SECTION F ENGLISH LANGUAGE 



(Hall 3, September 23, 3 p. m.) 



CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR CHARLES M. GAYLEY, University of California. 

 SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR OTTO JESPERSEN, University of Copenhagen. 

 PROFESSOR GEORGE L. KITTREDGE, Harvard University. 



THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CONSIDERED 

 IN ITS RELATION TO OTHER SUBJECTS 



BY OTTO JESPERSEN 



[Jens Otto Harry Jespersen, Professor of English Language and Literature, Uni- 

 versity of Copenhagen, b. Randers, Denmark, 1860. Ph.D. Copenhagen, 1891. 

 Member of the Royal Academy, Copenhagen, Honorary Member of the Asso- 

 ciation Phon^tique Internationale, Honorary Member of the Modern Language 

 Association of America. Author of Articulation of Speech Sounds; Progress in 

 Language; Lehrbuch der Phonetik; Phonetische Grundfragen; How to teach a 

 Foreign Language; Growth and Structure of the English Language, etc.] 



No single human individual ever lived completely isolated from 

 his fellow beings; no nation was ever entirely cut off from other 

 nations ; and no contact between individuals and nations ever took 

 place without leaving traces in their coming lives. Language is 

 inconceivable without such contact, and nothing is more contagious 

 than modes of speech. From the manner in which a man talks, one 

 can always tell what sort of people he has had most intercourse with 

 and what sort of influences, intellectual and moral, he has been 

 chiefly subject to in the whole of his life. This is true of nations 

 too; a complete survey of the English language would, therefore, 

 show to the initiated the whole of the life of the English nation from 

 the oldest times till the present day. 



Let us for a moment imagine that all human records, all books, 

 documents, inscriptions, letters, etc., were lost, with the single excep- 

 tion of a number of texts written in English at various dates, and 

 let us imagine a body of men buckling down to the task of writing 

 the history of the English language with that material only. They 

 would be able, of course, to find out a great many things, but how- 

 ever highly gifted we imagine them to be, there would always remain 

 to them an immense number of riddles which no amount of sagacity 

 would enable them to solve, and which now, to us, are no riddles at 

 all. In the old texts they would encounter a great many words whose 

 meanings could be gathered with more or less certainty from the 

 context; but a vast number of other words would remain unintellig- 



