LANGUAGE
ITS NATURE
DEVELOPMENT
AND ORIGIN
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Articulation of Speech Sounds (Marburg: Elwert)
Studier over engelske kasus (out of print)
Chaucers liv og digtning (out of print)
Progress in Language (out of print)
Fonetik (Copenhagen: Gyldendal)
How to Teach a Foreign Language (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin)
Lehrbuch der Phonetik (Leipzig: Teubner)
Phonetische Grundfragen (Leipzig: Teubner)
Growth and Structure of the English Language(Leipzig: Teubner)
A Modern English Grammar: I, II (Heidelberg:Winter)
Sprogets logik (Copenhagen: Gyldendal)
Nutidssprog (Copenhagen: Gyldendal)
Negation in English and Other Languages (Copenhagen:Höst)
Chapters on English (London: George Allen & Unwin)
Rasmus Rask (Copenhagen: Gyldendal)
LANGUAGE
ITS NATURE
DEVELOPMENT
AND ORIGIN
BY
OTTO JESPERSEN
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
First published in 1922
(All rights reserved)
TO
VILHELM THOMSEN
PREFACE
The distinctive feature of the science of language as conceivednowadays is its historical character: a language or a word is nolonger taken as something given once for all, but as a result ofprevious development and at the same time as the starting-pointfor subsequent development. This manner of viewing languagesconstitutes a decisive improvement on the way in which languageswere dealt with in previous centuries, and it suffices to mentionsuch words as ‘evolution’ and ‘Darwinism’ to show that linguisticresearch has in this respect been in full accordance with tendenciesobserved in many other branches of scientific work during the lasthundred years. Still, it cannot be said that students of languagehave always and to the fullest extent made it clear to themselveswhat is the real essence of a language. Too often expressions areused which are nothing but metaphors—in many cases perfectlyharmless metaphors, but in other cases metaphors that obscurethe real facts of the matter. Language is frequently spoken ofas a ‘living organism’; we hear of the ‘life’ of languages, ofthe ‘birth’ of new languages and of the ‘death’ of old languages,and the implication, though not always realized, is that a languageis a living thing, somethin