Otto Jespersen

Jespersen was a famous linguist who did the bulk of his work early in the twentieth century. The biography below was lifted wholesale from the pages of a French Professor of English, Abdelouahid Zaid[1]. One of Jespersen's accomplishments was an artificial language called "Novial" which was intended to facilitate cross-cultural communication[2]. This idea isn't unique: the Catholic Church has used Latin (which has become "artificial") this way for centuries, and other formal languages have been proposed as well; notably Esparanto. -TomLeith?

{yes'-pur-sen}

The noted Danish linguist Jens Otto Jespersen, b. July 16, 1860, d. Apr. 30, 1943, devoted the first part of his career to reforming his native language. In 1886 he founded a periodical to further the cause, and in 1901 he published a widely praised textbook on language teaching. During his tenure as professor of English at the University of Copenhagen from 1893 until his retirement in 1925, Jespersen produced a series of influential and highly original works on linguistics, notably The Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905), A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (7 vols., 1909-49), Language: Its Nature and Development (1922), and The Philosophy of Grammar (1924). He early advanced the view that a word's meaning can affect the development of its pronunciation.

From a page of quotes by Geoffrey Nunberg[4], in his "commonplace file" Language is only attending to its proper business when it comprehends a multitude of like things under the same appellation : it is just this which makes the communication of thought possible. "Otto Jespersen, Mankind, Nation, and Individual from a Linguistic Point of View p. 79"