Latin at Anstey's Cove

Pursuing the reference in Harper's 1907 The South Devon Coast to the Latin sign that adorned Mr Thomas's tea-house, formerly at Anstey's Cove, Torquay: here's a transcript and a bit more about its background.

Ubik poem

For Tony Boucher

ich sih die liehte heide
in gruner varwe stan
dar suln wir alle gehen,
die sumerzeit enphahen

I see the sunstruck forest
In green it stands complete.
There soon we all are going,
The summertime to meet.

Comic Latin and other texts

A couple of extended out-takes from recent posts.

Further to Comic Grammars, check out The Comic Latin Grammar: A New and Facetious Introduction to the Latin Tongue (1840, Internet Archive comiclatingramm00leiggoog), by the same duo of Punch contributors, Percival Leigh and the illustrator John Leech, as The Comic English Grammar.  It too is a parody, in this case of The Eton Latin Grammar, first published in 1758 as An Introduction to the Latin Tongue, for the Use of Youth. (Most of the grammar is over my head - I know a deal of Latin at recognition level, via the sciences and general reading, but didn't study it as a language at school. However, it's still worth a look even if you don't know Latin well).

And also, check out Paradigm ("Journal of the Textbook Colloquium - Where any, and every, aspect of textbooks is, or are, investigated"). This was a fairly short-lived journal - it only ran to some 40 issues - but its archive is a rich lode of interesting articles and papers that look at how social history has manifested through textbooks:

Textbooks, Schools and Society

For the social historian the school textbook is a junction where many lines of interest meet. Its author, often a quirky teacher of merely local repute, nevertheless expresses a wider range of prejudices and assumptions than just his own. He or she represents a popular, unsophisticated, but sometimes innovative view of knowledge and conduct, the dissemination of which is controlled by the commercial considerations of the printer-publisher, who in turn is responding to wider social and economic forces. The influences which form the textbook are more easily seen than those which the textbook sets in motion, but "it is in school texts that we find the best evidence not only for the importance and spread of ideas at a particular time but also for the accomodation of particular ideas to the core of intelligibility" (Murray Cohen, Sensible Words, 1977, p. 144). This evidence, however, has until recently been little studied. We still need to discover how much has survived and where it is located.

Ian Michael

A few examples of the content:

• Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace: Comparative treatments in Soviet and post-Soviet textbooks.
• History, memory and the representation of Britain's experience of strategic bombing in survey textbooks
• 'Tom's Grammar'? The genesis of Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar revisited
• William Barnes's manuals of instruction
• Sexy ghosts and gay grammarians: Kennedy's Latin primer in Britten's Turn of the Screw (exploring the theory that a gender rhyme from a Latin primer is full of double entendre)
• Quaker science texts
• The textbook furore in the 1920s: The Irish-American angle
• Bias in school history textbooks: Representations of the British invasion of Zululand
• The "grammarians' battleground": Controversies surrounding the publication of John Holmes' Greek Grammar
• "Cloud Cuckoo Land? "Fact and fantasy in geographical readers,1870-1944
• Multiplication is vexation (maths teaching technique as revealed through Walkinghame's Tutor's Assistant)
• Barnes Wallis and mathematics with love (revealing a correspondence between Barnes Wallis and his cousin, later wife, Molly)

Fascinating stuff!

- Ray

Anglick

A while back - see Ansible ... and Anglish - I mentioned various attempts to imagine an English purged of French and Latin influences, such as the 'Pure English' of the Dorset poet William Barnes, the 'Blue-Eyed English' of the composer Percy Grainger, and the SF author Poul Anderson's essay on atomic theory, Uncleftish Beholding.

A question on Yahoo! Answers, "What would English look like today without the French influence?", prompted me to a rethink. Interesting though these attempts are, they're essentially modern English, removing French and Latin but retaining all the innovations (such as the massive simplifying of grammar) that marked the vast 'reboot' from Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) to Middle English and later Modern English.

An English (let's call it 'Anglick') where no Norman invasion happened would more likely be an entirely different branch of the Germanic languages, even more dissimilar to English than Yola, with many more features akin to Old English (for instance, it might - like modern German - retain grammatical gender and case endings). I imagine the Lord's Prayer in Anglick could look like this ...

Vaider arn thu beest on evvinem
Gehagled be thi narmer
Becoom theen kernyrike
Gedaan theen villa
On arder soso on evvinem
Arne daglicke brode geev uns hoady
An ar gildies uns vergeev
Soso weer andern gildeen vergeeven
An nae layde thu uns in costening
Arba layde thu uns vorm ooble. Zo beest.

... and even this, as the language of the King James Bible is to English, could be archaic Anglick. Who knows where English could have borrowed from?

- Ray

William Barnes online (depending where you are)

Onwith from the posts yesterday and backalong - as I guess William Barnes might like me to write (see Ansible ... and Anglish), I've just been reading his An Outline of English Speech-craft (CK Paul, 1878).

"Latin ban": nothing to see, folks

A Telegraph story - Councils ban 'elitist' and 'discriminatory' Latin phrases, now copied worldwide - had various academic bloggers aerated a few days ago. It's bonkers to ban Latin said Mary Beard; Anti-Latin P.C. poppycock said Geoff Pullum at Language Log; "gibbering idiocy" said Language Hat at Banning Latin.

Skip to the key analysis: Anatomy of a manfactured controversy from Gareth Rees, who rightly suspected both the facts and the agenda, and identifies the ingredients: a reactionary polemicist and selective reportage of Bournemouth City Council's initiative

"... to encourage plain, appropriate and easily-understood language. This includes considering whether or not various phrases, including jargon and Latin, are appropriate for the particular audience that the information is aimed at".
- Use of Latin words - Inaccurate reporting in recent national media, press release, Bournemouth City Council

If you like English peppered with Latin (or even more peppered, since it already is), check out Carmen Possum; and the intro to Umberto Eco's Baudolino, whose central character tells his story in an English (Italian in the original) mixed with Latin and various European languages of the 12th century.

P.S. While reading around this topic, I ran into a fine example of recency illusion (not to mention, lack of linguistic research) in a Times piece in the same vein as the recent Telegraph one:

So we are solving the difficulty in a natural way. Instead of inventing a funny neutral pronoun, we are bending another "rule" of grammar. We say: "Why should anyone plan their own funeral?" "Every child must bring their own picnic." "We don't want anyone to hurt themselves." "It must have been someone who wanted to clear their conscience." We are busting the old rule of agreement of number between the parts of a sentence. We do it to avoid the clumsiness of "his or her". We do it for fear of being exposed as a male chauvinist. We do it because it is politically correct. And it is becoming correct. That is the way language changes.
- A new sex-neutral pronoun would make it easier for anyone to speak their mind, Philip Howard, The Times, May 10, 2002

See (again) Everybody loves their Jane Austen on the antiquity and ubiquity of singular "their" as a genderless construct in English.

- Ray