Otto Jespersen

For the Norwegian comedian, see Otto Jespersen (comedian).

Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen [ʌtˢo ˈjɛsb̥ɐsn̩] (July 16, 1860-April 30, 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin. He also studied linguistics at Oxford.

Jespersen was a professor of English at Copenhagen University from 1893 to 1925. Along with Paul Passy, he was a founder of the International Phonetic Association. He was a vocal supporter and active developer of international auxiliary languages. He was involved in the 1907 delegation that created the auxiliary language Ido, and in 1928, he developed the Novial language, which he considered an improvement over Ido. Jespersen collaborated with Alice Vanderbilt Morris to develop the research program of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), which in 1951 presented Interlingua to the general public. Edward Sapir and William Edward Collinson also collaborated with Morris.

He advanced the theories of Rank and Nexus in Danish in two papers: Sprogets logik (1913) and De to hovedarter af grammatiske forbindelser (1921). Jespersen in this theory of ranks removes the parts of speech from the syntax, and differentiates between primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries; e.g. in "well honed phrase," "phrase" is a primary, this being defined by a secondary, "honed", which again 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 proved valuable in bringing the concept of context to the forefront of the attention of the world of linguistics.

He was most widely recognized for some of his books. Modern English Grammar (1909), concentrated on morphology and syntax, and Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905) is a comprehensive view of English by someone with another native language, and still in print, over 60 years after his death and nearly 100 years after publication. Late in his life he published Analytic Syntax (1937), in which he presents his views on syntactic structure using an idiosyncratic shorthand notation.

More than once Otto Jespersen was invited to the U.S. as a guest lecturer, and he took occasion to study the country's educational system. His autobiography (see below) was published in English translation as recently as 1995.

Jespersen was a proponent of phonosemanticism and wrote: “Is there really much more logic in the opposite extreme which denies any kind of sound symbolism (apart from the small class of evident echoisms and ‘onomatopoeia’) and sees in our words only a collection of accidental and irrational associations of sound and meaning? ...There is no denying that there are words which we feel instinctively to be adequate to express the ideas they stand for.”

Essays and articles

• What is the use of phonetics?, in: Educational Review (February 1910)
• Nature and Art in Language, in: American Speech 5 (1929), pp. 89ff (Part 1, Part 2)
• Adversative Conjunctions, in: Linguistics (1933)

Bibliography

• 1889: The articulations of speech sounds represented by means of analphabetic symbols. Marburg: Elwert.
• 1894: Progress in Language. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
• 1905: Growth and Structure of the English Language (ISBN 0-226-39877-3)
• 1909ff: A Modern English Grammar (in seven volumes; the title should be understood as 'A grammar of Modern English') (ISBN 0-06-493318-0)
• 1922: Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (ISBN 0-04-400007-3)
• 1924: The Philosophy of Grammar (ISBN 0-226-39881-1)
• 1928: An International Language (the introduction of the Novial language)
• 1930: Novial Lexike Novial to English, French and German dictionary.
• 1937: Analytic Syntax (ISBN 0-226-39880-3)
• 1938: En sprogmands levned, Copenhagen, Jespersen's autobiography
• 1993. A literary miscellany: proceedings of the Otto Jespersen Symposium April 29-30, edited by Jørgen Erik Nielsen and Arne Zettersten 1994
• 1995: A Linguist's Life: an English translation of Otto Jespersen's autobiography, edited by Arne Juul, Hans Frede Nielsen and Jørgen Erik Nielsen, Odense (ISBN 87-7838-132-0)

External links

• "Otto Jespersen", by Niels Haislund, in: Englische Studien 75 (1943), pp. 273-282 (reprinted in: Thomas A. Sebeok, Portraits of Linguists, vol. 2, Bloomington & London: Indiana U.P. 1966 [ISBN 1-84371-006-4], pp. 148-57).