Path: ...!feeds.phibee-telecom.net!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Athel Cornish-Bowden Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: Otto Jespersen died (30-4-1943) Date: Thu, 2 May 2024 10:56:04 +0200 Lines: 33 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net YPSeWw4L9xje4MKxRRH9pgQP6oxq/jrScTimeyGGltRwCe5CqB Cancel-Lock: sha1:6B946BRNx1fNSm4WbuNzKg/6X7o= sha256:MzZwvHCfxeoOZ2kiwphF1HI7Vj4sV3DJl7vx+s/6nsc= User-Agent: Unison/2.2 Bytes: 2156 On 2024-04-30 09:23:32 +0000, Ross Clark said: > If I may quote from my 2018 observance of his birthday: No one will care in the slightest about this, but Jesperson died on the day on which my in-laws were married. > > July 16 - Otto Jespersen (1860) > I bought his "Growth and Structure of the English Language" (1905) > from the same guy who sold me Sapir's Language (1921), both great books > still in print decades after their first appearance. Late in life I > acquired his seven-volume historical grammar of Modern English. But his > interests ranged very widely; the titles "Language: Its Nature, > Development and Origin" and "Mankind, Nation and Individual from a > Linguistic Point of View" give some idea. Also an enthusiast for > international auxiliary languages (Ido, Novial). > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Jespersen > > Crystal thinks Jespersen was the first linguist to publish a full > autobiography (A Linguist's Life, 1938), and that it is a very good > read. I think I have read it, and I think I agree. Trouble is, I > sometimes get him confused with a near-contemporary Danish linguist, > Holger Pedersen (1867-1953), perhaps most famous for coining the name > "Nostratic". > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_Pedersen_(linguist) -- Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly in England until 1987.