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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin," Otto Jespersen explores the intricate tapestry of language, considering its biological, psychological, and social dimensions. Through a rigorous linguistic framework, Jespersen employs a descriptive and analytical style that deftly combines historical linguistics with contemporary insights, revealing the evolution of language as a dynamic and living system. He delves into concepts such as phonetics, syntax, and semantics while situating linguistic development within broader cultural and historical contexts, making it an essential text for understanding the complexities of human communication. Otto Jespersen, a prominent Danish linguist and a pioneering figure in the field of English grammar, draws on his extensive academic background to craft this seminal work. His experiences in the rapidly evolving landscape of European languages during the late 19th and early 20th centuries likely informed his inquiry into language origins and classifications. Jespersen's ability to synthesize various linguistic theories showcases his commitment to the scientific study of language, making him a respected authority in the field. This book is highly recommended for scholars, students, and language enthusiasts alike, offering profound insights into the essence of language itself. Jespersen's thoughtful analysis invites readers to reflect on their own linguistic experiences while providing a comprehensive foundation for further exploration in the spheres of linguistics and semiotics. 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. - 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: 2022
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Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin
Table of Contents
Introduction
This book confronts the paradox that language is at once an orderly system and a restless, evolving human practice. In Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, Otto Jespersen invites readers to consider speech not as a fixed code but as a living phenomenon shaped by use, context, and time. He treats words, sounds, and structures as products of human ingenuity, social need, and historical change. The result is a study that asks how linguistic forms arise, how they spread, and why they transform, all while insisting that explanation must account for the habits and impulses of speakers as much as for formal patterns.
Jespersen’s work is a landmark of linguistic inquiry written in the early twentieth century by a Danish scholar renowned for clarity and breadth. Situated amid a period that bridged nineteenth-century philology and more functionally oriented approaches, the book blends synthesis with argument, presenting a general account of language accessible beyond specialist circles. Its scope crosses languages and epochs rather than inhabiting a single geographical setting, and it speaks to the intellectual climate that sought to understand language historically, comparatively, and as a social institution embedded in everyday life. The effect is both panoramic and deliberately concrete.
Readers encounter a guided exploration of what language is, how it grows, and where it may have come from, presented in lucid prose that favors example and explanation over technical display. Jespersen writes with an authoritative yet conversational voice, balancing careful definitions with vivid observations. The tone is analytical but humane, determined to reveal the evidence behind each claim without reducing language to mere mechanism. The experience is that of a sustained essay that moves from fundamental questions to specific phenomena and back again, inviting readers to test theoretical claims against what they hear, say, and read in ordinary communication.
The book’s themes include the interplay of form and meaning, the tension between economy and expressiveness, and the role of analogy and habit in shaping grammar. Jespersen treats language as growth rather than invention by decree, stressing how small, incremental shifts accumulate into systemic change. He is attentive to sound patterns, semantic drift, and the social forces that stabilize or unsettle usage. Equally important is his account of individual creativity working within communal norms, a view that illuminates how novelty is accepted, resisted, or regularized, and why linguistic change can appear both law-bound and surprising at once.
A persistent thread is the effort to relate structure to function: the usefulness of a form, its ease for speakers, and its fitness in communicative contexts help explain its survival. Jespersen also surveys ideas about how language may have originated, treating such questions as inquiries into human capacities for play, emotion, and invention. While cautious about the limits of evidence, he shows how comparative observations can constrain speculation. By connecting linguistic facts to human purposes, he presents language as a tool shaped by need and imagination, an argument that keeps the work relevant to ongoing debates about usage and change.
For contemporary readers, the book matters because it models a clear descriptive stance while showing how evaluation emerges from understanding rather than prescription. It offers a vocabulary for thinking about variation and change without nostalgia or alarm, a perspective valuable in a multilingual, rapidly shifting communicative world. Many of its concerns resonate with later approaches that examine function, discourse, and the pressures of efficiency and clarity, even as it remains rooted in attentive reading of examples. Above all, it values evidence, reasoning, and intellectual humility, virtues that continue to guide responsible discussion of language today.
To open Jespersen is to enter a conversation that feels at once historical and freshly pertinent. The pages reward careful reading: arguments unfold transparently, examples illuminate principles, and the narrative returns repeatedly to the living speakers who make language what it is. Without depending on jargon or heavy apparatus, the book offers a durable framework for thinking about linguistic form, change, and origins. It invites readers to observe, compare, and question with rigor. In doing so, it preserves a humane vision of language as a shared inheritance that remains open to renewal, a perspective that endures beyond its original moment.
Synopsis
Otto Jespersen’s Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, first published in 1922, sets out to explain what language is, how it changes, and how it may have arisen. Writing from the vantage of a comparative linguist, Jespersen combines descriptive observation with historical argument, drawing on many languages to illuminate general tendencies rather than isolated curiosities. The book’s threefold title signals its progression: from the essential features of speech, through mechanisms of growth and decay, to conjectures about prehistoric beginnings. Throughout, Jespersen stresses intelligibility, efficiency, and human needs as forces shaping linguistic form, positioning language as a living social instrument rather than a fixed logical calculus.
He begins by establishing the primacy of spoken language over writing, treating sounds as the material of communication shaped by physiological and psychological constraints. Phonetic description anchors his account, but sound values are never detached from meaning; he contrasts the conventionality of signs with recurrent tendencies, including limited sound symbolism and expressive effects. Words are viewed as tools within utterances, not labels existing in isolation, and grammar as the organization that makes them serviceable. Jespersen ties articulation and perception to habits formed in communities, emphasizing that language is learned, shared, and variable, yet generally economical in conveying distinctions that speakers find functionally important.
From this foundation, he examines how structural patterns evolve. Jespersen highlights a drift toward economy: complex inflectional paradigms often simplify, while reliance on word order and independent function words increases. He interprets such shifts as adaptive responses to communicative pressures rather than mere erosion. Analogy plays a central role, regularizing irregular forms and spreading familiar patterns, even as sound change introduces fresh asymmetries. The interplay of phonetic wear, semantic differentiation, and syntactic reorganization yields new grammatical categories and constructions. For Jespersen, development is uneven and contingent, but intelligibility and ease frequently steer languages toward clearer segmentation and more transparent signaling of relations.
He then surveys mechanisms of change observable across time and across communities. Regular sound shifts can remodel entire systems, yet their outcomes are constantly adjusted by analogy and by contact with other languages, which contributes loans and patterns of usage. Vocabulary expands through word formation and semantic change, with old forms acquiring new senses and expressive coloring. Jespersen also considers acquisition and everyday conversation as laboratories of change, where simplifications, reanalyses, and innovations arise and either fade or spread. Variation, in his view, is a normal condition of language, and historical trajectories emerge from countless small choices made in ordinary interaction.
A substantial portion treats language as a social institution. Jespersen contrasts local dialects with standardized varieties shaped by schooling, print, and public life, noting how prestige and convention stabilize some features while leaving others open to change. He discusses politeness, taboo, and circumlocution as motives for lexical and stylistic shifts, and he examines reported differences associated with men’s and women’s speech as part of broader patterns of social differentiation. Writing, though derivative of speech, exerts conservative influence through orthographic tradition and editorial norms. These forces, combined with mobility and contact, help explain both the persistence of recognizable standards and the continual emergence of novelty.
In addressing origin, Jespersen reviews earlier proposals that language began in imitations of sounds or in instinctive cries, finding each too narrow to account for the richness of expression. He assigns limited roles to onomatopoeia and interjections but emphasizes the cumulative shaping power of social use. His own hypothesis links early speech with play, emotion, and song, arguing that rhythmic, melodious utterance could have furnished a flexible medium later harnessed for propositional communication. Gesture and vocalization, he suggests, likely cooperated. While necessarily speculative, this account is presented as consistent with gradual development and with the observed plasticity of spoken forms.
By uniting detailed observations with wide-ranging synthesis, the book offers an early, influential statement of a functional approach to language. Jespersen’s insistence on the primacy of speech, on economy and clarity as recurrent motives, and on the social embeddedness of change framed debates that continue in linguistics and allied fields. Some claims have been revised in later scholarship, yet his questions—what makes linguistic structures viable, how usage molds system, and how human expressiveness could have crystallized into language—retain their force. The volume endures as a lucid map of problems and possibilities, inviting readers to connect historical facts with the living dynamics of communication.
Historical Context
Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) was a Danish linguist and professor of English at the University of Copenhagen, a post he held from 1893 to 1925. Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin appeared in English in 1922, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when European scholarly networks were reknitting themselves. Jespersen wrote from a Scandinavian university long oriented toward German and British philology, yet increasingly engaged with international debates. The interwar moment, with its mixture of cultural reconstruction and scientific ambition, provided a receptive audience for broad syntheses of linguistic knowledge aimed at educated readers beyond specialist circles.
Jespersen’s formative decades coincided with the dominance of comparative philology and the Neogrammarian school. In the 1870s and 1880s, scholars at Leipzig and elsewhere—such as Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff—advanced the principle of exceptionless sound laws, refining Indo-European reconstruction. This scientific ethos permeated northern European universities and defined what counted as rigorous linguistic explanation. Jespersen absorbed its historical method but resisted its narrowness, emphasizing analogy, usage, and stylistic forces in change. His early work, including Progress in Language (1894), engaged those debates and prepared the ground for a more inclusive survey that would later become Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin.
Late nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century advances in phonetics reshaped practical and theoretical linguistics. The International Phonetic Association, founded in 1886 by Paul Passy, promoted a standardized phonetic alphabet and empirical study of speech; figures such as Henry Sweet and, later, Daniel Jones popularized precise description of sounds. Jespersen participated in the language‑teaching reform movement and published How to Teach a Foreign Language (1904), advocating phonetic training and the direct method. From Copenhagen he helped align English studies with these reforms. That milieu oriented his general survey toward speech, pronunciation, and usage as living phenomena rather than merely textual artifacts.
In 1866 the Société de Linguistique de Paris famously refused to accept papers on the origin of language, a stance that discouraged speculative theories for decades. By the early twentieth century, however, scholars cautiously reopened the topic using data from child language, comparative psychology, and ethnography, while remaining wary of conjecture. Charles Darwin had already framed language within evolutionary thinking in The Descent of Man (1871), and debates about gesture, sound symbolism, and development persisted. Jespersen, who earlier examined language change in social context, addressed origins within a broad, evidence‑seeking synthesis, signaling a measured departure from the nineteenth‑century taboo.
The First World War transformed attitudes toward nationalism and communication, and the League of Nations (established 1920) embodied interwar hopes for organized international cooperation. Since the 1880s, constructed auxiliary languages had sought to ease cross‑border exchange: L. L. Zamenhof’s Esperanto (1887) inspired a movement, and a 1907 Paris Delegation endorsed a reformed project known as Ido. Jespersen served on that Delegation and became a prominent supporter of Ido before later proposing his own auxiliary language, Novial, in 1928. These experiences informed his attention to intelligibility, efficiency, and reform—concerns that permeate his wide‑ranging discussion of how languages grow and adapt.
During the 1910s and early 1920s, general linguistics was being reshaped by Ferdinand de Saussure’s posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916), which stressed the synchronic study of systems and the distinction between langue and parole. Antoine Meillet highlighted social determinants of change, while typology and semantics gained ground. Jespersen’s survey interacts with these currents but retains a historically oriented, usage‑based approach; his earlier essay Negation in English and Other Languages (1917) had already framed recurrent pathways now called “Jespersen’s Cycle.” The book thus situates language change within patterns of communication and economy rather than within a rigid structural program.
At the time, English was consolidating its global reach through the British Empire and the growing influence of the United States, while mass literacy and national school systems fixed standards for public communication. Telegraphy, telephony, and early radio (regular broadcasting began in 1920) intensified contact across dialects and nations. Jespersen, a leading analyst of English—known for his multivolume Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (1909–1949)—drew many examples from English alongside data from Scandinavian and other European languages. That vantage point, centered in European print culture but attuned to wider communication, shaped his generalizations about grammar, vocabulary, and change.
Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin epitomizes a transitional moment: it collects philological knowledge, integrates phonetic and pedagogical advances, and acknowledges new structural and sociological insights, yet maintains a pragmatic, human‑centered outlook. Jespersen writes against rigid dogma—whether the absolute sound laws of Neogrammarians or blanket taboos on discussing origins—while favoring economy, communicative needs, and observable usage. The result mirrors interwar faith in rational reform and international understanding, even as it preserves nineteenth‑century historical depth. The book’s critiques and syntheses reflect an era seeking to rebuild intellectual common ground and to understand language as a living, adaptive institution.
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’ 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[1], 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[1q]: 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[3], 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[4] 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’s Gothic translation of the Bible[5], 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—that language could not have been invented by man, but was a direct gift from God. One of Herder’s strongest arguments is that if language had been framed by God and by Him instilled into the mind of man, we should expect it to be much more logical, much more imbued with pure reason than it is as an actual matter of fact. Much in all existing languages is so chaotic and ill-arranged that it could not be God’s work, but must come from the hand of man. On the other hand, Herder does not think that language was really ‘invented’ by man—although this was the word used by the Berlin Academy when opening the competition in which Herder’s essay gained the prize. Language was not deliberately framed by man, but sprang of necessity from his innermost nature; the genesis of language according to him is due to an impulse similar to that of the mature embryo pressing to be born. Man, in the same way as all animals, gives vent to his feelings in tones, but this is not enough; it is impossible to trace the origin of human language to these emotional cries alone. However much they may be refined and fixed, without understanding they can never become human, conscious language. Man differs from brute animals not in degree or in the addition of new powers, but in a totally different direction and development of all powers. Man’s inferiority to animals in strength and sureness of instinct is compensated by his wider sphere of attention; the whole disposition of his mind as an unanalysable entity constitutes the impassable barrier between him and the lower animals. Man, then, shows conscious reflexion when among the ocean of sensations that rush into his soul through all the senses he singles out one wave and arrests it, as when, seeing a lamb, he looks for a distinguishing mark and finds it in the bleating, so that next time when he recognizes the same animal he imitates the sound of bleating, and thereby creates a name for that animal. Thus the lamb to him is ‘the bleater,’ and nouns are created from verbs, whereas, according to Herder, if language had been the creation of God it would inversely have begun with nouns, as that would have been the logically ideal order of procedure. Another characteristic trait of primitive languages is the crossing of various shades of feeling and the necessity of expressing thoughts through strong, bold metaphors, presenting the most motley picture. “The genetic cause lies in the poverty of the human mind and in the flowing together of the emotions of a primitive human being.” Another consequence is the wealth of synonyms in primitive language; “alongside of real poverty it has the most unnecessary superfluity.”
When Herder here speaks of primitive or ‘original’ languages, he is thinking of Oriental languages, and especially of Hebrew. “We should never forget,” says Edward Sapir,[1] “that Herder’s time-perspective was necessarily very different from ours. While we unconcernedly take tens or even hundreds of thousands of years in which to allow the products of human civilization to develop, Herder was still compelled to operate with the less than six thousand years that orthodoxy stingily doled out. To us the two or three thousand years that separate our language from the Old Testament Hebrew seems a negligible quantity, when speculating on the origin of language in general; to Herder, however, the Hebrew and the Greek of Homer seemed to be appreciably nearer the oldest conditions than our vernaculars—hence his exaggeration of their ursprünglichkeit.”
Herder’s chief influence on the science of speech, to my mind, is not derived directly from the ideas contained in his essay on the actual origin of speech, but rather indirectly through the whole of his life’s work. He had a very strong sense of the value of everything that had grown naturally (das naturwüchsige); he prepared the minds of his countrymen for the manysided receptiveness of the Romanticists, who translated and admired the popular poetry of a great many countries, which had hitherto been terræ incognitæ
