English, Again

While in London, we watched from the Globe's pit the story, delivered in Shakespearean English, of Henry IV, his son Hal and cousin Hotspur. The language was coming to us from across five centuries,
but, with well acted drama to back it up, it arrived in our ears with much of the power and nuance it had when it was written. In Richard II, the preceding history play, Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke (who became Henry IV) are both banished from England, Mowbray for life. He reacts with these heartbreaking words:

The language I have learn'd these forty years,
My native English, now I must forego:
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony:
Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue,
Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips;
And dull unfeeling barren ignorance
Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

Notice that he doesn't worry about missing the food or the weather!  Mowbray died in Venice of the plague, presumably unable to speak Italian to his doctor, the following year.

This quote always comes back to me when, as now, I'm in France, trying to carry on in French with people I admire and love.  It's as if I'm playing an out of tune piano, or a piano where the keys correspond to different notes from what I'm used to.  Not that there isn't plenty of music in French; I just have trouble playing it.  I'm not terrible at it; short automatic phrases come easily and new ones can be learned with practice, but to think and reveal new thoughts through speech at the same time, well, that's currently beyond me, and thus I seem, in darker moments, condemned to "dull unfeeling barren ignorance."  On the bright side, I'm made aware of what a gift it is to have a native language that I can use to express my thoughts as I think them, in the English speaking world, despite the many dialectical variations therein.

French, or Old French, washed over the British Isles in 1066, stretching and enriching, with time, the languages that were spoken there before into the Middle English we know from Chaucer and the York Plays, the common root of the various Englishes we speak today.  Thus the Old French was subsumed by Old English and visa versa.  In any case French went its way and English went its way and, though you can hear each in the other, you can't understand one purely on the strength of knowing the other.

While William the Conqueror was bringing his language to England, there was another language spoken here in Montpellier: Occitan, Langue D'Oc, the western tongue.  In fact, there were six major dialects of Occitan, the local one being "languedocian."  Languedocian has a vast literature, but it's known and studied less and less since it's one of several local heritage languages for the French, and it's more remote from the current language than Shakespearean English is remote from what we speak.

On the Saint-Chenian label to the left, an Occitan phrase meaning, as well as one of our friends here can make out, "here's hoping that tomorrow we'll all be here."  When we're back in York next week, and let's hope we will be, we'll be together and speaking our own tongue.  We'll miss the magic of the French, but welcome the comfort of the English.  When, in two months, we're back in Minnesota, we'll be missing the magic of English English with its blokes and lorries, but welcoming the comforts of Minnesotan English where pants are pants.  Esper deman serem aqui!