Old English had case endings on its nouns and grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter). Modern English has lost almost all of it — and set beside a language like German or Russian, which still keeps its case system, the loss looks even starker. Hearing this, it’s tempting to conclude: “English got simpler, therefore it decayed.” Jespersen takes that intuition on directly.
The assumption hiding inside “decay”
Older languages tend to be more complex, newer ones simpler — as a plain fact, that’s true. But equating “complex” with “superior” and “simple” with “inferior” is, Jespersen argues, a separate claim entirely. Bundling the two together without noticing is exactly what produces the lament that “language is degenerating.” At the end of Chapter XVII, in a section titled “Final Answer,” he states his conclusion:
…in all those instances in which we are able to examine the history of any language for a sufficient length of time, we find that languages have a progressive tendency… the sum total of these changes… shows a surplus of progressive over retrogressive or indifferent changes, so that the structure of modern languages is nearer perfection than that of ancient languages.
Losing case endings and grammatical gender is not evidence that a language has broken down — it is evidence that it has been polished. That is Jespersen’s position. Naturally, he is careful to add that no change moves in a straight line toward “better,” and that progress was never achieved on purpose — most changes start out as nothing more than a slip of the tongue or a convenient shortcut. Even so, he argues, the long-run balance sheet tips toward progress.
Flipping the “stone worn smooth in a riverbed” metaphor
To make his case, Jespersen reaches for a metaphor. The linguist August Schleicher had once compared Gothic words with modern ones and written: “our words, contrasted with Gothic words, are like a statue that has been rolling for a long time in the bed of a river till its beautiful limbs have been worn off, so that now scarcely anything remains but a polished stone cylinder.” A lament for lost sculptural value.
Jespersen quotes this — and then turns the tables. Suppose that statue isn’t meant to be admired as art on a pedestal, but has to actually serve some practical purpose. Which is better: a rugged, unwieldy statue that catches on something with every turn, or a smooth, easygoing, well-oiled roller? The same single fact — wear — reads as loss when judged by the standard of art, and as improvement when judged by the standard of a tool; which conclusion you reach depends entirely on which standard you bring to it.
Not as art, but as a tool
What this metaphor gets at is the standard of judgment itself. Treat a language as a sculpture to be admired, and the richness of its complex inflections might well be a virtue. Treat it as a tool used every day, and the calculation changes: what matters more is conveying meaning quickly, with little effort, and without confusion. As case endings shrank, word order became fixed and prepositions took over the work instead — not a loss, Jespersen argues, but a reassignment of the job. The question “progress or decay” turns out to depend on a prior question: what standard are you measuring by? The lament that “old English was richer and more beautiful in form” isn’t wrong on its own terms — but that’s an aesthetic judgment, and it belongs to a different axis entirely from the question of which serves better as a day-to-day means of communication.
Summary
| Point | Content |
|---|---|
| The popular view | Old languages are rich and complex; modern ones are simple and poor — i.e., decay |
| Jespersen’s counter | Over the long run, languages accumulate more progressive changes than regressive ones |
| The metaphor used | Schleicher’s “statue worn smooth by a river,” deliberately reread as “a well-oiled roller” |
| The core question | Judge by value as art, or by usefulness as a tool? |
In a nutshell — modern English, having lost its case endings, may look impoverished as sculpture. But judged as a daily tool for communication, that loss isn’t decay — it’s the result of being polished. Next time you hear the lament that “things were richer in the old days,” it’s worth asking back: is there really only one ruler for measuring richness?