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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin," Otto Jespersen presents a profound exploration of linguistic evolution, analyzing the intricate relationship between language and human cognition. Combining meticulous scholarship with an accessible prose style, Jespersen delves into the nature of language as a dynamic social phenomenon. He examines the historical and cultural contexts that shape linguistic change, offering insights into phonetics, grammar, and the interplay of dialects. Through a systematic study, he engages with contemporary linguistic theories and critiques existing paradigms, placing his work within the broader tradition of linguistic inquiry established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Otto Jespersen, a prominent Danish linguist and philologist, was a pivotal figure in the development of modern linguistics. His extensive academic background and passion for language led him to challenge traditional views on language evolution, emphasizing its fluidity. His contributions to the field include significant work on English grammar, and he was a strong advocate for the use of simplified languages, reflecting his broader beliefs in accessibility and communication. Jespersen's scholarly journey is marked by a commitment to unveiling the complexities of language, which permeates this seminal text. This book is essential reading for linguists, educators, and anyone interested in the profound intricacy of human communication. Jespersen's holistic approach not only enlightens the reader on the mechanisms of language but also encourages a deeper appreciation for its role in society. "Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin" invites readers to engage critically with the very essence of what it means to communicate, making it a pivotal text for both novice and seasoned linguists. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its heart, this book asks how human language comes to be what it is—shaped by history, social life, and the mind—and how those forces make speech both orderly and endlessly changeable. Otto Jespersen’s Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin presents a far-reaching inquiry by a distinguished Danish linguist, inviting readers to examine language as a living phenomenon. Written in a clear, argumentative, and exploratory voice, it maps the terrain from fundamental features to far-reaching implications. The result is a work that marries scholarly depth with a broad human curiosity, offering a guide to how languages emerge, change, and sustain the work of communication.
This is a work of scholarly nonfiction in linguistics, first appearing in the early twentieth century, when the study of language was shifting from traditional philology toward broader theoretical questions. Jespersen situates his analysis within that intellectual climate, addressing debates about how languages are structured and how they evolve over time. Rather than confining itself to a single tradition, the book moves across comparative insights and general principles, combining observation with conceptual framing. Readers encounter a historical moment in European scholarship that sought to connect sound, form, and meaning to the realities of use. The book’s context illuminates how a field consolidated its methods while expanding its ambitions.
The premise is both simple and expansive: to account for what language is, how it develops, and what might explain its beginnings. Jespersen approaches this through an examination of linguistic features—sounds, words, and patterns—while keeping an eye on real usage and change. The experience for readers is analytical yet accessible, marked by an essayistic style that values clarity and cumulative insight. The mood is inquisitive rather than doctrinaire, building its case through examples and distinctions that aim to bring underlying processes into view. In this way, the book offers not just conclusions but an approach to thinking about language with precision and breadth.
Key themes run through the study. Language appears as a dynamic system in which stability and variation coexist: patterns solidify even as innovation and simplification push against them. Social interaction, habit, and communicative need help explain why forms spread or fade. Jespersen treats language as both structure and practice, concerned with the interplay between established norms and the pressures of use. Development is presented as cumulative and adaptive rather than linear or uniform, prompting readers to consider how small shifts can reshape larger systems. This thematic emphasis makes the book a sustained meditation on continuity and change in human expression.
On the question of origins, the book surveys competing possibilities while acknowledging the limits of direct evidence. Jespersen weighs how features of language—its sounds, meaningful units, and patterns—could have arisen from ordinary human capacities and contexts. He traces connections between communicative functions and the forms that serve them, arguing from plausibility and comparative observation rather than speculative narrative. The point is not to settle the debate once and for all, but to clarify criteria for reasonable explanation. In following this path, the book models disciplined inference: it values what can be shown, distinguishes it from what cannot, and builds a careful case.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance lies in its questions as much as its answers. What makes linguistic structure resilient in the face of change? How do social conventions, cognitive tendencies, and historical pressures interact to shape grammar and meaning? Jespersen’s work encourages attention to everyday usage without losing sight of system and theory. It offers a frame for thinking about language that can enrich studies in linguistics, literature, and related fields interested in how forms carry ideas. The intellectual appeal is durable because it joins meticulous description to conceptual curiosity, showing how careful observation can illuminate enduring problems.
Approached today, this study is an invitation to rigorous, open-minded reading. It offers a lucid tour of language as practice and pattern, balancing empirical insight with reflective argument. Readers will find a steady guide through debates that remain vital, from the mechanisms of change to the reach and limits of explanation. Jespersen’s method—patient, comparative, and attentive to function—provides tools for thinking beyond any single language or school. The book matters because it shows how to ask better questions about speech and meaning, and because it treats language as a human achievement that deserves both analysis and admiration.
Synopsis
Otto Jespersen’s Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin presents a comprehensive account of what language is, how it changes through time, and how it may have arisen. The book proceeds from description to history and finally to conjectures about origins, integrating linguistic observation with psychological and social considerations. Jespersen emphasizes language as a human, social instrument rather than a biological organism, and he grounds his discussion in examples from many languages. He aims to show the interplay between structure and use, stressing that language is shaped by the needs of speakers for economy, clarity, and expressiveness. The result is an organized survey of linguistic principles and tendencies.
In discussing the nature of language, Jespersen places primary importance on speech over writing, treating spoken language as the foundation of linguistic structure. He analyzes the relationship between sound and meaning, balancing the arbitrariness of signs with limited forms of motivation such as sound symbolism and iconicity. Core principles include economy of effort, distinctiveness for communication, and the social character of linguistic norms. He outlines the layers of linguistic analysis, from sounds to words to sentences, and he emphasizes that linguistic facts must be understood in context. This perspective frames the later chapters on change, typology, and the conditions under which linguistic systems evolve.
Jespersen examines phonetics and phonology as the material basis of language. He describes how sounds are produced and heard, how phoneme systems are organized, and how prosody, stress, and intonation contribute to meaning and structure. He reviews sound change, noting both its recurrent patterns and the role of functional pressures that preserve intelligibility. Writing is treated as a secondary, imperfect record of speech, sometimes obscuring phonetic realities. Regularities in change are acknowledged, but Jespersen also accounts for leveling, analogy, and the influence of usage on maintaining contrasts. The chapter conveys how physical, psychological, and communicative factors jointly condition the sound side of language.
Turning to words and meanings, Jespersen surveys vocabulary growth and semantic change, including narrowing, widening, metaphor, and shifts in evaluation. He describes how new words arise through derivation, compounding, borrowing, and blending, and how analogy supports the extension of patterns. He shows how grammatical categories develop from lexical items and how frequent expressions become reduced and conventionalized. Processes of shortening and coalescence are linked to economy, while systems of affixes and function words arise to secure clarity. Meaning is viewed as contextually anchored and continually negotiated by speakers, with stable conventions emerging from repeated use. The discussion highlights the gradual, cumulative nature of lexical and grammatical development.
Jespersen then addresses syntax and the sentence. He explains how word order, agreement, and government coordinate to signal relationships, and how languages balance fixed order with morphological marking. He presents a typological overview, contrasting isolating, agglutinative, and inflectional tendencies, while cautioning that languages mix features and change type over time. He analyzes grammaticalization paths, the tightening of constructions, and the rise of auxiliaries and particles. A recurrent theme is the tendency toward analytic expression and clearer sequencing when inflectional material is reduced, though this is treated as a statistical drift rather than a strict law. The account links structural patterning to communicative efficiency and learnability.
The book integrates individual and social perspectives on linguistic change. Jespersen considers child language as evidence for the shaping forces of simplification, pattern recognition, and expressive needs, without claiming a direct recapitulation of history. He discusses dialectal diversity, prestige norms, and the roles of different social groups in spreading innovations. Contact between languages leads to borrowing, calquing, and structural convergence, while standardization constrains variation and codifies usage. He highlights selection among variants as a social process influenced by frequency, convenience, and communicative success. This section situates change in the interplay of speaker psychology, community norms, and the demands of everyday interaction.
Historical development is illustrated by case studies drawn from well-known language families. Jespersen sketches how inflectional systems may erode through phonetic reduction and analogical leveling, with compensatory strengthening of word order, prepositions, and auxiliaries. He notes cycles in grammatical expression, including the rise and reanalysis of periphrastic forms. Examples from Indo-European languages, including English, show the cumulative effect of sound change, borrowing, and syntactic restructuring on vocabulary and grammar. Throughout, he emphasizes tendencies rather than immutable rules, recognizing that languages adopt different solutions to recurring communicative pressures. The discussion presents historical change as orderly yet contingent, shaped by frequency, patterning, and social diffusion.
In addressing the origin of language, Jespersen reviews classic hypotheses, including imitative, interjectional, and work-chant theories, and he evaluates gestural accounts and mixed proposals. He argues for a socially grounded, expressive genesis in which playful and emotional vocalization, closely tied to gesture and rhythm, gradually acquired stable meanings and structures. Musical and aesthetic features are seen as important early motivators, later channeled into conventional signs. Jespersen rejects single-cause explanations and emphasizes gradual conventionalization through repeated, shared interactions. The chapter synthesizes physiological, psychological, and social evidence, while acknowledging the limits of direct proof and the speculative character of origin theories.
The concluding chapters reiterate that language is a flexible, adaptive instrument shaped by human needs for expression, economy, and mutual understanding. Jespersen integrates observations on sound, meaning, and structure with accounts of variation, history, and possible beginnings to present a coherent picture of linguistic dynamics. He offers tendencies rather than prescriptive laws, stresses the primacy of speech, and treats writing and grammar as evolving conventions. The overall message is that language changes through selection and regular use, balancing ease with clarity. While cautious about origins, the book maintains that comparative observation and functional explanation can illuminate both development and the probable pathways of emergence.
Historical Context
Published in 1922, Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin belongs to the interwar intellectual climate of Northern and Western Europe. Its author, Otto Jespersen, wrote from Copenhagen, where he served as professor of English at the University of Copenhagen between 1893 and 1925, but his references and correspondences spanned London, Paris, and Leipzig. Denmark had remained neutral during the First World War (1914–1918), yet Copenhagen’s scholars felt both the shock of the war and the pull of new international institutions. The book’s setting is thus the seminar room, the learned society, and the international congress, a transnational scholarly space in which comparative data, pedagogy, and philology converged after 1900.
Danish political and social history shaped Jespersen’s vantage point. After Denmark’s 1864 defeat to Prussia and Austria in the Second Schleswig War, cultural nation-building turned inward toward education and language. The folk high school movement associated with N. F. S. Grundtvig and Christen Kold expanded from the 1860s, while mass literacy deepened through late nineteenth-century schooling. The parliamentary transition known as the Systemskiftet of 1901 accelerated reforms and broadened civic participation. The University of Copenhagen modernized its curricula amid this climate. Jespersen’s long engagement with language teaching and public lectures arose from these reforms, and his 1922 book reflects a pedagogical commitment to living speech and to practical description over classical prescriptivism.
Debates on evolution and the origin of language formed the most consequential background to the book. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) framed language as an evolved capacity, prompting wide controversy. In reaction to speculative excess, the Société de Linguistique de Paris famously banned communications on the origin of language in 1866, a rule that discouraged theorizing without evidence. Nevertheless, the topic persisted in public view through Max Müller’s Oxford Lectures on the Science of Language (1861–1864), William Dwight Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875), and Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (1900–1920), which treated language as a collective psychological product. Developments in prehistory and anthropology added time depth and comparative materials: the Neanderthal discovery in 1856 (Feldhofer Cave, Germany), Cro-Magnon remains in 1868 (Les Eyzies, France), and systematic ethnographic linguistics at the turn of the century broadened inquiry beyond classical languages. By 1900–1920, new empirical methods—phonetics, child language observation, and comparative typology—reopened questions that the Paris ban had cordoned off. Jespersen’s Language engages this reopened field with caution and breadth: he assesses hypotheses about how speech systems arise, change, and specialize, draws on cross-linguistic evidence rather than mythic just-so stories, and treats linguistic evolution as a cumulative process governed by usage and social function. In doing so, the book positions itself as a historically informed intervention that neither returns to mid-nineteenth-century speculation nor accepts blanket prohibitions on investigating language origins.
The Neogrammarian movement that coalesced in Leipzig in the 1870s–1880s shaped the scientific standards Jespersen inherited. Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff’s 1878 manifesto and August Leskien’s principle of the exceptionless sound law established a rigorous historical-comparative method. Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880) integrated psychology and usage into historical grammar. By 1922, this paradigm had stabilized Indo-European studies across Germany and beyond. Jespersen’s book acknowledges the power of regular sound change but insists that analogy, frequency, and communicative economy also drive development. He reframes the method by stressing gradual, usage-based reshaping of forms, thus situating the Neogrammarian legacy within a broader social and functional history of language.
The phonetic reform movement provided concrete tools and institutional supports. The International Phonetic Association, founded in 1886 in Paris by Paul Passy, promoted a standardized alphabet and classroom techniques grounded in articulatory science. Figures such as Henry Sweet in London and Daniel Jones at University College London (An Outline of English Phonetics, 1918) made phonetics central to language teaching and description. This infrastructure transformed scholarly practice by privileging spoken data and transcription over purely orthographic traditions. Jespersen’s 1922 volume participates in this shift: it treats speech as primary, uses phonetic observation to argue about change and variation, and presents language as a living, physiological and social activity rather than a fixed written inheritance.
The cataclysms and diplomatic experiments surrounding the First World War reshaped linguistic ideals. The war of 1914–1918 destroyed empires and, with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the 1920 creation of the League of Nations in Geneva, fostered projects of international cooperation. A parallel movement sought a politically neutral auxiliary language. The Delegation pour l’adoption d’une langue auxiliaire internationale met in Paris in 1907 under Louis Couturat; its recommendations favored the reformed Esperanto known as Ido, which Jespersen supported before later designing Novial in 1928. In 1922 a committee of the League of Nations discussed Esperanto, and a favorable report encouraged its teaching, though France blocked official adoption. Jespersen’s book mirrors this internationalist moment: its arguments about economy, transparency, and cross-linguistic commonalities implicitly support the feasibility of a simplified, widely learnable means of communication in a fractured postwar world.
European imperial expansion and the rise of anthropology supplied vast new linguistic evidence. The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 formalized colonial partitions in Africa, triggering administrative and missionary grammars and dictionaries across Bantu, Nilotic, and other families. In North America, Franz Boas’s Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911) and Edward Sapir’s Language (1921, New York) reoriented analysis toward typological diversity and cultural context. These global corpora complicated Eurocentric models of structure and development. Jespersen’s 1922 study draws on such broadened comparisons to argue that languages evolve under pressures of usage, contact, and functional need rather than along a single, Indo-European path, thus integrating colonial-era documentation into a more balanced, global account.
As a social and political critique, the book contests prescriptive hierarchies and nationalist linguistic ideologies of the period. It opposes the elevation of archaic written norms and elite school grammars over the speech of ordinary people, thereby challenging class-based judgments of correctness that had accompanied mass schooling since the late nineteenth century. By emphasizing cross-linguistic kinships and the adaptability of all languages, it also rebukes chauvinist claims of inherent superiority tied to nation or race. In advocating clarity, economy, and learnability, it aligns linguistics with democratic educational aims and with postwar internationalism, suggesting that more tolerant language policies and auxiliary solutions can mitigate the communicative and political fractures of the age.
Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin
PREFACE
The distinctive feature of the science of language as conceived nowadays is its historical character: a language or a word is no longer taken as something given once for all, but as a result of previous development and at the same time as the starting-point for subsequent development. This manner of viewing languages constitutes a decisive improvement on the way in which languages were dealt with in previous centuries, and it suffices to mention such words as ‘evolution’ and ‘Darwinism[1]’ to show that linguistic research has in this respect been in full accordance with tendencies observed in many other branches of scientific work during the last hundred years. Still, it cannot be said that students of language have always and to the fullest extent made it clear to themselves what is the real essence of a language. Too often expressions are used which are nothing but metaphors—in many cases perfectly harmless metaphors, but in other cases metaphors that obscure the real facts of the matter. Language is frequently spoken of as a ‘living organism’; we hear of the ‘life’ of languages, of the ‘birth’ of new languages and of the ‘death’ of old languages, and the implication, though not always realized, is that a language is a living thing, something analogous to an animal or a plant. Yet a language evidently has no separate existence in the same way as a dog or a beech has, but is nothing but a function of certain living human beings. Language is activity, purposeful activity, and we should never lose sight of the speaking individuals and of their purpose in acting in this particular way. When people speak of the life of words—as in celebrated books with such titles as La vie des mots, or Biographies of Words—they do not always keep in view that a word has no ‘life’ of its own: it exists only in so far as it is pronounced or heard or remembered by somebody, and this kind of existence cannot properly be compared with ‘life’ in the original and proper sense of that word. The only unimpeachable definition of a word is that it is a human habit, an habitual act on the part of one human individual which has, or may have, the effect of evoking some idea in the mind of another individual. A word thus may be rightly compared with such an habitual act as taking off one’s hat or raising one’s fingers to one’s cap: in both cases we have a certain set of muscular activities which, when seen or heard by somebody else, shows him what is passing in the mind of the original agent or what he desires to bring to the consciousness of the other man (or men). The act is individual, but the interpretation presupposes that the individual forms part of a community with analogous habits, and a language thus is seen to be one particular set of human customs of a well-defined social character.
It is indeed possible to speak of ‘life’ in connexion with language even from this point of view, but it will be in a different sense from that in which the word was taken by the older school of linguistic science. I shall try to give a biological or biographical science of language, but it will be through sketching the linguistic biology or biography of the speaking individual. I shall give, therefore, a large part to the way in which a child learns his mother-tongue (Book II): my conclusions there are chiefly based on the rich material I have collected during many years from direct observation of many Danish children, and particularly of my own boy, Frans (see my book Nutidssprog hos börn og voxne, Copenhagen, 1916). Unfortunately, I have not been able to make first-hand observations with regard to the speech of English children; the English examples I quote are taken second-hand either from notes, for which I am obliged to English and American friends, or from books, chiefly by psychologists. I should be particularly happy if my remarks could induce some English or American linguist to take up a systematic study of the speech of children, or of one child. This study seems to me very fascinating indeed, and a linguist is sure to notice many things that would be passed by as uninteresting even by the closest observer among psychologists, but which may have some bearing on the life and development of language.
Another part of linguistic biology deals with the influence of the foreigner, and still another with the changes which the individual is apt independently to introduce into his speech even after he has fully acquired his mother-tongue. This naturally leads up to the question whether all these changes introduced by various individuals do, or do not, follow the same line of direction, and whether mankind has on the whole moved forward or not in linguistic matters. The conviction reached through a study of historically accessible periods of well-known languages is finally shown to throw some light on the disputed problem of the ultimate origin of human language.
Parts of my theory of sound-change, and especially my objections to the dogma of blind sound-laws, date back to my very first linguistic paper (1886); most of the chapters on Decay or Progress and parts of some of the following chapters, as well as the theory of the origin of speech, may be considered a new and revised edition of the general chapters of my Progress in Language (1894). Many of the ideas contained in this book thus are not new with me; but even if a reader of my previous works may recognize things which he has seen before, I hope he will admit that they have been here worked up with much new material into something like a system, which forms a fairly comprehensive theory of linguistic development.
Still, I have not been able to compress into this volume the whole of my philosophy of speech. Considerations of space have obliged me to exclude the chapters I had first intended to write on the practical consequences of the ‘energetic’ view of language which I have throughout maintained; the estimation of linguistic phenomena implied in that view has bearings on such questions as these: What is to be considered ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ in matters of pronunciation, spelling, grammar and idiom? Can (or should) individuals exert themselves to improve their mother-tongue by enriching it with new terms and by making it purer, more precise, more fit to express subtle shades of thought, more easy to handle in speech or in writing, etc.? (A few hints on such questions may be found in my paper “Energetik der Sprache” in Scientia, 1914.) Is it possible to construct an artificial language on scientific principles for international use? (On this question I may here briefly state my conviction that it is extremely important for the whole of mankind to have such a language, and that Ido[2] is scientifically and practically very much superior to all previous attempts, Volapük, Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Latin sine flexione, etc. But I have written more at length on that question elsewhere.) With regard to the system of grammar, the relation of grammar to logic, and grammatical categories and their definition, I must refer the reader to Sprogets Logik (Copenhagen, 1913), and to the first chapter of the second volume of my Modern English Grammar (Heidelberg, 1914), but I shall hope to deal with these questions more in detail in a future work, to be called, probably, The Logic of Grammar, of which some chapters have been ready in my drawers for some years and others are in active preparation.
I have prefixed to the theoretical chapters of this work a short survey of the history of the science of language in order to show how my problems have been previously treated. In this part (Book I) I have, as a matter of course, used the excellent works on the subject by Benfey, Raumer, Delbrück (Einleitung in das Sprachstudium, 1st ed., 1880; I did not see the 5th ed., 1908, till my own chapters on the history of linguistics were finished), Thomsen, Oertel and Pedersen. But I have in nearly every case gone to the sources themselves, and have, I think, found interesting things in some of the early books on linguistics that have been generally overlooked; I have even pointed out some writers who had passed into undeserved oblivion. My intention has been on the whole to throw into relief the great lines of development rather than to give many details; in judging the first part of my book it should also be borne in mind that its object primarily is to serve as an introduction to the problems dealt with in the rest of the book. Throughout I have tried to look at things with my own eyes, and accordingly my views on a great many points are different from those generally accepted; it is my hope that an impartial observer will find that I have here and there succeeded in distributing light and shade more justly than my predecessors.
Wherever it has been necessary I have transcribed words phonetically according to the system of the Association Phonétique Internationale, though without going into too minute distinction of sounds, the object being, not to teach the exact pronunciation of various languages, but rather to bring out clearly the insufficiency of the ordinary spelling. The latter is given throughout in italics, while phonetic symbols have been inserted in brackets [ ]. I must ask the reader to forgive inconsistency in such matters as Greek accents, Old English marks of vowel-length, etc., which I have often omitted as of no importance for the purpose of this volume.
I must express here my gratitude to the directors of the Carlsbergfond for kind support of my work. I want to thank also Professor G. C. Moore Smith, of the University of Sheffield: not only has he sent me the manuscript of a translation of most of my Nutidssprog, which he had undertaken of his own accord and which served as the basis of Book II, but he has kindly gone through the whole of this volume, improving and correcting my English style in many passages. His friendship and the untiring interest he has always taken in my work have been extremely valuable to me for a great many years.
OTTO JESPERSEN.
University of Copenhagen,June 1921.
ABBREVIATIONS OF BOOK TITLES, ETC.
PHONETIC SYMBOLS
' stands before the stressed syllable. · indicates length of the preceding sound.
[a·] as in alms. [ai] as in ice. [au] as in house. [æ] as in hat. [ei] as in hate. [ɛ] as in care; Fr. tel. [ə] indistinct vowels. [i] as in fill; Fr. qui. [i·] as in feel; Fr. fille. [o] as in Fr. seau. [ou] as in so. [ɔ] open o-sounds. [u] as in full; Fr. fou. [u·] as in foorl; Fr. épouse. [y] as in Fr. vu. [ʌ] as in cut. [ø] as in Fr. feu. [œ] as in Fr. sœur. [~] French nasalization. [c] as in G. ich. [x] as in G., Sc. loch. [ð] as in this. [j] as in you. [þ] as in thick. [ʃ] as in she. [ʒ] as in measure. [’] in Russian palatalization, in Danish glottal stop.
BOOK I HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
CHAPTER I BEFORE 1800
§ 1. Antiquity. § 2. Middle Ages and Renaissance. § 3. Eighteenth-century Speculation. Herder. § 4. Jenisch.
I.—§ 1. Antiquity.
The science of language began, tentatively and approximately, when the minds of men first turned to problems like these: How is it that people do not speak everywhere the same language? How were words first created? What is the relation between a name and the thing it stands for? Why is such and such a person, or such and such a thing, called this and not that? The first answers to these questions, like primitive answers to other riddles of the universe, were largely theological: God, or one particular god, had created language, or God led all animals to the first man in order that he might give them names. Thus in the Old Testament the diversity of languages is explained as a punishment from God for man’s crimes and presumption. These were great and general problems, but the minds of the early Jews were also occupied with smaller and more particular problems of language, as when etymological interpretations were given of such personal names as were not immediately self-explanatory.
The same predilection for etymology, and a similar primitive kind of etymology, based entirely on a more or less accidental similarity of sound and easily satisfied with any fanciful connexion in sense, is found abundantly in Greek writers and in their Latin imitators. But to the speculative minds of Greek thinkers the problem that proved most attractive was the general and abstract one, Are words natural and necessary expressions of the notions underlying them, or are they merely arbitrary and conventional signs for notions that might have been equally well expressed by any other sounds? Endless discussions were carried on about this question, as we see particularly from Plato’s Kratylos[4], and no very definite result was arrived at, nor could any be expected so long as one language only formed the basis of the discussion—even in our own days, after a century of comparative philology, the question still remains an open one. In Greece, the two catchwords phúsei (by nature) and thései (by convention) for centuries divided philosophers and grammarians into two camps, while some, like Sokrates in Plato’s dialogue, though admitting that in language as actually existing there was no natural connexion between word and thing, still wished that an ideal language might be created in which words and things would be tied together in a perfectly rational way—thus paving the way for Bishop Wilkins and other modern constructors of philosophical languages.
Such abstract and a priori speculations, however stimulating and clever, hardly deserve the name of science, as this term is understood nowadays. Science presupposes careful observation and systematic classification of facts, and of that in the old Greek writers on language we find very little. The earliest masters in linguistic observation and classification were the old Indian grammarians. The language of the old sacred hymns had become in many points obsolete, but religion required that not one iota of these revered texts should be altered, and a scrupulous oral tradition kept them unchanged from generation to generation in every minute particular. This led to a wonderfully exact analysis of speech sounds, in which every detail of articulation was carefully described, and to a no less admirable analysis of grammatical forms, which were arranged systematically and described in a concise and highly ingenious, though artificial, terminology. The whole manner of treatment was entirely different from the methods of Western grammarians, and when the works of Panini and other Sanskrit grammarians were first made known to Europeans in the nineteenth century, they profoundly influenced our own linguistic science, as witnessed, among other things, by the fact that some of the Indian technical terms are still extensively used, for instance those describing various kinds of compound nouns.
In Europe grammatical science was slowly and laboriously developed in Greece and later in Rome. Aristotle laid the foundation of the division of words into “parts of speech” and introduced the notion of case (ptôsis). His work in this connexion was continued by the Stoics, many of whose grammatical distinctions and terms are still in use, the latter in their Latin dress, which embodies some curious mistakes, as when genikḗ, “the case of kind or species,” was rendered genitivus, as if it meant “the case of origin,” or, worse still, when aitiatikḗ, “the case of object,” was rendered accusativus, as if from aitiáomai, ‘I accuse.’ In later times the philological school of Alexandria was particularly important, the object of research being the interpretation of the old poets, whose language was no longer instantly intelligible. Details of flexion and of the meaning of words were described and referred to the two categories of analogy or regularity and anomaly or irregularity, but real insight into the nature of language made very little progress either with the Alexandrians or with their Roman inheritors, and etymology still remained in the childlike stage.
I.—§ 2. Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Nor did linguistic science advance in the Middle Ages. The chief thing then was learning Latin as the common language of the Church and of what little there was of civilization generally; but Latin was not studied in a scientific spirit, and the various vernacular languages, which one by one blossomed out into languages of literature, even less so.
The Renaissance in so far brought about a change in this, as it widened the horizon, especially by introducing the study of Greek. It also favoured grammatical studies through the stress it laid on correct Latin as represented in the best period of classical literature: it now became the ambition of humanists in all countries to write Latin like Cicero. In the following centuries we witness a constantly deepening interest in the various living languages of Europe, owing to the growing importance of native literatures and to increasing facilities of international traffic and communication in general. The most important factor here was, of course, the invention of printing, which rendered it incomparably more easy than formerly to obtain the means of studying foreign languages. It should be noted also that in those times the prevalent theological interest made it a much more common thing than nowadays for ordinary scholars to have some knowledge of Hebrew as the original language of the Old Testament. The acquaintance with a language so different in type from those spoken in Europe in many ways stimulated the interest in linguistic studies, though on the other hand it proved a fruitful source of error, because the position of the Semitic family of languages was not yet understood, and because Hebrew was thought to be the language spoken in Paradise, and therefore imagined to be the language from which all other languages were descended. All kinds of fanciful similarities between Hebrew and European languages were taken as proofs of the origin of the latter; every imaginable permutation of sounds (or rather of letters) was looked upon as possible so long as there was a slight connexion in the sense of the two words compared, and however incredible it may seem nowadays, the fact that Hebrew was written from right to left, while we in our writing proceed from left to right, was considered justification enough for the most violent transposition of letters in etymological explanations. And yet all these flighty and whimsical comparisons served perhaps in some measure to pave the way for a more systematic treatment of etymology through collecting vast stores of words from which sober and critical minds might select those instances of indubitable connexion on which a sound science of etymology could eventually be constructed.
The discovery and publication of texts in the old Gothonic (Germanic) languages, especially Wulfila[5]’s Gothic translation of the Bible, compared with which Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Old German and Old Icelandic texts were of less, though by no means of despicable, account, paved the way for historical treatment of this important group of languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But on the whole, the interest in the history of languages in those days was small, and linguistic thinkers thought it more urgent to establish vast treasuries of languages as actually spoken than to follow the development of any one language from century to century. Thus we see that the great philosopher Leibniz, who took much interest in linguistic pursuits and to whom we owe many judicious utterances on the possibility of a universal language, instigated Peter the Great to have vocabularies and specimens collected of all the various languages of his vast empire. To this initiative taken by Leibniz, and to the great personal interest that the Empress Catherine II took in these studies, we owe, directly or indirectly, the great repertories of all languages then known, first Pallas’s Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa (1786-87), then Hervas’s Catálogo de las lenguas de las naziones conocidas (1800-5), and finally Adelung’s Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde (1806-17). In spite of their inevitable shortcomings, their uncritical and unequal treatment of many languages, the preponderance of lexical over grammatical information, and the use of biblical texts as their sole connected illustrations, these great works exercised a mighty influence on the linguistic thought and research of the time, and contributed very much to the birth of the linguistic science of the nineteenth century. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that Hervas was one of the first to recognize the superior importance of grammar to vocabulary for deciding questions of relationship between languages.
It will be well here to consider the manner in which languages and the teaching of languages were generally viewed during the centuries preceding the rise of Comparative Linguistics. The chief language taught was Latin; the first and in many cases the only grammar with which scholars came into contact was Latin grammar. No wonder therefore that grammar and Latin grammar came in the minds of most people to be synonyms. Latin grammar played an enormous rôle in the schools, to the exclusion of many subjects (the pupil’s own native language, science, history, etc.) which we are now beginning to think more essential for the education of the young. The traditional term for ‘secondary school’ was in England ‘grammar school’ and in Denmark ‘latinskole,’ and the reason for both expressions was obviously the same. Here, however, we are concerned with this privileged position of Latin grammar only in so far as it influenced the treatment of languages in general. It did so in more ways than one.
Latin was a language with a wealth of flexional forms, and in describing other languages the same categories as were found in Latin were applied as a matter of course, even where there was nothing in these other languages which really corresponded to what was found in Latin. In English and Danish grammars paradigms of noun declension were given with such cases as accusative, dative and ablative, in spite of the fact that no separate forms for these cases had existed for centuries. All languages were indiscriminately saddled with the elaborate Latin system of tenses and moods in the verbs, and by means of such Procrustean methods the actual facts of many languages were distorted and misrepresented. Discriminations which had no foundation in reality were nevertheless insisted on, while discriminations which happened to be non-existent in Latin were apt to be overlooked. The mischief consequent on this unfortunate method of measuring all grammar after the pattern of Latin grammar has not even yet completely disappeared, and it is even now difficult to find a single grammar of any language that is not here and there influenced by the Latin bias.
Latin was chiefly taught as a written language (witness the totally different manner in which Latin was pronounced in the different countries, the consequence being that as early as the sixteenth century French and English scholars were unable to understand each other’s spoken Latin). This led to the almost exclusive occupation with letters instead of sounds. The fact that all language is primarily spoken and only secondarily written down, that the real life of language is in the mouth and ear and not in the pen and eye, was overlooked, to the detriment of a real understanding of the essence of language and linguistic development; and very often where the spoken form of a language was accessible scholars contented themselves with a reading knowledge. In spite of many efforts, some of which go back to the sixteenth century, but which did not become really powerful till the rise of modern phonetics in the nineteenth century, the fundamental significance of spoken as opposed to written language has not yet been fully appreciated by all linguists. There are still too many writers on philological questions who have evidently never tried to think in sounds instead of thinking in letters and symbols, and who would probably be sorely puzzled if they were to pronounce all the forms that come so glibly to their pens. What Sweet wrote in 1877 in the preface to his Handbook of Phonetics is perhaps less true now than it was then, but it still contains some elements of truth. “Many instances,” he said, “might be quoted of the way in which important philological facts and laws have been passed over or misrepresented through the observer’s want of phonetic training. Schleicher’s failing to observe the Lithuanian accents, or even to comprehend them when pointed out by Kurschat, is a striking instance.” But there can be no doubt that the way in which Latin has been for centuries made the basis of all linguistic instruction is largely responsible for the preponderance of eye-philology to ear-philology in the history of our science.
We next come to a point which to my mind is very important, because it concerns something which has had, and has justly had, enduring effects on the manner in which language, and especially grammar, is viewed and taught to this day. What was the object of teaching Latin in the Middle Ages and later? Certainly not the purely scientific one of imparting knowledge for knowledge’s own sake, apart from any practical use or advantage, simply in order to widen the spiritual horizon and to obtain the joy of pure intellectual understanding. For such a purpose some people with scientific leanings may here and there take up the study of some out-of-the-way African or American idiom. But the reasons for teaching and learning Latin were not so idealistic. Latin was not even taught and learnt solely with the purpose of opening the doors to the old classical or to the more recent religious literature in that language, but chiefly, and in the first instance, because Latin was a practical and highly important means of communication between educated people. One had to learn not only to read Latin, but also to write Latin, if one wanted to maintain no matter how humble a position in the republic of learning or in the hierarchy of the Church. Consequently, grammar was not (even primarily) the science of how words were inflected and how forms were used by the old Romans, but chiefly and essentially the art of inflecting words and of using the forms yourself, if you wanted to write correct Latin. This you must say, and these faults you must avoid—such were the lessons imparted in the schools. Grammar was not a set of facts observed but of rules to be observed, and of paradigms, i.e. of patterns, to be followed. Sometimes this character of grammatical instruction is expressly indicated in the form of the precepts given, as in such memorial verses as this: “Tolle -me, -mi, -mu, -mis, Si declinare domus vis!” In other words, grammar was prescriptive rather than descriptive.
The current definition of grammar, therefore, was “ars bene dicendi et bene scribendi,” “l’art de bien dire et de bien écrire,” the art of speaking and writing correctly. J. C. Scaliger said, “Grammatici unus finis est recte loqui.” To attain to correct diction (‘good grammar’) and to avoid faulty diction (‘bad grammar’), such were the two objects of grammatical teaching. Now, the same point of view, in which the two elements of ‘art’ and of ‘correctness’ entered so largely, was applied not only to Latin, but to other languages as well, when the various vernaculars came to be treated grammatically.
The vocabulary, too, was treated from the same point of view. This is especially evident in the case of the dictionaries issued by the French and Italian Academies. They differ from dictionaries as now usually compiled in being not collections of all and any words their authors could get hold of within the limits of the language concerned, but in being selections of words deserving the recommendations of the best arbiters of taste and therefore fit to be used in the highest literature by even the most elegant or fastidious writers. Dictionaries thus understood were less descriptions of actual usage than prescriptions for the best usage of words.
The normative way of viewing language is fraught with some great dangers which can only be avoided through a comprehensive knowledge of the historic development of languages and of the general conditions of linguistic psychology. Otherwise, the tendency everywhere is to draw too narrow limits for what is allowable or correct. In many cases one form, or one construction, only is recognized, even where two or more are found in actual speech; the question which is to be selected as the only good form comes to be decided too often by individual fancy or predilection, where no scientific tests can yet be applied, and thus a form may often be proscribed which from a less narrow point of view might have appeared just as good as, or even better than, the one preferred in the official grammar or dictionary. In other instances, where two forms were recognized, the grammarian wanted to give rules for their discrimination, and sometimes on the basis of a totally inadequate induction he would establish nice distinctions not really warranted by actual usage—distinctions which subsequent generations had to learn at school with the sweat of their brows and which were often considered most important in spite of their intrinsic insignificance. Such unreal or half-real subtle distinctions are the besetting sin of French grammarians from the ‘grand siècle’ onwards, while they have played a much less considerable part in England, where people have been on the whole more inclined to let things slide as best they may on the ‘laissez faire’ principle, and where no Academy was ever established to regulate language. But even in English rules are not unfrequently given in schools and in newspaper offices which are based on narrow views and hasty generalizations. Because a preposition at the end of a sentence may in some instances be clumsy or unwieldy, this is no reason why a final preposition should always and under all circumstances be considered a grave error. But it is of course easier for the schoolmaster to give an absolute and inviolable rule once and for all than to study carefully all the various considerations that might render a qualification desirable. If the ordinary books on Common Faults in Writing and Speaking English and similar works in other languages have not even now assimilated the teachings of Comparative and Historic Linguistics, it is no wonder that the grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with whom we are here concerned, should be in many ways guided by narrow and insufficient views on what ought to determine correctness of speech.
Here also the importance given to the study of Latin was sometimes harmful; too much was settled by a reference to Latin rules, even where the modern languages really followed rules of their own that were opposed to those of Latin. The learning of Latin grammar was supposed to be, and to some extent really was, a schooling in logic, as the strict observance of the rules of any foreign language is bound to be; but the consequence of this was that when questions of grammatical correctness were to be settled, too much importance was often given to purely logical considerations, and scholars were sometimes apt to determine what was to be called ‘logical’ in language according to whether it was or was not in conformity with Latin usage. This disposition, joined with the unavoidable conservatism of mankind, and more particularly of teachers, would in many ways prove a hindrance to natural developments in a living speech. But we must again take up the thread of the history of linguistic theory.
I.—§ 3. Eighteenth-century Speculation. Herder.
The problem of a natural origin of language exercised some of the best-known thinkers of the eighteenth century. Rousseau imagined the first men setting themselves more or less deliberately to frame a language by an agreement similar to (or forming part of) the contrat social which according to him was the basis of all social order. There is here the obvious difficulty of imagining how primitive men who had been previously without any speech came to feel the want of language, and how they could agree on what sound was to represent what idea without having already some means of communication. Rousseau’s whole manner of putting and of viewing the problem is evidently too crude to be of any real importance in the history of linguistic science.
Condillac is much more sensible when he tries to imagine how a speechless man and a speechless woman might be led quite naturally to acquire something like language, starting with instinctive cries and violent gestures called forth by strong emotions. Such cries would come to be associated with elementary feelings, and new sounds might come to indicate various objects if produced repeatedly in connexion with gestures showing what objects the speaker wanted to call attention to. If these two first speaking beings had as yet very little power to vary their sounds, their child would have a more flexible tongue, and would therefore be able to, and be impelled to, produce some new sounds, the meaning of which his parents would guess at, and which they in their turn would imitate; thus gradually a greater and greater number of words would come into existence, generation after generation working painfully to enrich and develop what had been already acquired, until it finally became a real language.
The profoundest thinker on these problems in the eighteenth century was Johann Gottfried Herder, who, though he did little or nothing in the way of scientific research, yet prepared the rise of linguistic science. In his prize essay on the Origin of Language (1772) Herder first vigorously and successfully attacks the orthodox view of his age—a view which had been recently upheld very emphatically by one Süssmilch[3]
