topics: |  linguistics | english-language | history

In the summer of 2008, I was walking along one of the small cobbled streets of Amsterdam where the university rubs shoulders with the red-light district, when i saw a sign for an used book shop. It was inside a courtyard of a 17th c. building that you reached by going through a tall arched gateway. There on a table lay this well-thumbed volume, more than a half-century old, printed on thick paper in a large serif font, and I immediately picked it up for the princely sum of 3 euros.

Though this edition was from 1954, the book was written in 1905. Amazingly, it is still in print!

Until this chance encounter, Jespersen was just an oft-cited name for me. As i started to read this book, i was increasingly taken by the amazing erudition and connections that Jespersen keeps making.

Not only does he draw sharp, pointed inferences, he also writes with great verve and energy, and carries you along effortlessly, one argument after another.

A linguist par excellence

A hundred years after his era, Jespersen remains very current in
linguistics today.

At one point, Chomsky refers to what he calls a misunderstanding in
Jespersen, when the latter refers to the idea of "grammatical habit".  
In fact, this idea is quite central in Jespersen (see this section from 
his The philosophy of grammar). 

According to Chomsky, grammar cannot be a habit since each sentence is
completely new:

	Normal use of language involves the production and interpretation of
	sentences that are similar to sentences that have been heard before
	only in that they are generated by the rules of the same grammar, and
	thus the only sentences that can in any serious sense be called
	‘familiar’ are clichés or fixed formulas of one sort or another. The
	extent to which this is true has been seriously underestimated even
	by those linguists (e.g. O. Jespersen) who have given some attention
	to the problem of creativity. This is evident from the common
	description of language use as a matter of ‘grammatical habit’
	(e.g. O. Jespersen, Philosophy of Grammar (London, 1924)). It is
	important to recognize that there is no sense of ‘habit’ known to
	psychology in which this characterization of language use is true. 
	      - Chomsky, N.: 1971, Topics in the Theory of Generative
		Grammar. In The Philosophy of Language, J. R. Searle (Ed.),
		Oxford University Press, p.74

However even to the layman this argument seems spurious.  "Boy loves
girl" and "Ram hits Shyam" are similar by virtue of construction, as 
Chomsky suggests, but isn't "Ram hits Shyam" and "Ram beats Shyam up"
similar in some way?  It is not clear if Chomsky would agree. 

Thus, sentences are not completely new, they follow patterns, - what
Jespersen calls "type" and Langacker calls "schema".
Further, the ascent of probabilistic grammars has made it clear that
similarity between sentences can be used to learn structures. 

Today, times have changed, and most linguists would perhaps find the
misunderstanding more with Chomsky than in Jespersen.  

I guote below a tribute from James D. McCawley, taken from his
Introduction to a re-issue of Jespersen's Analytic Syntax (1937), 
an abstruse text which, in the spirit of Panini, seeks to formulate a
grammar in terms of rules that encode both syntax and semantics (to the level
of subj-obj identification) via a set of abstruse symbols. 

McCawley on Jespersen (1984)

I first heard of Analytic Syntax (henceforth, AS) in Edward S.  Klima's
"Structure of English" course at M.I.T. in autumn 1961, where it was
recommended to the students as an unparalleled source of insight into
English syntax, but it was not until five or six years later that I
actually followed Klima's advice and read AS.  Since AS consists mainly of
example sentences and formulaic analyses, it is not a book that one might
expect to read from cover to cover in just a couple of sittings, but I did
exactly that, with fascination that increased as I progressed from each
group of formulas to the next.

Jespersen, 20 years before the beginnings of transformational grammar (AS
was originally published in 1937), had dealt with many of the same
syntactic phenomena that were occupying transformational grammarians, had
given analyses that had much in common with what in the mid-60s were the
latest and hottest ideas in transformational grammar, and had gone in
considerable depth into many important syntactic phenomena that merited but
had not yet received the attention of transformational grammarians.

Analytic Syntax represents
	He promised her to go
and
	He allowed her to go

as differing with regard to whether the 'latent' subject of go is
coreferential with he or with her (p. 49).
(l) a. He promised her to go. S V 0 O(SoI)
    a'. He allowed her to go. S V 0 O(So2(O)I)

Similarly and the advance of science and the advancement of science as
differing with regard to whether science is the subject or object of the
nominalization (p . .58):
(1) b. The advance of science. X pS
    b'. The advancement of science. X pO

(In these formulas, the o indicates 'latent,' i.e. 'understood,' and
repeated relation letters are used to specify coreferntiality, so that the
repeated S in (1a) indicates an understood NP coreferential to the
subject and the repeated O in (1b) an understood NP coreferential to
the indirect object.) AS gives an analysis of
	John is easy to deceive 
in which John is represented as both surface subject of is and underlying
object of deceive (p. 52), an analysis of
	She seems to notice it
in which she to notice it is a sentential subject of seem (p. 47), and an
analysis of
	I am not sure he is ill
in which the complement is the object of an understood preposition (p. 62):

	(2) a. John is easy to deceive. S(0*) V P(2 pI*)
	    b. She seems to notice it. is ½S V ½S(10)
	    c. I am not sure he is ill. S Vn P poI (S2 V P2)

Some important things that AS helped me to see for the first time are
the possibility of prepositional phrases serving as subject or object
(p. 22), the existence of understood prepositions and conjunctions in
several kinds of compound words (pp. 17-19), and the sentential
nature of certain seemingly nonsentential NP's (p. 42):

	(3) a. You have till ten tonight. S V 0(pI3)
	    b. Franco-Prussian war 2(2&°-2) I
	    c. Too many cooks spoil'the broth. S(3P82) V 0

In (3c), for example, cooks is treated as the subject of too many, as it
would be in the semi-sentence *Cooks being too many spoils the broth.1

The grand old man of linguistics

These days, computer scientists often think poorly of linguists.  A popular
witticism is "Every time I fire a linguist, the accuracy of my system goes
up" (something like this was actually said by Fred Jelinek around 1988,
though he said "when a linguist leaves" rather than "fire a linguist").
See (Jurafsky/Martin 2nd ed. p.83).

Reading Jespersen reinforces your faith in linguistics.  There is so much
to learn on every page.  And it is all said so well... 

lessons in military history might be learnt from the words such as loot, a Hindi word learnt by English soldiers in India about a hundred years ago.

It is these thinkers who look at language in all its hairiness, and do not restrict themselves to those bits that a given theory will support, hiding behind terms such as competence. So also one may read Labov, or for that matter, Fillmore, or struggle through Langacker or Givon or Bhartrhari.

The temple of language has many divine priests, and surely Otto Jespersen ranks high among them.

Biography

Otto Jespersen was intrigued by languages as a child: 

	As a boy I read with enthusiasm of Rasmus Rask and by help of his
	grammars made a certain start in Icelandic, Italian and Spanish:
	while I was still at school I had on my own initiative read a
	good. deal in these languages. I count it also as a piece of luck
	that I had as my headmaster Carl Berg, who in a few small books had
	shown an interest in comparative philology’ and who lent me books,
	among others books by Max Müller and Whitney. After my parents’
	deaths, I was much in the house of an uncle whose main interest was
	in the Romanic literatures and his collection of books was a
	treasured browsing place for me in my last years before going to the
	University.  [Farewell address, U. Copenhagen, 1925 May 25]

However, when he entered University, he followed family tradition to study
law.  Fortunately, he soon rebelled at the idea of learning by heart how
how to think about certain situations.  Around this time he encountered
Johan Storm's English Philology (in Norwegian), and the works of Henry
Sweet, and Vilhelm Thomsen who introduced him to comparative linguistics.
He eventually moved to Oxford where he studied with Sweet who advised him to
go to Berlin to study Old and Middle English; he ended up with his
old teacher Thomsen at the University of Copenhagen, where he 
spent more than forty years. 

For much of this period, and for two decades beyond, He worked on his seven
volume magnum opus - "A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles".
During this period, he worked on various other projects including the
The philosophy of grammar (1924),
and books on teaching English.  He was also involved in several languages for
international communication, including Ido and Interlingua, which are still
in use, and Novial, which he created, but was not as widely adopted.

Excerpts

[from the heyday where alternate cultures could be assigned stereotypical
characteristics without risk of Political Correctness]:

	I select at random, by way of contrast, a passage from the language
	of Hawaii: "I kona hiki ana aku ilaila ua hookipa ia mai la oia me ke
	aloha pumehana loa." Thus it goes on, no single word ends in a
	consonant, and a group of two or more consonants is never found. Can
	anyone be in doubt that even if such a language sound pleasantly and
	be full of music and harmony the total impression is childlike and
	effeminate? You do not expect much vigour or energy in a people
	speaking such a language; it seems adapted only to inhabitants of
	sunny regions where the soil requires scarcely any labour on the part
	of man to yield him everything he wants, and where life therefore
	does not bear the stamp of a hard struggle against nature and against
	fellow-creatures. p.3


The dialects spoken by the settlers in England belonged to the great Germanic
(or Teutonic) branch of the most important of all linguistic families, termed
by many philologists the Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic) and by others, and
to my mind more appropriately, Arian (Aryan). p.18
 
A considerable number of military words (e. g. alarm or alarum, cartridge,
corporal, cuirass, pistol, sentinel) carry us back to wars between Italy and
France; and still other lessons in military history might be learnt from
the existence in English of two synonyms, plunder, a German word
introduced in the middle of the seventeenth century by soldiers who had
served under Gustavus Adolphus, and loot, a Hindi word learnt by English
soldiers in India about a hundred years ago. 153

Pronouns of respect: Thou vs you

[Jespersen's willingness to find social characteristics in language have
been noted, for example, by the amazingly erudite yet readable, Bill Bryson. 

from the Mother tongue:

[...] Originally, thou was to you as in French tu is to vous. Thou
signified either close familiarity or social inferiority, while you was the
more impersonal and general term. In European languages to this day
choosing between the two forms can present a very real social agony. As
Jespersen, a Dane who appreciated these things, put it:

  	"English has thus attained the only manner of address
  	worthy of a nation the respects the elementary rights of
  	each individual."  [p.238]


It is worth looking at the entire context of this statement, which appears in
the final chapter of this work, and is much more nuanced than the
isolated quotation above would suggest.]

Honorifics and Democratic norms in society

Aristocratic and democratic tendencies in a nation often show themselves in
its speech...  It is often said, on the Continent at least, that the typical
Englishman's self-assertion is shown by the fact that his is the only
language in which the pronoun of the first person is written with a capital
letter, while in some other languages it is the second person that is
honoured by this distinction, especially the pronoun of courtesy (Germain
Sie, often also Du, Danish De and in former times Du, Italian Ella^ Lei,
Spanish V. or Vd., Finnish Te). p.234

But this is little short of calumny. If self-assertion had been the real
cause, why should not me also be written Me? The reason for writing _I_ is
a much more innocent one, namely the orthographic habit in the middle ages of
using a 'long i' (that is, j or I), whenever the letter was isolated or
formed the last letter of a group; the numeral one was written j or I (and
three, iij, etc.)  just as much as the pronoun.  Thus no sociological
inference can be drawn from this peculiarity. p.235

The aristocratic "vous"

On the other hand, the habit of addressing a single person by means of a
plural pronoun [vous, sie] was decidedly in its origin an outcome of an
aristocratic tendency towards class-distinction.

The habit originated with the Roman Emperors, who desired to be addressed as
beings worth more than a single ordinary man; and French courtesy in the
middle ages propagated it throughout Europe. In England as elsewhere this
plural pronoun (you, ye) was long confined to respectful address. Superior
persons or strangers were addressed as you; thou thus becoming the mark
either of the inferiority of the person spoken to, or of familiarity or even
intimacy or affection between the two interlocutors.

English is the only language that has got rid of this useless distinction.

The Quakers (the Society of Friends) objected to the habit as obscuring the
equality of all human beings; they therefore thou'd (or rather thee'd)
everybody. But the same democratic levelling that they wanted to effect in
this way, was achieved a century and a half later in society at large, though
in a roundabout manner, when the pronoun you was gradually extended to lower
classes and thus lost more and more of its previous character of deference.
Thou then for some time was reserved for religious and literary use as well
as for foul abuse, until finally the latter use was discontinued also and you
became the onlyform used in ordinary conversation.

Apart from the not very significant survival of thou, English has thus
attained the only manner of address worthy of a nation that respects the
elementary rights of each individual. 236

People who express regret at not having a pronoun of endearment and who
insist how pretty it is in other languages when, for instance, two lovers
pass from vous to the more familiar tu, should consider that no foreign
language has really a pronoun exclusively for the most intimate relations.
Where the two forms of address do survive, thou is very often, most often
perhaps, used without real affection, nay very frequently in contempt or
frank abuse.  ...

In some languages the pronoun of respect often is a cause of ambiguity, in
German and Danish by the identity in form of Sie (De) with the plural of the
third person, in Italian and Portuguese by the identity with the singular
(feminine) of the third person. When all the artificialities of the modes of
address in different nations are taken into account — the Lei, Ella, voi and
tu of the Italians, the vossa merce ('your grace', to shopkeepers) and voce
(shortened form of the same, to people of a lower grade) of the Portuguese
(who in addressing equals or superiors use the third person singular of the
verb without any pronoun or noun), the gij, jij, je and U of the Dutch, not
to mention the eternal use of titles as pronouns in German and, still more,
in Swedish ('What does Mr.  Doctor want?' 'The gracious Miss is probably
aware', etc,) — the English may be justly proud of having avoided all such
mannerisms and ridiculous extravagances, though the simple Old English way of
using thou in addressing one person and ye in addressing more than one
would have been still better.

Contents

Chapter I : Preliminary Sketch 						1
Chapter II : The Beginnings 						18
Chapter III : Old English 						33
Chapter IV : The Scandinavians 						59
Chapter V : The French 							84
Chapter VI : Latin and Greek 						114
Chapter VII : Various Sources 						152
Chapter VIII : Grammar 							178
Chapter IX : Shakespeare and the Language of Poetry 			210
Chapter X : Conclusion 							234
Phonetic Symbols. Abbreviations 					249