Otto Jespersen

Jens Otto Harry Jespersen (Danish: [ˈʌtˢo ˈjespɐsn̩]; 16 July 1860 – 30 April 1943) was a Danish linguist who worked in foreign-language pedagogy, historical phonetics, and other areas, but is best known for his description of the grammar of the English language. Steven Mithen describes him as "one of the greatest language scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

Early life

Otto Jespersen was born in Randers in Jutland, to Jens Bloch Jespersen (1813–1870) and Sophie Caroline Bentzien (1833–1874). He was one of nine children. After his father died the family moved to Hillerød, where his Jutland accent was ridiculed.

As a boy, Jespersen was inspired by works of the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask and the biography of Rask by Niels Matthias Petersen; and with the help of Rask's grammars taught himself some Icelandic, Italian, and Spanish.

Academic life and work

Jespersen's father, grandfather and great-grandfather had been lawyers, and the same was expected of him. He entered the University of Copenhagen in 1877 when he was 17, initially studying law but not abandoning his language studies. In his first year at university, he attended a lecture course by Sophus Heegaard on the history of Evolutionism since the Greeks; this introduced him to the ideas of Herbert Spencer, and later in life he looked back on the course warmly. Teaching languages in a lower secondary school and working from 1880 to 1887 as a stenographer for the Rigsdag (Danish parliament) brought an income that in 1881 allowed Jespersen to shift his focus completely to languages. Following the introduction of a new degree, Skoleembedseksamen, he switched to this, choosing French as the major subject and English as the second minor subject, the first compulsorily being Latin (a language that he hated from then on). He was one of a large number of students who appealed for Latin to be made voluntary, but the appeal was unsuccessful. Thanks to his need for an income, obtaining a Master's degree (in French) took Jespersen a decade, but the delays may well have determined his "habits of wide and self-motivated study".