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Anglic (scroll down)
Fictional Lewis does not just quote fictitious Natvilcius. He first quotes the latter's Latin, then translates it for us. Later, another of Lewis' characters, Wither, addresses the man whom he thinks is the revived Merlin in Latin:
"'Magister Merline,...Sapientissime Britonum, secreti secretorum possessor...'"
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT CHAPTER 12, 6, p. 626.
My Point? I wish that:
I had been taught French, Latin and (in our case, in the Republic of Ireland) Irish properly, to read and to speak them;
I had been helped to understand that this was worth doing.
Instead, we were force fed something that we neither understood nor wanted at the time. But our expected social role did not require us to speak or read anything other than English.
2 comments:
Latin and French, yeah. Irish Gaelic? Spoken by no more than 40K people? What's the point? Apart from bilingual signs nobody reads.
But I was in contact with fluent speakers, including language enthusiasts. It would have been good to converse with them in their language, not just in English - especially since I was, notionally, being given the opportunity to do that. Two Irish speakers could switch to their language if they didn't want me to understand what they were saying.
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