Death of a Grammarian

"He settled Hoti's business--let it be!--Properly based Oun-- Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De . . . This man decided not to Live but Know-- . . . Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying." Robert Browning, A Grammarian's Funeral.

The death of such a grammarian as Browning wrote of was reported last week from London (where the news had been picked up from Denmark's Nazi-controlled Kalundborg radio). On April 30 death had come to 82-year-old Jens Otto Harry Jespersen after an operation in Roskilde's hospital. In this handsome Danish giant of scholarship, English grammar lost its greatest living historian, Europe an outstanding humanist.

Jespersen was professor of English at the University of Copenhagen from 1893 to 1925, lectured at Columbia University. Bedoctored by both universities, as well as by Scotland's St. Andrews, France's University of Paris, he attached "no importance to these titles." Many a philological pilgrim came respectfully to his villa at Hamlet's Elsinore. For its articles on Language, Philology, Grammar, the Encyclopedia Britannica (see p. 48) turned to Jespersen. He left behind him more than a score of lively books in several tongues. His magnum opus: Modern English Grammar (4 vols.) 1909-1931.

Jespersen was a man of temperament, a great teacher and--in his field--a great realist. Upon English grammar he gazed with a fondly passionate eye, that knew and loved it as it was, not as it should be. Upon England he looked somewhat as though she were Denmark's interesting offspring.* A Social-Democrat, Jespersen liked neither capital letters (used for all Danish nouns) nor kings (although he did not much mind Denmark's King Christian X). He saw traces of the democratic spirit in the very bones and muscles of English speech.

Jespersen devised a synthetic language, Novial, worked with the International Auxiliary Language Association sponsored by U.S. lawyer-diplomat Dave Hennen Morris and Mrs. Morris. Object: to develop, propagate the perfect "inter-language." Wrote Jespersen in 1928:

"The word 'international' was only invented by Jeremy Bentham in 1780 . . . we have come to the point of needing an international language."

Scholar Jespersen continued work after the Nazi invasion, contrived to send a copy of a new article to a Columbia colleague. Said the colleague: "Under Hitlerism he must have been wretched." Last week Danish refugees cited their old proverb: "Death is a dying man's friend."

*In 878 King Alfred surrendered half of England to Danish invaders.

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