Otto Jespersen

“ Further, we must remember that the child has far more abundant opportunities of hearing his mother-tongue than one gets, as a rule, with any language one learns later. He hears it from morning to night, and, be it noted, in its genuine shape, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words and right syntax: the language comes to him as a fresh, ever-bubbling spring. ”

“ A child who chatters early may remain a chatterer all his life, and children whose motto is ‘Slow and sure’ may turn out the deepest, most independent and most trustworthy characters in the end. There are some children who cannot be made to say a single word for a long time, and then suddenly come out with a whole sentence, which shows how much has been quietly fructifying in their brain. ”

“ On the whole, it must be said that it was reserved for that century to apply the notion of history to other things than wars and the vicissitudes of dynasties, and thus to discover the idea of development or evolution as pervading the whole universe. This brought about a vast change in the science of language, as in other sciences. Instead of looking at such a language as Latin as one fixed point, and instead of aiming at fixing another language, such as French, in one classical form, the new science viewed both as being in constant flux, as growing, as moving, as continually changing. ”

“ To learn a language it is not enough to know so many words. They must be connected according to the particular laws of the particular language. No one tells the child that the plural of ‘hand’ is hands, of ‘foot’ feet, of ‘man’ men, or that the past of ‘am’ is was, of ‘love’ loved; it is not informed when to say he and when him, or in what order words must stand. How can the little fellow learn all this, which when set forth in a grammar fills many pages and can only be explained by help of many learned words? ”

“ He sees the close connexion that exists between language and primitive poetry, or that kind of spontaneous singing that characterizes the childhood or youth of mankind, and which is totally distinct from the artificial poetry of later ages. But to him each language is not only the instrument of literature, but itself literature and poetry. A nation speaks its soul in the words it uses. Herder admires his own mother-tongue, which to him is perhaps inferior to Greek, but superior to its neighbours. The combinations of consonants give it a certain measured pace ”

“ A native of Luxemburg, where it is usual for children to talk both French and German, says that few Luxemburgers talk both languages perfectly. “Germans often say to us: ‘You speak German remarkably well for a Frenchman,’ and French people will say, ‘They are Germans who speak our language excellently.’ Nevertheless, we never speak either language as fluently as the natives. The worst of the system is, that instead of learning things necessary to us we must spend our time and energy in learning to express the same thought in two or three languages at the same time.” ”

“ But we now come to something of the greatest importance in the life of language, the fact, namely, that deviations from the usual or normal pronunciation are very often due to causes inside the language itself, either by lingering reminiscences of what has just been spoken or by anticipation of something that the speaker is just on the point of pronouncing. The process of speech is a very complicated one, and while one thing is being said, the mind is continually active in preparing what has to be said next, arranging the ideas and fashioning the linguistic expression in all its details. ”

“ Men will certainly with great justice object that there is a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions, and that vigour and vividness count for something. Most boys and many men have a dislike to some words merely because they feel that they are used by everybody and on every occasion: they want to avoid what is commonplace and banal and to replace it by new and fresh expressions, whose very newness imparts to them a flavour of their own. ”

“ Thus Max Müller writes: “All this becomes clear and intelligible by the light of Comparative Grammar; anomalies vanish, exceptions prove the rule, and we perceive more plainly every day how in language, as elsewhere, the conflict between the freedom claimed by each individual and the resistance offered by the community at large establishes in the end a reign of law most wonderful, yet perfectly rational and intelligible”; and again: “There is nothing accidental, nothing irregular, nothing without a purpose and meaning in any part of Greek or Latin grammar. ”

“ If by a mental effort we transport ourselves to a period in which language consisted solely of such graphic concrete words, we shall discover that, in spite of their number, they would not suffice, taken all together, to cover everything that needed expression; a wealth in such words is not incompatible with a certain poverty. They would accordingly often be required to do service outside of their proper sphere of application. That a figurative or metaphorical use of words is a factor of the utmost importance in the life of all languages is indisputable ”

“ Most of those who are in the habit of reading books in foreign languages will have experienced a much greater average difficulty in books written by male than by female authors, because they contain many more rare words, dialect words, technical terms, etc. Those who want to learn a foreign language will therefore always do well at the first stage to read many ladies’ novels, because they will there continually meet with just those everyday words and combinations which the foreigner is above all in need of, what may be termed the indispensable small-change of a language. ”

“ One thing which plays a great rôle in children’s acquisition of language, and especially in their early attempts to form sentences, is Echoism: the fact that children echo what is said to them. When one is learning a foreign language, it is an excellent method to try to imitate to oneself in silence every sentence which one hears spoken by a native. By that means the turns of phrases, the order of words, the intonation of the sentence are firmly fixed in the memory—so that they can be recalled when required, or rather recur to one quite spontaneously without an effort. ”

“ And here we must first of all realize that man is not the only animal that has a ‘language,’ though at present we know very little about the real nature and expressiveness of the languages of birds and mammals or of the signalling system of ants, etc. The speech of some animals may be more like our language than most people are willing to admit—it may also in some respects be even more perfect than human language precisely because it is unlike it and has developed along lines about which we can know nothing ”

“ First, as to the language of children. Some biologists maintain that the development of the individual follows on the whole the same course as that of the race; the embryo, before it arrives at full maturity, will have passed through the same stages of development which in countless generations have led the whole species to its present level. It has, therefore, occurred to many that the acquisition by mankind at large of the faculty of speech may be mirrored to us in the process by which any child learns to communicate its thoughts by means of its vocal organs. ”

“ It is very often said that if sound laws admitted of exceptions there would be no possibility of a science of etymology. Thus Curtius wrote as early as 1858 (as quoted by Oertel 259) : “If the history of language really showed such sporadic aberrations, such pathological, wholly irrational phonetic malformations, we should have to give up all etymologizing. For only that which is governed by law and reducible to a coherent system can form the object of scientific investigation; whatever is due to chance may at best be guessed at, but will never yield to scientific inference.” ”

“ It is, therefore, clear that, while speaking, everyone is incessantly producing analogical forms. Reproduction by memory and new-formation by means of association are its two indispensable factors. It is a mistake to assume a language as given in grammar and dictionary, that is, the whole body of possible words and forms, as something concrete, and to forget that it is nothing but an abstraction devoid of reality, and that the actual language exists only in the individual, from whom it cannot be separated even in scientific investigation, if we will understand [95] its nature and development. ”

“ But if the change witnessed in the evolution of modern speech out of older forms of speech is thus on a larger scale projected back into the childhood of mankind, and if by this process we arrive finally at uttered sounds of such a description that they can no longer be called a real language, but something antecedent to language—why, then the problem will have been solved; for transformation is something we can understand, while a creation out of nothing can never be comprehended by human understanding. ”

“ In the nurseries of all countries a little comedy has in all ages been played—the baby lies and babbles his ‘mamama’ or ‘amama’ or ‘papapa’ or ‘apapa’ or ‘bababa’ or ‘ababab’ without associating the slightest meaning with his mouth-games, and his grown-up friends, in their joy over the precocious child, assign to these syllables a rational sense, accustomed as they are themselves to the fact of an uttered sound having a content, a thought, an idea, corresponding to it. ”

“ It is just on account of the fact that the forms developed on the spur of the moment by each individual are in the vast majority of instances perfectly identical with those used already by other people, that the principle of analogy comes to have such paramount importance in the life of language, for we are all thereby driven to apply it unhesitatingly to all those instances in which we have no ready-made form handy: without being conscious of it, each of us thus now and then really creates something never heard before by us or anybody else. ”

“ The difference may not be greater than that between the language of a judge and that of a costermonger in a modern novel, or between Juliet’s and her nurse’s expressions in Shakespeare, and if all women, even those we should call the ‘heroines’ of the plays, use only the lower stratum of speech, the reason certainly is that the social position of women was so inferior that they ranked only with men of the lower orders and had no share in the higher culture which, with the refined language, was the privilege of a small class of selected men. ”

“ It is the same thing with language: the task of the child is to learn an existing language, that is, to connect certain sounds heard on the lips of others with the same ideas that the speakers associate with them, but not in the least to frame anything new. No; if we are seeking some parallel to the primitive acquisition of language, we must look elsewhere and turn to baby language as it is spoken in the first year of life, before the child has begun to ‘notice’ and to make out what use is made of language by grown-up people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we try to learn and talk a foreign tongue we do not introduce into it words taken from our own language; our endeavour will always be to speak the other language as purely as possible, and generally we are painfully conscious of every native word that we intrude into phrases framed in the other tongue. But what we thus avoid in speaking a foreign language we very often do in our own. Frederick the Great prided himself on his good French, and in his French writings we do not find a single German word, but whenever he wrote German his sentences were full of French words and phrases. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one who has once discovered this hidden life of language, no one who has once found out that what seemed to be merely anomalous and whimsical in language is but, as it were, a petrification of thought, of deep, curious, poetical, philosophical thought, will ever rest again till he has descended as far as he can descend into the ancient shafts of human speech,” etc. ”

“ In his review (1812) of Rask’s Icelandic grammar he writes: “Each individuality, even in the world of languages, should be respected as sacred; it is desirable that even the smallest and most despised dialect should be left only to itself and to its own nature and in nowise subjected to violence, because it is sure to have some secret advantages over the greatest and most highly valued language.” Here we meet with that valuation of the hitherto overlooked popular dialects which sprang from the Romanticists’ interest in the ‘people’ and everything it had produced. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Phonetic explanation of the new sounds and phonetic transcription have done wonders to overcome difficulties of pronunciation. But in other respects it is possible to some extent to assimilate the teaching of a foreign language to the method pursued by the child in its first years: one should not merely sprinkle the pupil, but plunge him right down into the sea of language and enable him to swim by himself as soon as possible, relying on the fact that a great deal will arrange itself in the brain without the inculcation of too many special rules and explanations. ”

“ It has been well said that for a long time a child’s dearest toy is its tongue—that is, of course, not the tongue only, but the other organs of speech as well, especially the lips and vocal chords. At first the movements of these organs are as uncontrolled as those of the arms, but gradually they become more systematic, and the boy knows what sound he wishes to utter and is in a position to produce it exactly. ”

“ We get the first approach to language proper when communicativeness takes precedence of exclamativeness, when sounds are uttered in order to ‘tell’ fellow-creatures something, as when birds warn their young ones of some imminent danger. In the case of human language, communication is infinitely more full and rich and elaborate; the question therefore is a very complex one: How did the association of sound and sense come about? ”

“ Here we see one of the characteristics of modern linguistic science: it is so preoccupied with etymology, with the origin of words, that it pays much more attention to what words have come from than to what they have come to be. If a word has not always been suggestive on account of its sound, then its actual suggestiveness is left out of account and may even be declared to be merely fanciful. ”

“ The ‘little language’ which the child makes for itself by imperfect imitation of the sounds of its elders seems so arbitrary that it may well be compared to the child’s first rude drawings of men and animals. ”

“ The countless grammatical mistakes made by a child in its early years are a tell-tale proof of the difficulty which this side of language presents to him—especially, of course, on account of the unsystematic character of our flexions and the irregularity of its so-called ‘rules’ of syntax.
At first each word has only one form for the child, but he soon discovers that grown-up people use many forms which resemble one another in different connexions, and he gets a sense of the purport of these forms, so as to be able to imitate them himself or even develop similar forms of his own. ”

“ 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? ”

“ When comparative linguists set themselves against the narrowmindedness of classical scholars who thought Latin and Greek the only worthy objects of study, and emphasized the value of all, even the least literary languages and dialects, they were primarily thinking of their value to the scientist, who finds something of interest in each of them, but they had no idea of comparing the relative value of languages from the point of view of their users—and yet the latter comparison is of much greater importance than the former. ”

“ If languages were learnt perfectly by the children of each generation, then languages would not change: English children would still speak a language as old at least as ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ and there would be [162] no such languages as French and Italian. The changes in languages are simply slight mistakes, which in the course of generations completely alter the character of the language” (PS 75) . But only one year later, in 1900, he maintains that the child’s imitation “is in most cases practically perfect”—“the main cause of sound-change must therefore be sought elsewhere. ”

“ As Prakrit is a ‘younger’ and ‘worn-out’ form of Sanskrit, the question here naturally arises: What is the general attitude of the two sexes to those changes that are constantly going on in languages? Can they be ascribed exclusively or predominantly to one of the sexes? Or do both equally participate in them? An answer that is very often given is that as a rule women are more conservative than men, and that they do nothing more than keep to the traditional language which they have learnt from their parents and hand on to their children, while innovations are due to the initiative of men. ”