the uvula can be described as "a passive articulator in uvular consonants but an active articulator in nasalized sounds".Template:Sfnp

In June 1886, he became a member of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), then called the Phonetic Teachers' Association. The idea of creating a phonetic alphabet that could be used by every language was first put forward by Jespersen in a letter he sent to Paul Passy.<ref name="principles">Template:Cite journal In a supplement on the cover, "A short history of the Association Phonétique Internationale".</ref> Jespersen's transcription system for English, used in Template:Ill's Engelsk–Dansk–Norsk Ordbog = A Dictionary of the English and Dano-Norwegian Languages (1902–1907), is very close to that of Daniel Jones, which it preceded by some years.Template:Sfnp Language-specific systems were not unusual at the time (Johan Storm devised Norvegia for Norwegian in 1884);Template:Sfnp and Jespersen devised a system, named Dania, for the phonetic transcription of Danish (1890), which has remained in use for philological, dialectological and lexicographic work in Danish.Template:Sfnp Jespersen was sceptical of a single phonetic transcription system for universal application, and did not use the IPA's International Phonetic Alphabet.Template:Sfnp

With continued encouragement by Thomsen and a new friendship with Paul Passy, whom he met in Paris, Jespersen was well informed on phonetics. His own major work on this was Fonetik, published in 1897–1899. In it, Jespersen bases his descriptions on his observations of his own production of sounds in a variety of languages, where this production satisfies native speakers. Jespersen was keen to supplant metaphorical and impressionistic terms with those that described the vocal tract, and had considerable success. Jørgen Rischel calls Fonetik "a landmark in Danish phonetics because of its terminology", much of which has lasted.Template:Sfnp Stripped of content specific to Danish, but updated, it was published in German translation in 1904.

The Danish-specific material within Fonetik was republished in 1906 within the booklet Modersmålets fonetik ("Phonetics of the mother tongue"). This treated not only the sounds of Danish but also its prosody, an area in which Jespersen was a pioneer. Repeatedly reprinted, the booklet was long used as a standard textbook.Template:Sfnp

Two books, Phonetische Grundfragen ("Phonetics essentials") and Lehrbuch der Phonetik ("Textbook of phonetics"), presented portions of Fonetik to readers of German in 1904. Jespersen hoped for an English translation, and plans were made for a translation by Hans Jørgen Uldall, and later for a revision by Uldall, no English translation ever appeared.Template:Sfnp

Rischel writes that: "It is Jespersen's amazing breadth in [his studies of phonetics], paired with his never failing linguistic intuition as a safeguard against errors or downright nonsense, which impresses the reader today."Template:Sfnp In Eli Fischer-Jørgensen's estimate (1979), Jespersen was not a great innovator, but was unusually adept at the pronunciation and description of articulatory phonetics, and also aware of the importance of contrast.Template:Sfnp

Early dialectological and other fieldwork on East Slesvig and North Jutland dialects, Faroese, and West Greenlandic work was indebted to Jespersen's methodology (although for the last, William Thalbitzer, the researcher, "did not live up to Jespersen's standards at all").Template:Sfnp

Although not a phonologist himself, Jespersen was the first to propose a conceptual distinction between phonetics and phonology that is commonly observed today.Template:Efn

Stød, "a particular kind of laryngealisation (creaky voice) characterizing some Danish syllables" had been studied since Jens Høysgaard in the mid-18th century, but Jespersen's synchronic study of stød and of its morphology and also his study of the relationship between the Danish stød and "the Norwegian and Swedish tonal ('musical') accents" were major advances from the work done by Rasmus Rask, Karl Verner, and Henry Sweet.Template:Sfnp

Hans Basbøll evaluates Jespersen as "a true pioneer in his analysis of stress" saying that:

he developed a whole system of types of stress and described it in detail: both syntactic principles of stress reduction (unitary stress, or unit accentuation), of compound stress, of value stress (different types of emphatic stress), and so on.Template:Sfnp

Basbøll has coined the term "New Jespersen School" (Ny-Jespersenianerne) for "the main editors of [Den Store Danske Udtaleordbog (a major pronunciation dictionary for Danish)Template:Efn], namely, Template:Ill, Jørn Lund and Steffen Heger, and their collaborators and pupils"; their major achievement aside from SDU has been Brink and Lund's two-volume historical phonetics work Dansk Rigsmål (1975).Template:Sfnp Template:Efn Template:Sfnp

Concentration on EnglishEdit

While still regarding himself as less of a scholar of English than a scholar of French, Jespersen published Kortfattet engelsk grammatik for tale- og skriftsproget ("A concise English grammar for the spoken and written language") in 1885. Most unusually for a grammar book, this employed phonetic script. Inge Kabell comments: "All other grammars of English published in Denmark were for many, many years to come modelled on it and all middle-aged Danes have been taught English according to the principles found in it."Template:Sfnp

Jespersen continued to study in Paris (especially under Gaston Paris), England, Berlin (under Julius Zupitza), and Leipzig. Particularly important were his friendships with Paul Passy and Henry Sweet. Sweet's views on phonetics, grammar, and historical linguistics, and his concentration on English, had a great influence on Jespersen. Jespersen's choice of the case system of English as the subject of his doctoral dissertation was probably also prompted by advice from Vilhelm Thomsen to prepare for a chair in English at the University of Copenhagen that would soon be vacant upon the retirement of George Stephens. He successfully defended his dissertation in 1891. Once installed as chair, Jespersen devoted most of his energy to the study and teaching of English, but he retained his broader interests. His prolific output was of great importance for the linguistic study of all aspects of English, for linguistics in general, and to a lesser degree for Nordic philology. Jespersen was the first great linguist to hold the chair of English at the Copenhagen, while his friend Template:Ill had much the same role for the university's chair of French.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen continued as chair of English until he retired in 1925, following his resolve not to continue after reaching 65, in order to help make way for younger scholars.Template:Sfnp

General syntaxEdit

Jespersen advanced the concepts of rank in two papers: Sprogets logik (1913) and De to hovedarter af grammatiske forbindelser (1921); and in the latter, nexus as well.Template:Sfnp In this theory of ranks Jespersen removes the parts of speech from the syntax, and differentiates between primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries; e.g. in well honed phrase, the primary is phrase, this being defined by a secondary, honed, which itself is defined by a tertiary, well. The term nexus is applied to sentences, structures similar to sentences and sentences in formation, in which two concepts are expressed in one unit; e.g., it rained, he ran indoors. This term is qualified by a further concept called a junction which represents one idea, expressed by means of two or more elements, whereas a nexus combines two ideas. Junction and nexus have had a mixed evaluation: Hjelmslev finds the distinction between them confused, and Jespersen's theory of them in need of revision, in contrast to his refinement in "Tid og tempus" (1914)Template:Efn of Sweet's distinction between tense (Danish tempus) and time (Danish tid).Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's work helped point the way towards our current understanding of a grammatical head.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In Hjelmslev's opinion, Negation in English and Other Languages (1917) offers a great number of observations and considerable food for thought, but fails to constitute a general examination of negation, for which purpose it would have to be based on more solid materials, from a greater variety of languagesTemplate:Sfnp (the overwhelming majority of the examples examined are from the Indo-European languages of west Europe). Jespersen coined the terms paratactic negationTemplate:Sfnp and resumptive negation (negation with an element added to the end of the sentence to strengthen the already negative meaning of the sentence);Template:Sfnp he also advanced understanding of negative concord.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In The Philosophy of Grammar (1924) Jespersen challenges the accepted views of common concepts in grammar and proposes corrections to the basic definitions of case, pronoun, object, voice etc., and further develops his notions of Rank and Nexus. In the 21st century this book is still used as one of the basic texts in modern structural linguistics.Template:Citation needed

With The Philosophy of Grammar particularly in mind, Noam Chomsky said in 1975: "I think it is fair to say that the work of recent years tends generally to support the basic ideas that Jespersen outlined 50 years ago, and extends and advances the program that he outlined."<ref>Template:Cite book Also Template:ISBN.</ref>

Late in his life Jespersen published Analytic Syntax (1937), in which he presents his views on syntactic structure using an idiosyncratic shorthand notation.

Evolution and progress of languagesEdit

From his doctoral dissertation of 1891 onwards, Jespersen maintained that over time language did not merely evolve but progressed, a notion originally inspired by Spencer's ideas on the progress of language.Template:Sfnp He wrote "That language ranks highest which goes farthest in the art of accomplishing much with little means, or, in other words, which is able to express the greatest amount of meaning with the simplest mechanism."<ref>Template:Cite book Template:Cite book</ref> Jespersen considered the efficiency of a language's phonology, lexicon and grammar, his view of efficiency in grammar being a reaction to contrasting estimates of "synthetic" and "analytic" inflectional languages. held by the brothers August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, and Wilhelm von Humboldt.Template:Sfnp

August Schleicher was a conspicuous proponent of the idea that older languages such as Latin had attained a synthetic optimum, and languages that derived from these tended to degrade via the analytic towards an "isolating" extreme, the degree of degradation of a language increasing with "the richness and eventfulness of its speakers' history".Template:Sfnp Jespersen proposed the reverse, criticizing the needless complexities of synthetic grammar, and ascribing Schleicher's evaluations to "a grammar-school admiration, a Renaissance love of [Latin and Ancient Greek] and their literatures".<ref>Progress in Language, pp. 9–10; quoted in Template:Sfnlink.</ref>

Whereas Schleicher conceived language as a biological phenomenon, and thus subject to processes such as maturation, ageing and death, linguists of the mid 19th century such as Georg Curtius, Johan Nikolai Madvig and William Dwight Whitney emphasized language as a human-developed tool for communication. By the end of the century this became the received conception of language.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen thought of the uses of language as needing a balance between two factors: the ease of the speaker's expression of ideas, and the distinctness of that expression (and thus the ease of comprehension for the listener).<ref>Efficiency in Linguistic Change, pp. 391–392; quoted in Template:Sfnlink.</ref> The proximate sources of the pair were Georg von der Gabelentz's Bequemlichkeitstrieb ('drive to comfort') and Deutlichkeitstrieb ('drive to distinctness', although by Deutlichkeit Gabelentz meant something broader than Jespersen's early formulations of distinctness).Template:Sfnp Although Jespersen later recognized that distinctness should include playfulness, vividness and other factors, the ability to communicate retained its primacy.Template:Sfnp

As for the mechanism of grammatical change, a major interest of Jespersen's was the diachronic loss from Old English of both case inflections and freedom of word order. He showed that fixed word order did not arrive to make up for the loss of case inflections: word order became fixed before rather than after this loss. Rather, the degree of syncretism in inflection had meant that inflection had lost much of its earlier helpfulness. A later change Jespersen discussed was the disappearance of the exclusively singular second-person (thou, thee, thy, thine), which, he wrote, had merely maintained a "useless distinction" between polite and familiar terms of address or reference.Template:Sfnp

Unlike Gabelentz, Jespersen was interested in extending the concepts of analyticity and efficiency to international auxiliary languages.Template:Sfnp Within negotiations among the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language aimed at deciding which constructed language should receive the international backing of scholars, the greatest supporter of Jespersen's principles was the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, who had his own theory of Energetik ('energetics'), and for whom "Language was . . . a domain of culture calling out to be optimized through deliberate intervention".Template:Sfnp Thus for Jespersen, progress towards communicative efficiency is anyway inevitable,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> but can also be assisted by language engineering.Template:Sfnp

Hjelmslev criticizes the ambiguity of "efficiency" and "effort"; and adds that even if these are understood only loosely, there have been counter-examples.Template:Efn He concludes that, as propounded by Jespersen, the thesis is far from convincing, but is put forward vividly and has aroused considerable interest.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's conception of evolution soon came to differ from Spencer's. Whereas Spencer believed that increased heterogeneity – synonymy, and the generation of new word classes, dialects and even languages – indicated progress, Jespersen found progress in simplicity and uniformityTemplate:Sfnp and:

Jespersen praised the "Template:Thinspace'noiseless' machinery" of English,Template:Efn the modern European language furthest down the analytic path, and the language most despised by Schleicher precisely for what he regarded as this analytic degeneracy.Template:Sfnp

In a review of Efficiency in Linguistic Change, Bernard Bloch was forthright in saying that while linguists, like anyone else, were entitled to their private opinions on the relative merits of languages, judging the utility or attractiveness of a language was not part of their job.Template:Sfnp But although Bloch was an American structuralist, largely following Leonard Bloomfield, his reaction was much more extreme than that of Bloomfield, who thought that tackling questions such as relative efficiency was not improper, but instead better postponed until the factors involved were better understood.Template:Sfnp

A very different kind of opposition to Jespersen's conception came from Charles Bally, whose stylistics concerns led him to concentrate on the affective dimension of language, for which processes such as polysemy and clipping are important, and thus to reject efficiency as an ideal.Template:Sfnp Bally's objections to received opinions on language evolution extended beyond this: for example, he claimed that the change from "synthetic" to "analytic" was at times reversedTemplate:Sfnp (as Hermann Möller had pointed out to Jespersen as early as 1891Template:Sfnp).

Hans Frede Nielsen has criticized Jespersen's lack of consistency in, for example, approving the development of new, periphrastic (and, thanks to &nbh;ing, inflectional) tenses for allowing new distinctions and nuances that enriched English, while also approving the loss in English of the subjunctive and thus the distinctions and nuances that it had enabled.Template:Sfnp

As for the beginnings of language:

Humboldt held the view . . . that the origin of language lies in the natural urge to produce art. . . . [The idea, which] originated most probably with Vico . . . lived on till the beginning of the 20th century. Jespersen . . . emphatically denies, against all evidence, the romanticist background of this theory, [yet] still defends the thesis that language originated in song, in love play and otherwise. . . . Nowadays [this view] is entirely forgotten.Template:Efn<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Richard C. Smith considers Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin to be Jespersen's "masterpiece".<ref name="warwick"/>

Jespersen advanced the study of the Great Vowel Shift, and was the first to present it in diagram form; he also coined its name.Template:Efn<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Child languageEdit

As Jespersen believed that linguistics was a biological science and that in evolution ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, his interest in historical linguistics led him both to examine child language and to propound interlinguistics, the encouragement of linguistic progress.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's writings on child language appear in Nutidssprog hos børn og voxne (1916), Børnesprog (1923), Sproget: barnet, kvinden, slægten (1941); they are summarized within Language: Its nature, development, and origin (1922).Template:Sfnp

International auxiliary languagesEdit

Template:Ido sidebar Jespersen applied both his theories on grammar and his ideas of efficiency of expression into the quest for an international auxiliary language.

It is true that towards the end of his life Jespersen expressed some qualms about the time and energy he had invested in [artificial languages, but his] interest in the matter covered practically his whole life, from his rejection of Volapük in his student days to suggested reforms in his own creation Novial a few years before his death.Template:Sfnp

In 1907 Louis Couturat called a meeting of the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language to decide on a single language for recommendation for international use.Template:Sfnp As an Anglicist, Jespersen might have been expected to back English for this role, but he rejected such a notion on the grounds that:Template:Sfnp

a deliberate choice of any one [national] language for such a purpose would meet with unsurmountable difficulties on account of international jealousiesTemplate:Sfnp

each of them is several times more difficult than a constructed language need beTemplate:Sfnp

As for constructed languages, these had either of two goals. There were languages primarily designed to encourage clarity of thought, and those primarily based on (but simplifying) existing, widely spoken languages. Volapük, which had approached the former (and whose words were built on unrecognizable roots), had suffered a recent and rapid eclipse in speaker population by Esperanto, which did not. Thus the favourites for endorsement by the Delegation were Esperanto (which had regular morphology and was largely based on Romance languages), and Idiom Neutral (which had less stress on regularity and was based on what was already shared by the most prominent languages of Europe).Template:Sfnp Of the two, Idiom Neutral was more to Jespersen's liking.Template:Sfnp

A complex and shady process (see Ido: History) involved the sudden nomination by somebody using the pseudonym "Ido" of a newly conceived revision of Esperanto. Despite learning of the deception made by or for the pseudonymous reviser, and despite his anger over this deception, Jespersen believed candidate languages should be judged purely on their merits, and that this revision (which came to be called Ido) was a significant improvement over Esperanto in its current state. However, L. L. Zamenhof, Esperanto's creator, was opposed to it, as was the Esperantists' Lingva Komitato, and it became a rival of Esperanto.Template:Sfnp Jespersen collaborated with Louis Couturat and others on International Language and Science (1910), a book advocating its adoption;Template:Efn Template:Sfnp and became president of an Ido academy. But although a significant increase in its number of speakers would have required Ido to mobilize its speakers and evangelize, such a project did not attract Jespersen, who wanted "a language for the brain, not for the heart".Template:Sfnm

In 1925 Jespersen met Alice Morris, a wealthy cofounder (and lasting financial supporter) of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). "[U]nlike its counterparts in the international auxiliary language movement in Europe, there was in IALA little of the fanaticism, the eccentricity, and even the mysticism that accompanied the promotion of languages such as Esperanto."Template:Sfnp Through Morris and the IALA Jespersen also met Edgar de Wahl, creator of the language Occidental and others with whom he could discuss the possibilities for constructed languages.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's active participation in the IALA included chairing an IALA-funded conference, the Meeting of Linguistic Research, held in Geneva in spring 1930;Template:Sfnp but perhaps more important to IALA was the prestige he brought. Before the involvement in IALA, and then formal association with it, of American scholars such as Edward Sapir, Earle Babcock, Henry A. Todd, and John L. Gerig, and the Europeans Collinson and Jespersen, many in academia thought international auxiliary languages pointless and a waste of time; but now "the organization and the movement could – and did – claim scholarly legitimacy for its linguistic research".Template:Sfnp

Morris viewed the issues involved in constructing a language to be mainly those of the lexicon. She and Jespersen (writing in a 1929 article, "Nature and art in language"Template:Efn) were not unusual:

The proponents, the creators, and the analysts of artificial languages all concentrated on lexicon and derivational morphology. Syntax warranted no special attention. Being 'natural', it would take care of itself, or so it seemed to many of the enthusiasts most responsible for actually constructing auxiliary languages.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen believed that constructed languages, Ido included, were still more complex than needed, and still differed more than necessary from widely spoken national languages. He therefore set out to create an improved language, Novial Template:Sfnp (Nov "new" + IAL "International Auxiliary Language"Template:Sfnp). His significant publications here include An International language (1928);Template:Efn Novial Lexike (a dictionary, 1930);Template:Efn and "A new science: Interlinguistics" (1931).Template:Efn Template:Sfnp Novial got a mixed reception (the Esperantist Gaston Waringhien found it particularly unsatisfactory), but Jespersen was hobbled by the mutual incompatibility of regularity and perceived naturalness as goals. Oddly, Novial also lacked some of the features that Jespersen had praised in English, such as consonant-ending monosyllabic words, and conversion without a need for inflection.Template:Sfnp

Larsen urges his readers:Template:Sfnp

But rather than judge [projects such as Novial] by their actual or potential contribution to international communication, we are better advised . . . to see [Jespersen's] life-long preoccupation with auxiliary languages and his creation of Novial not as a heroic failure but as a revealing application of his linguistic thought.

The English languageEdit

Jespersen's specialism for the longest period was the English language. His most celebrated work, and easily his most expansive, was A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, published in six "parts" (volumes) during his lifetime, from 1909 to 1942, and a seventh, posthumous part in 1949. The first part is devoted to phonetics (much of it historical), the sixth to morphology (both derivational and inflectional). Five of the seven parts are devoted to syntax, which Jespersen particularly enjoyed.Template:Efn

Writing in Jespersen's obituary, Helmslev calls A Modern English Grammar a "monumental work", one that "will maintain its immense value for an incalculable future thanks to the rich documentation of facts it provides".Template:Efn Template:Sfnp

In his own work The Syntactic Phenomena of English (1988), James D. McCawley attributes various of his analyses, or the insights pointing towards them, to Jespersen: raising;Template:Sfnp "worthwhile criticism of traditional systems of parts of speech"Template:Sfnp and classification of what are traditionally termed "subordinating conjunctions" (as in "You must look at this before you leave") as prepositions with sentential objects;Template:Sfnp and more specifically, classification of that in relative clauses (as in "The necktie that he bought was polyester") not as a relative pronoun but as a complementizer.Template:Sfnp Asked how the 20th-century Dutch grammarians of English Hendrik Poutsma, Etsko Kruisinga and R. W. Zandvoort compared with Jespersen, McCawley replied: "Of course, Jespersen is in a class by himself. He was a fantastically original, broad, and deep thinker."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905, and reprinted at numerous times thereafter) is a broad history of the English language. It won Jespersen the Prix Volney.Template:Sfnp In 1989, Hans Frede Nielsen wrote that:

[It] can be read as the homage paid by an Anglophile to the English language which is praised for its business-like, virile qualities, its conciseness, logic and sobriety — to say nothing of its noble, rich, pliant and expressive character. . . . No wonder that [the book] became so popular in the English-speaking world and among Anglophiles elsewhere.<ref>Template:Harvtxt Within this, Nielsen cites in particular Growth and Structure of the English Language (9th edition, 1938), pp. 2–16, 234.</ref>

He described it as "probably the most widely read introduction to the history of the English language ever written".Template:Sfnp

Essentials of English Grammar (1933), primarily intended for university teaching, is for the most part synchronic.Template:Sfnp W. Nelson Francis described it as "arguably [Jespersen's] most familiar and popular book".Template:Sfnp

Terms related to English that were introduced by Jespersen and are still widely used today include cleft sentence,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> content clause,Template:Sfnp light verb,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> mass noun,Template:Sfnp quantifier,Template:Sfnp and yes-or-no question.Template:Sfnp Jespersen's writings have also influenced today's conceptions of existential sentence.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Robert I. Binnick calls Jespersen "one of the greatest students of the English language . . . , at once the last of the traditional grammarians and the first modern linguist–grammarian".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

SociolinguisticsEdit

Jespersen has been cited as "a pioneer in the study of women's language [and] often quoted for his views on what he believed to be the biologically determined nature of women's usage" – although "[a] product of his own day and age".<ref>Template:Cite book (Also preprint.) Page 214. Hovdhaugen et al. point to Jespersen's works "Mands sprog og kvindes tale", in Gads Magasin 1906–1907, pp. 581–592; and Sproget: Barnet, Kvinden, Slægten (1941).</ref>

Linguists have been less patient with the content of "The Woman", a chapter within Jespersen's book Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922): "he manages to include every stereotype about women that was current at the time";<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> "[the chapter offers] a compendium – and a grim one for that matter, filled with prejudices and misogyny – of long-standing commonplaces on women's contribution to the development of language."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

However, Einar Haugen finds something of value: "Jespersen's data were inadequate, and his views sound sexist to today's feminists; but he caught one significant generalization: that many of the differences [between men's and women's speech] were due to the division of labor between men and women in most societies."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Influences and allegiancesEdit

During the decades of his activity, Jespersen followed what other, younger linguists were doing but refrained from unreservedly welcoming any advance, let alone from aligning himself with any new approach. He remained individualistic, but "there was a conservative streak in his radicalism"Template:Efn as he seemed to take seriously only the standpoints that had influenced him in his youth and to interpret newer work as mere repetition of this or that older theory.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen's main interest was not that of seeking patterns and explanations of the langue behind parole, but rather its opposite, the major concern of the phonetics and semantics of his youth: "the psychophysiological fact of parole".Template:Efn Template:Sfnp

Travels and honoursEdit

Jespersen visited the United States twice: he lectured at the Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis in 1904, and in 1909–1910 he visited both the University of California and Columbia University.Template:Sfnp While in the U.S., he studied its education system. His autobiography (En sprogmands levned) was first published in English translation (A linguist's life) as recently as 1995.

After his retirement in 1925, Jespersen remained active in the international linguistic community. As well as continuing to write, he convened and chaired the first International Meeting on Linguistic Research in Geneva in 1930, and presided over the Fourth International Congress of Linguists in Copenhagen in 1936.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen received honorary degrees from Columbia University in New York (1910), the University of St Andrews in Scotland (1925), and the Sorbonne in Paris (1927).Template:Sfnp He was one of the first six international scholars to be elected as honorary members of the Linguistic Society of America.Template:Sfnp He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1931.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Books by JespersenEdit

Praktisk Tilegnelse af fremmede Sprog ("Practical acquisition of foreign languages"). [A translation of Felix Franke, Die praktische Spracherlernung auf Grund der Psychologie und Physiologie der Sprache dargestellt von Felix Franke.] Copenhagen: Carl Larsen, 1884. Template:OCLC.
Kortfattet engelsk Grammatik for Tale- og Skriftsproget ("A concise English grammar for the spoken and written language"). Copenhagen: Carl Larsen, 1885. Template:OCLC. (Also later editions.)
Fransk Læsebog efter Lydskriftsmethode ("A French reader using the phonetic method"). Copenhagen, 1889.
The Articulations of Speech Sounds Represented by Means of Analphabetic Symbols. Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1889. Template:OCLC. At the Internet Archive; Again at the Internet Archive.
Studier over engelske Kasus. Med en Indledning om Fremskridt i Sproget ("Studies on case in English: With an introduction on progress in language"). [Jespersen's doctoral dissertation.] Copenhagen: Kleins Vorlag, 1891. Template:OCLC.
- Progress in Language: With Special Reference to English. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1894. Template:OCLC. At the Internet Archive. New York: Macmillan & Co. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993; with an introduction by James D. McCawley. Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013. Template:ISBN. [Jespersen's adaptation of his doctoral dissertation.]
- Chapters on English. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918. Template:OCLC. Selected Writings. 1960. Pp. 153–346. Selected Writings. 2010. Pp. 81–165. [Excerpted from Progress in Language.]
Chaucers Liv og Digtning ("Chaucer's life and poetry"). Studier fra Sprog- og Oldtidsforskning. Copenhagen: Klein, 1893. Template:OCLC.
With Template:Ill. Engelsk Begynderbog ("English primer"). 1895. Template:OCLC. (Often later reprinted.)Template:Sfnp
Fonetik: En systematisk Fremstilling af Læren om Sproglyd ("Phonetics: A systematic presentation of the study of the sounds of language"). Copenhagen: Schubotheske Forlag, 1899. Template:OCLC.
- Phonetische Grundfragen ("Phonetics essentials"). Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1904. Template:OCLC. [German translation by N. Andersen and Hermann Davidsen of portions of Fonetik; with additions written by Jespersen.]
- Lehrbuch der Phonetik ("Textbook of phonetics"). Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1904. Template:OCLC. (Also later editions.) [German translation by Hermann Davidsen of portions of Fonetik.]
Sprogundervisning ("Language teaching"). Copenhagen: Det Schubotheske forlag, 1901. Template:OCLC. 2nd ed. ("revised, less polemical"Template:Sfnp). Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1935. Template:OCLC.
- How to Teach a Foreign Language. Translation by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen of Sprogundervisning. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1904. Template:OCLC. London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1904. 1904 printing and 1928 printing at the Internet Archive. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2007. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2010. Template:ISBN.
The England and America Reader. Copenhagen, 1904.
- A British Reader: Nybearb. af "The England and America Reader". 1931. Template:OCLC. Edited by Template:Ill and H. Helweg-Møller.
Growth and Structure of the English Language. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner; New York: G.E. Stechert, 1905. Template:OCLC. New York: Free Press, 1968. Template:OCLC. Free Press edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982; with a foreword by Randolph Quirk. Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN.
Modersmålets Fonetik ("Phonetics of the mother tongue"). Copenhagen: Schubotheske, 1906. Template:OCLC. (Revised and augmented in later editions.Template:Sfnp)
John Hart's Pronunciation of English (1569 and 1570). Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1907. Anglistische Forschungen, Heft 22. Template:OCLC. At the Internet Archive. [About the content of John Hart's An Orthographie (1569) and A Methode or Comfortable Beginning for All Vnlearned, Whereby They May Bee Taught to Read English (1570).]
A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Seven "parts" (volumes), 1909–1949. Earliest parts first published by Carl Winter, Heidelberg, later parts by Ejnar Munksgaard, Copenhagen and George Allen & Unwin, London. Parts 5–7, issued without series title, have imprint: Copenhagen, E. Munksgaard, 1940–49; Imprint varies: Parts 5–6: London: George Allen & Unwin; part 7: Copenhagen: Munksgaard, London: George Allen & Unwin.
Engelsk Fonetik. Copenhagen: Nordisk, 1912. Edited by H. Helwig-Møller. Template:OCLC.
- English Phonetics: A Handbook for Scandinavian Students. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1950. Template:OCLC. Revised and translated by Bengt Jürgensen.
Sprogets Logik ("The logic of language"). Copenhagen: J. H. Schultz, 1913. Template:OCLC.
Nutidssprog hos Børn og Voxne ("Modern language in children and adults"). Copenhagen: Nordisk forlag, 1916. Template:OCLC.
Negation in English and Other Languages. Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Historisk-filologiske Meddelelser I, 5. Copenhagen: Andr. Fred. Høst og søn, 1917. Template:OCLC. At the Internet Archive; at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Selected Writings. 1960. Pp. 1–152. Selected Writings. 2010. Pp. 2–80.
Rasmus Rask i Hundredåret efter hans Hovedværk ("Rasmus Rask a hundred years after his major work"). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1918. Template:OCLC. At Danskernes Historie Online.
De to Hovedarter av grammattiske Forbindelser ("The two main types of grammatical relations"). Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab: Historisk-filologiske Meddelelser IV, 3. Copenhagen: Andr. Fred. Høst og søn, 1921. Template:OCLC. At the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2007. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013. Template:ISBN.
Sprogets Udvikling og Opstaaen ("The development and origin of language"). Copenhagen: V. Pio, 1926. Template:OCLC.
Børnesprog: En Bog for Foraldre ("Children's language: A book for parents"). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1923. Template:OCLC.
The Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924. Template:OCLC. At the Internet Archive. New York: Henry Holt, 1924. Template:OCLC. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. Template:OCLC. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; with an introduction by James D. McCawley. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2010. Template:ISBN.
Mankind, Nation and Individual: From a Linguistic Point of View. Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1925. Template:OCLC. At the Internet Archive. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013. Template:ISBN.
Et Verdenssprog: Et Forsøg på Spørsmålets Løsning ("A world language: An attempt to solve the question"). Copenhagen: V. Pios, 1928. Template:OCLC.
An International Language. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928. Template:OCLC. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013. Template:ISBN. S.l.: Feedbooks, n.d. Archived by the Wayback Machine on 21 August 2018. [The introduction of the Novial language.]
Novial Lexike: International Dictionary = Dictionnaire international = Internationales Wörterbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1930. Template:OCLC. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013. Template:ISBN. Text file edition, blahedo.org (Don Blaheta). [Novial to English, French and German dictionary.]
Tanker og Studier ("Thoughts and studies"). Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1932. Template:OCLC. [Collection of papers in Danish.]
Linguistica: Selected Papers in English, French and German. London: George Allen & Unwin; Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1933. Template:OCLC. At Internet Archive. College Park, Maryland: McGrath, 1970. Template:OCLC. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2015. Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN.
Essentials of English Grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1933. (And later impressions.) Template:OCLC. Tokyo: Kaitakusha (Template:Nihongo2), 1943. 2nd ed. 1944. Template:NCID. University of Alabama Press, 1965. Template:OCLC. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006. Template:ISBN. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013. Template:ISBN. [Greatly condensed derivative of A Modern English Grammar.]
Analytic Syntax: A System of Expressing Grammatical Formulae by Symbols. London: George Allen & Unwin, [1937]. Template:OCLC. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1937. Template:OCLC. New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1969. Template:OCLC. Tokyo: Senjo, 1971. Template:OCLC. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984; with an introduction by James D. McCawley. Template:ISBN.
Template:AnchorEn Sprogmands Levned ("A linguist's life"). Copenhagen, 1938. Template:OCLC. [Jespersen's autobiography.]
- A Linguist's Life: An English Translation of Otto Jespersen’s Autobiography with Notes, Photos and a Bibliography. Translated by David Stoner, edited by Arne Juul, Hans Frede Nielsen and Jørgen Erik Nielsen, foreword by Paul Christophersen. Odense: Odense University Press, 1995. (Template:ISBN)
Sproget: Barnet, Kvinden, Slægten ("Language: Child, woman, family"). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1941. Template:OCLC.
Efficiency in Linguistic Change. Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Historisk-filosofiske Meddelelser 27, 4, 1941. 2nd ed. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1949. 3rd ed. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1969. At the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Selected Writings. 1960. Pp. 381–466. Selected Writings. 2010. Pp. 190–231.
Template:AnchorSelected Writings. London: George Allen & Unwin; Tokyo: Senjo, 1960. Template:OCLC. At the Internet Archive. London: Routledge, 2010. Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN.

Personal lifeEdit

As a student, Jespersen enjoyed chess and reading French and English literature.Template:Sfnp

Jespersen married Ane Marie Djørup on 13 April 1897; the couple, later together with their son, lived in Frederiksberg (distinct from Copenhagen but geographically part of it), until their move in 1901 to Ermelundsly, a large house in Jægersborg, near Gentofte. In 1934 they again moved to a large house, Lundehave, in the outskirts of Helsingør, provided by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters for a distinguished academician.Template:Sfnp

Ane Marie died on 30 March 1937. Jespersen became ill in December 1942; he died on 30 April 1943, and his urn was interred in a cemetery at Helsingør.Template:Sfnp