To know more about Otto Jespersen
To Understand what Otto Jespersen
contributed.
Be able to have knowledge about The
Language Origin hypothesis semiotics or Sign
Language.
 HIS COMPLETE NAME IS Jens Otto Harry Jespersen
 He is born on July 16,1860 in Randers.
 He is a danish linguist and a foremost authority on English
grammar.
 He died on April 30,1943.
 Contributed greately to the advancement of Phonetics,
Linguistic Theory and the History of English and originated
an international Language.
 He was inspired by Rasmus Rask.
 ICELANDIC, ITALIAN AND SPANISH – GRAMMARS HE USED TO BEGIN TO STUDY.
 He decided to explore language studies at a time when phonetics and reform In
language teaching were in prime concern.
 1886- the year before receiving his master’s degree in French from Copenhagen
University, he published his first important paper, on phonetic laws, and helped to
establish a Scandinavian association for the reform of language education.
 Jespersen in this theory of ranks removes the parts of speech from the syntax, and differentiates
between primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries; e.g. in "well honed phrase," "phrase" is a primary, this
being defined by a secondary, "honed", which again is defined by a tertiary "well".
“THE LOGIC OF LANGUAGE”
 His principal work on linguistic evolution, and also probably his most brilliant
achievement, was Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (1922).
 Long interested in international auxiliary languages, he helped to elaborate Ido.
NOVIAL- HIS MAIN ACHIVEMENT IN THIS AREA.
- He presented in International Language.
 artificial language constructed in 1928 by the Danish philologist Otto Jespersen,
intended for use as an international auxiliary language, but little used today. Its
grammar is similar in type to that of Esperanto or Ido.
 a language that is deliberately created for a specific purpose.
 Novial is thus the only major auxlang designed by an academic linguist. It is a moderately
naturalistic a posteriori language based on the major languages of Europe, mainly the Romance
languages.
 rules of a language governing the sounds, words, sentences, and other elements, as
well as their combination and interpretation.
 The word grammar also denotes the study of these abstract features or a book
presenting these rules. In a restricted sense, the term refers only to the study of
sentence and word structure (syntax and morphology), excluding vocabulary and
pronunciation.
CONCEPTIONS OF
GRAMMAR
 A common contemporary definition of grammar is the underlying structure of a
language that any native speaker of that language knows intuitively.
 The systematic description of the features of a language is also a grammar
 THESE FEATURES PHONOLOGY,MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX And SEMANTICS.
 Depending on the grammarians approach these can be PRESCRIPTIVE OR
DESCRIPTIVE or GENERATIVE.
ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL
GRAMMARS
 In Europe the Greeks were the first to write grammars. To them, grammar was a tool
that could be used in the study of Greek literature; hence their focus on the literary
language.
 The Alexandrians of the 1st century BC further developed Greek grammar in order to
preserve the purity of the language.
 Dionysus Thrax of Alexandria later wrote an influential treatise called The Art of
Grammar, in which he analyzed literary texts in terms of letters, syllables, and eight
parts of speech.
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
GRAMMARS
 By 1700 grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been printed. These were written
primarily for purposes of reforming, purifying, or standardizing language and were
put to pedagogical use.
 Rules of grammar usually accounted for formal, written, literary language only and
did not apply to all the varieties of actual, spoken language.
 This prescriptive approach long dominated the schools, where the study of grammar
came to be associated with “parsing” and sentence diagramming.
ORIGINS AND BASIC
CHARACTERISTICS
 English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to
most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The
parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by
nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains.
 Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-
European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g.,
German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected.
 In addition to the simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics:
flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.
CHARACTERISTICS OF
MODERN ENGLISH
 PHONOLOGY-British Received Pronunciation (RP), traditionally defined as the
standard speech used in London and southeastern England, is one of many forms (or
accents) of standard speech throughout the English-speaking world.
 MORPHOLOGY- Inflection
Modern English nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs are inflected. Adverbs,
prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections are invariable.
 AFFIXES- word elements attached to words, may either precede, as prefixes.
 Back-formations, blends, and other types of word-formation-Back-formation is
the reverse of affixation, being the analogical creation of a new word from an existing
word falsely assumed to be its derivative.
 Example: the verb to edit has been formed from the noun editor
 Simple, declarative, affirmative sentences have two main patterns with five subsidiary
patterns within each. Verb and complement together form the predicate.