This feature has moved from an overview through the theory of linguistic progress, observations of children, the treatment of pidgin languages, theories of language’s origin, and the chapter on “the woman.” To close, let’s grade this 1922 book from the vantage point of a century of linguistics since.
What has genuinely held up
The observations of child language acquisition became part of the foundation of later developmental psycholinguistics. The insight that “a child extracts a rule and applies it consistently” resonates with the later linguistic tradition that places regularity and creativity at the center of language. The way he framed the question “progress or decay” — insisting the standard of judgment be stated explicitly — remains a useful lesson today. And his refusal to blame pidgin’s roughness on one side alone, while incomplete, was a genuine step toward later creole studies.
What was corrected
The framework treating pidgin and creole languages as “imperfect English” was decisively superseded by the creole studies that followed. Today these are treated not as deviations from a standard language, but as languages with their own independent grammatical systems.
What could not be undone
And then there is the chapter on “the woman.” As the previous article showed, Jespersen adopted the pseudo-science of his day — the greater male variability hypothesis — wholesale, as a scholarly conclusion. This chapter stands in stark contrast to the fairness his other work displayed.
Tying together four features
This history-series feature set has now traced the work of four figures: Jones’s paragraph, Grimm’s table, Müller’s lectures, and Jespersen’s single volume of synthesis. What they share is a pattern: testable observation survives the test of time; baseless assumption gets corrected, sooner or later, by the next generation. Müller’s “Aryan race” and Jespersen’s chapter on “the woman” both trace back not to the linguistic observation itself — each scholar’s actual specialty — but to the social conventions and pseudo-science of the day, carried in alongside it. Even a scholar with genuinely sharp powers of observation cannot free themselves from the prejudice of the era they live in — that single point is what these four features, taken together, have confirmed again and again.
Summary
| Verdict | Subject |
|---|---|
| Genuinely held up | Observations of child language acquisition, the standard for judging “progress,” fairness toward pidgin |
| Corrected | Treating pidgin and creole languages as “imperfect English” |
| Could not be undone | The “Woman” chapter — adopting the greater male variability hypothesis as a scholarly conclusion |
In a nutshell — Jespersen was ahead of his time on children and on pidgin languages, and swept along by his time on women. That both live inside the work of one scholar may be the single most useful lesson to take from the four figures this history-series feature has traced — no observation, however sharp, excuses you from the work of checking, one by one, the assumptions it rests on.