Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin — Reading Notes

Women as Linguistic Innovators

A striking pattern in the excerpts is Jespersen's repeated attention to women's role in language change. He cites v. Martius's account of Botocudo women inventing new words and composing songs, then turns to Japan, where women are 'less conservative than men' in pronunciation and vocabulary. Examples include the shift from watakshi to atashi for 'I' and the greater use of politeness prefixes like o- and go-.

For European languages, Jespersen quotes 16th- and 17th-century grammarians who noted women leading vowel changes: Sir Thomas Smith's 'mulierculae quædam delicatiores' and Alexander Gill's 'nostræ Mopsæ' who 'attenuate everything.' In 18th-century France, women reportedly shifted a to e in words like madame becoming medeme. Jespersen also links the weakening of trilled r to indoor life and refined domesticity, suggesting women's speech habits influenced this change.

Phonetic Change and Social Life

Jespersen connects sound change to broader social shifts. The weakening of the tongue-point r is tied to a move from outdoor to indoor life: 'the old loud trilled point sound is natural and justified when life is chiefly carried on out-of-doors, but indoor life prefers... less noisy speech habits.' He describes the original r as 'the rubadub in the orchestra of language,' a rare metaphor that nonetheless grounds phonetic evolution in human environment.

Similarly, Japanese women's advanced loss of w is attributed to their lesser exposure to written language. Jespersen contrasts this with England and France, where women 'avoid neologisms' and stay closer to written forms—except in Southern England, where the wh sound 'is scarcely ever pronounced except in girls' schools.' These observations show his comparative method and attention to social stratification.

Word Formation Across Cultures

The Botocudo examples illustrate how new objects receive names through descriptive compounds: krainejoune ('head-teeth') for horse, po-kekri ('foot-cloven') for ox, mgo-jonne-orône ('beast with long ears') for donkey. Jespersen notes that women were 'nearly always' the inventors of such words, as well as composers of songs and dirges. He also observes that even familiar objects may acquire new names that spread through family and community.

This section demonstrates Jespersen's interest in the creative, social process of naming, rather than treating vocabulary as a fixed system. The excerpts do not reveal his full argument about language origin, but they show him using ethnographic data to challenge assumptions about who drives lexical innovation.

Historical Sources and Methodology

Jespersen relies heavily on earlier scholars' observations, quoting grammarians like Sir Thomas Smith (1567), Mulcaster (1582), and Alexander Gill (1621) for English, and Alemand (1688) and Grimarest (1712) for French. He also cites Thurot's work on French pronunciation. These sources provide direct testimony about pronunciation differences between men and women, which Jespersen treats as evidence of ongoing change.

His method is to compile such reports from diverse languages and periods, then draw general conclusions about social factors in language change. Readers should note that the excerpts are fragmentary; the full book likely develops these threads more systematically. The preface warns against taking metaphors literally, and the excerpts show Jespersen practicing what he preaches by grounding claims in specific, dated observations.

Jespersen's approach rewards readers who attend to his use of evidence: each claim is tied to a named source, a specific community, or a phonetic detail. The excerpts suggest a work that is both historical and comparative, with a consistent focus on speakers as social beings. Readers should expect a dense but clear argument, built from concrete examples rather than abstract theory. The book's length (over 196,000 words) allows for extensive documentation, and the excerpts hint at a rich store of linguistic anecdotes and analyses.

Reading Jespersen’s careful tracing of women’s speech into new phonetic habits reminded me of sitting with my grandmother’s old dictionary, its margins filled with her pencil notes. I felt that same quiet wonder later in the Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Herman Melville — Story, Setting & Ideas, where every title felt like a door left ajar. Language drifts, and so do we.