A short life of the author
Otto Jespersen was the most important scholar of the English language in the first half of the twentieth century — a Danish linguist whose seven-volume grammar of English was the most ambitious descriptive project in the history of English language study, whose theoretical writings anticipated many of the questions that would preoccupy linguistics for the next century, and whose books on language teaching reformed the pedagogy of foreign languages across Europe. He was also a committed internationalist who invented his own constructed language, Novial, in the belief that a universal auxiliary language could promote international understanding.
Copenhagen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen was born in 1860 in Randers, Denmark. He studied English, French, and linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, where he came under the influence of the Neogrammarian school of historical linguistics, which insisted that sound changes operated according to exceptionless laws. He studied in England, Germany, and France, and in 1893 was appointed Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Copenhagen, a position he held until his retirement in 1925.
His command of English was extraordinary for a non-native speaker — his English prose was more lucid and more graceful than that of most English-born scholars — and his ability to perceive patterns and structures in English that native speakers took for granted was the key to his scholarly achievement. The outsider’s perspective gave him analytical distance that compensated for whatever he lacked in native intuition.
A Modern English Grammar
A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (seven volumes, 1909–1949, the last two volumes completed after Jespersen’s death by his student Niels Haislund) was Jespersen’s magnum opus — the most comprehensive descriptive grammar of the English language ever attempted. The work covered the sounds, forms, and syntax of English in exhaustive detail, drawing on an enormous corpus of examples from literary and colloquial sources and tracing the historical development of each grammatical feature from Old English through modern usage.
The grammar’s method was descriptive rather than prescriptive — Jespersen was interested in how English was actually used, not in how grammarians thought it should be used. This orientation, combined with his insistence on explaining grammatical phenomena historically (showing how present usage developed from past usage), made the work a monument of empirical scholarship that remains indispensable to English language scholars.
The Theoretical Works
Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922) was Jespersen’s most important theoretical work — a comprehensive treatment of the nature of language that covered phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, language change, language acquisition, and the origins of language. The book was notable for its breadth, its accessibility to non-specialist readers, and its independence from the theoretical schools that dominated contemporary linguistics.
The Philosophy of Grammar (1924) was Jespersen’s most original contribution to linguistic theory — an attempt to establish the logical and psychological foundations of grammatical categories. Jespersen argued that traditional grammatical categories (noun, verb, adjective) did not always correspond to the underlying logical structure of sentences, and he proposed a system of “ranks” (primary, secondary, tertiary) that described the hierarchical relationships between words in a way that anticipates aspects of modern generative grammar.
Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905) was Jespersen’s most popular book — a brilliant, concise history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon to modern times that combined scholarly authority with a gift for vivid exposition. The book has been reprinted many times and remains one of the best introductions to the subject.
Language Teaching
How to Teach a Foreign Language (1904) was a revolutionary work of language pedagogy that argued against the grammar-translation method that had dominated foreign language teaching for centuries. Jespersen advocated instead for what he called the “direct method” — teaching through conversation, reading, and immersion rather than through the memorisation of grammatical rules and vocabulary lists. His ideas influenced language teaching practice across Europe and anticipated the communicative approach that would become dominant in the later twentieth century.
Novial
Jespersen was one of the most prominent advocates for a constructed international auxiliary language. After working with other constructed languages (including Ido), he created Novial (an acronym for “Nov International Auxiliari Lingue”) in 1928 — a language designed to be as easy as possible for speakers of European languages to learn. He published a dictionary (Novial Lexike, 1930) and a grammar, but the language never achieved widespread adoption.
Collecting Jespersen
Academic first editions are collected by specialists in the history of linguistics. Growth and Structure of the English Language (B. G. Teubner, 1905) is the most accessible. The seven-volume Modern English Grammar (Carl Winter/Allen & Unwin, 1909–1949) is collected as a set. Jespersen’s papers are held at the University of Copenhagen.