A Danish linguist helped kill grammar drills and asked his wife to enforce retirement
Otto Jespersen hated compulsory Latin so much that he later got it dropped from Copenhagen's English degree. He campaigned for teaching languages by ear rather than by translation, and once told newspaper readers that his wife had sworn to shoot him should he still be working past 65.
Born in Randers in 1860, one of nine children, Jespersen was mocked for his Jutland accent after the family moved to Hillerød. As a boy he taught himself some Icelandic, Italian and Spanish from the grammars of Rasmus Rask. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been lawyers, and he entered the University of Copenhagen at 17 to follow them, but work as a teacher and as a parliamentary stenographer from 1880 to 1887 let him switch to languages. Earning a living stretched his master's degree over a decade, which may have built his habit of broad, self-directed study.
In 1886 he co-founded a Scandinavian reform group called Quousque Tandem, borrowing Wilhelm Viëtor's pen name. It wanted languages taught as living speech: pupils should hear and repeat words and short phrases before reading them, fix pronunciation with phonetic script, read connected texts where context explains new words, and work out grammar for themselves. Translation drills were to be played down. His textbooks, one unusual for using nursery rhymes, helped this direct method displace grammar and translation in Danish schools, a shift recognised by the Secondary Schools Act of 1903. Louis Hjelmslev, usually struck by his moderation, called him a Jacobin among linguists on this issue.
A study tour in 1887 and 1888 took him to London to meet Henry Sweet, to Oxford where James Murray described the dictionary in progress, to Leipzig, to Paris with Paul Passy and to Berlin. His dissertation on the English case system followed in 1891. In a fierce contest for a new professorship, one rival even published a book accusing him of plagiarism, a charge the supposedly copied scholar denied. Jespersen, fluent in English and current in the field, won, and held the chair from 1893 to 1925.
He pushed for a second Danish university and questioned a divinity faculty in a modern one. As rector in 1921 he spoke at the opening of the institute later named for Niels Bohr. Steven Mithen ranks him among the greatest language scholars of two centuries.
Source: Otto Jespersen
