Charles Nodier on marginal languages

Nodier was a distinguished bibliophile and member of the Académie Française who ran the library at the Parisian Arsenal, which, according to Musset, was where romanticism set up shop. (Émile de Girardin says in Mme de Girardin that Hugo, like everyone else, fell in love with Mrs and called her Notre-Dame de l’Arsenal.) His novel Inés de las sierras was inspired by a trip to Barcelona, of which more later, and here he is on that most un-republican of subjects, minority languages:

No, gentlemen! no language will die a statutory and judicial death, in the shadow of a lyceum, garrotted, muzzled, dickied [plastronée] by strictures daubed on a pedant’s pulpit! Never will a rector assisted by two oaves [cuistre is Provençal and may for all I know, not having looked, have something to do with the Spanish cutre; re the plural "oaves": 'tain't half so weird as be plastroner] heave it into the great forever in the name of king and consistory! Languages are longer-lived, not to be killed. So leave us our patois, if you please, gentlemen of Cahors! Leave them to us begad! they will at least compensate us a little for the good French [in mode] nowadays!

And so say all of us, although we sometimes wonder as to the logistics.

Trevor @ 13 December 2006 6:15 PM

Categories

Related posts

• Inspirational tale for bubonic plagiarists
• Bilingual English-Spanish nursery attacked by Basque terrorists
• Back-to-front and upside-down
• Abbé de Saint-Léger’s Lettres au baron de H[eiss] sur les différentes éditions rares du XVe siècle
• Elegant combined bell and lightning installation on Serveto church tower

Previous/next post

Comments

Feeds: RSS2 · Atom

Trackback link.

Tell me if the spam dragon gives you a hard time. Log in if you want to be really foul.