One of the most recent issues of Cosmoglotta I've uploaded from 1937 features an article by Otto Jespersen, the Danish linguist and inventor of Novial. The article is not about constructed languages but is related, as it is about the simplification of languages over time. Apparently it was originally written in Danish, then translated into Occidental, and now I've translated it into English.







EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGESby Professor Otto JespersenWe have compared the oldest known states of our western European languages with their current form and we have found certain traits that, generally seen, are common to them, so that it was possible to find some large main lines showing the direction of evolution; and we have come to the opinion that the changes made in the course of centuries have as a whole been advantageous for the speakers, to the extent that we are justified if we speak of progress. The points in which the most recent languages have shown their superiority are as follows:These advantages were not gained by a coup and languages have moved in the directions mentioned with a different speed for each. For example,is in many points slow compared tois slower than South African ();in some areas compared to, and all these languages compared to. Thealso have not marched at the same pace. Here we emphasize only that all these languages have in historic times moved in general in these directions, and that, from an anthropocentric point of view -- i.e., if we measure according to the needs of speaking people -- we should call that which has happened a welcome progress.But are these tendencies general, or even perhaps absolute in the world of languages? All examples have been taken from a relatively small circle of languages, those that I myself and probably also the majority of my readers know the best. Do other languages show a similar evolution? Without claiming a deep knowledge of many languages I nevertheless dare to assert that the gained results are confirmed by all languages, of those of which their history is known:today and spokenare in many points simpler in their grammatical structure than the mosthas liberated itself from many complicated irregularities of ancient Slavic (), and the same has been done to a greater extent by other Slavic languages:has greatly simplified the flexion of nouns and adjectives, andits conjugation.spoken is considerably more simply in its forms than the language of Homer and Demosthenes.is almost as simple in its structure as English, whilewas a language of great complexity. In India we see a gradual simplification fromthroughandto the languages spoken now:),, etc. Outside our family of languages we see the same:is more simple and more regular than, spokenis simpler than the ancient written language.shows the same facility compared withIn short, even if we can clearly prove our theory only on a minority of languages spoken on the Earth, that minority still embraces all languages known during the era about which we can speak as having a history, and because of that we can dare to assert that theThat this tendency is, in general, useful, lets us truly speak of progress; on that point all more ancient linguists were blind, because they saw a "cosmos", a magnificent and well-ordered world in the ancient, particularly in the classical languages and because of which modern languages lack a quantity of things that they had learned to admire in the ancients. It also cannot be denied that they to a certain extent were correct: each language presents, when one studies it in the right spirit, as much beauty in a systematically coherent structure, that it can be qualified as a "cosmos". But it is not in every concern a cosmos full of beauty: just as all things human it contains traits more or less beautiful, and a comparative evaluation should not be unilateral. Without a doubt there are things extraordinarily beautiful in the structure of Ancient Greek, and the ancient Greeks with their artistic talent were able to profit to the maximum extent from their magnificent literature. But there is also not less beauty in many modern languages, though the real evaluation of that is based on taste, which for the most part escapes scientific critique.