Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen was a Danish linguist who worked in foreign-language pedagogy, historical phonetics, and other areas, but is best known for his description of the grammar of the English language. Steven Mithen describes him as "one of the greatest language scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Early life
Otto Jespersen was born in Randers in Jutland, to Jens Bloch Jespersen and Sophie Caroline Bentzien. He was one of nine children. After his father died the family moved to Hillerød, where his Jutland accent was ridiculed.As a boy, Jespersen was inspired by works of the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask and the biography of Rask by ; and with the help of Rask's grammars taught himself some Icelandic, Italian, and Spanish.
Academic life and work
Jespersen's father, grandfather and great-grandfather had been lawyers, and the same was expected of him. He entered the University of Copenhagen in 1877 when he was 17, initially studying law but not abandoning his language studies. In his first year at university, he attended a lecture course by 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. Teaching languages in a lower secondary school and working from 1880 to 1887 as a stenographer for the Rigsdag brought an income that in 1881 allowed Jespersen to shift his focus completely to languages. Following the introduction of a new degree, Skoleembedseksamen, he switched to this, choosing French as the major subject and English as the second minor subject, the first compulsorily being Latin. He was one of a large number of students who appealed for Latin to be made voluntary, but the appeal was unsuccessful. Thanks to his need for an income, obtaining a Master's degree took Jespersen a decade, but the delays may well have determined his "habits of wide and self-motivated study".Jespersen studied under the linguists Karl Verner, Hermann Möller and particularly Vilhelm Thomsen; and beyond linguistics, 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.
In 1887 Jespersen passed Skoleembedseksamen. For French, he chose to be examined on Diderot, from a lasting enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution and the 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.
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.
In 1887, soon after passing the Skoleembedseksamen, Jespersen went to London, where he met the phoneticians Wilhelm Viëtor, Alexander Ellis and Henry Sweet. In October he went on to Oxford, where James Murray told him of progress towards A New English Dictionary, and where he heard lectures by the Assyriologist Archibald Sayce and others.
Around New Year 1888 he went to Germany, first visiting Leipzig, where he met the phonetician and the historical linguists Karl Brugmann and August Leskien. He also visited the historical linguist Eduard Sievers, the phonetician Franz Beyer and the English teacher Hermann Klinghardt, at Halle, Weißenfels and Reichenbach respectively. He then stayed with Paul Passy at Neuilly-sur-Seine for two months, each day going with him to Paris to see the sights, to hear lectures by the Romance scholar Gaston Paris, the Orientalist James Darmesteter or the dialectologist Jules Gilliéron, or to audit Passy's English lessons.
He then went to Berlin to study Old and Middle English in Berlin under the philologist Julius Zupitza. Among his fellow students were the Anglicists and G. C. Moore Smith, both of whom would long remain friends.
Following a tip from his mentor Vilhelm Thomsen that after a few years 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, a dissertation that he successfully 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 expected vacancy; he also wrote a book on Chaucer.
On the resignation of George Stephens as Docent, the newly vacant position was upgraded to that of Professorship of English language and literature. Jespersen was one of four applicants; the others were and Jón Stefánsson, and William Craigie. This was "a no-holds-barred contest", during which Jón Stefánsson even published a book charging Jespersen with plagiarizing Georg von der Gabelentz. Up to date in English philology, familiar with English literature, and " English perfectly", Jespersen was chosen.
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 Politiken describing poor conditions for academic work, and also how he had got his wife to promise to shoot him if he failed to retire at 65. He remained something of a radical, in a magazine article published in 1914 he made further recommendations: that Denmark should have more than one university, 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 inferred that he backed the compulsory inclusion of Chaucer, Spenser and Milton in the English course.
Jespersen was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from November 1904 to November 1906; and Rector 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. Another was a speech welcoming new students in September 1921: "he exhorts to absorb the scholarly and scientific tradition, the only genuine hallmark of academics".
Language teaching
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, expressed decades earlier, that pupils should be encouraged to acquire a second language in the way that they had acquired their first, and indeed despite the writings of Jan Amos Comenius in the 17th century.In 1886, Jespersen, 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!. 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:
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, Jespersen was an extremist: Hjelmslev writes that this was an area where his normal moderation and common sense were counterbalanced by a revolutionary fervour, and that he was a "Jacobin" among linguists.
Jespersen's first book was a Danish translation, Praktisk Tilegnelse af Fremmede Sprog, of Die praktische Spracherlernung, by Felix Franke. Both Franke 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 of such matters as second language education and phonetic scripts; it was cut short in 1886 when Franke succumbed to tuberculosis.
In an article published in 1886, 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.