John Gallagher reviews Arturo Tosi’s Language and the Grand Tour: Linguistic experiences of travelling in early modern Europe for the TLS (January 22, 2021):
“For God’s sake learn Italian as fast as you can, if it be only to read Ariosto.” Charles James Fox wrote to a friend in 1767 that only an understanding of Italian language and literature would make him “fit to talk to Christians”. For Fox, as for the thousands of travellers before and after him who embarked on the continental pilgrimage known as the Grand Tour, crossing the channel meant encountering other languages. Some, like John Milton or Robert Boyle, returned accomplished polyglots, while the idleness and incomprehension of others helped build the modern image of the monoglot English tourist.
Arturo Tosi’s Language and the Grand Tour is a welcome study of the role of language in elite European travel from the late sixteenth century to the dawn of the nineteenth. Drawing on printed travel accounts and tourists’ letters, he explores how travellers learnt languages on the Continent, and how their linguistic skill (or lack thereof) shaped their interactions with everyone from border guards to courtesans. Lorenzo da Ponte, later Mozart’s librettist, wrote a romantic account of his first steps in German with a female innkeeper. The only payment she demanded for hours of German conversation and grammar study each day was that their lessons finished with an “Ich liebe Sie”: I love you.
In recent years, one welcome turn in histories of the Grand Tour has been the incorporation of women’s perspectives on travel and touring, and Tosi brings in accounts written by well-known figures including Mary Wortley Montagu and Hester Piozzi Thrale. Montagu was scathing about the young Englishmen she met in Venice – “the greatest blockheads in nature”, most of whom had “kept an inviolable fidelity to the languages their nurses taught them”. Thrale’s Observations and Reflections (1789) noted the language she overheard in everyday use, like a Milanese woman telling a runaway nobleman “that his conduct had put all the town into orgasmo grande”.
The Grand Tour emerged, Tosi argues, in a time of “cultural curiosity and linguistic exuberance”. Travellers encountered a sometimes bewildering variety of local dialects and national languages on the increasingly well-worn routes through France and Italy. Edward Lhuyd, a traveller and keen linguist, observed that the Breton language was so similar to Welsh “that in a months time at farthest a Welshman may understand their writings”. Tosi’s narrative sometimes loses sight of questions of language and strays into more general discussions of aspects of the Grand Tour, as in the discussion of travellers’ shock at Italian sexual morality and at the figure of the castrato. But this first book-length study of language and the Grand Tour points towards the new ideas and approaches that can come from a multilingual approach to histories of the English abroad.
Sounds like an interesting book, and let me take this opportunity to recommend Gallagher’s own Learning Languages in Early Modern England (see this 2020 post); I read a chunk of it ages ago and meant to post about it, but by now I realize that’s unlikely to happen, so this will have to do.
I am intrigued by the idea that the “ich liebe” set-up was not sufficient to get da Ponte on the intimate side of the du/Sie distinction.
Yes, that struck me too.
The history of politeness in German is generally bizarre and mystifying. I’m not even sure if Sie is the 3pl or the 3sg here.
I am intrigued by the idea that the “ich liebe” set-up was not sufficient to get da Ponte on the intimate side of the du/Sie distinction
AFAIK, use of the polite pronoun (3rd person plural) among married couples was usual in certain circles into the 20th century, politeness overriding intimacy.
OTOH, as DM probably had in mind, during the period in case it was usual to address servants and underlings with the third person singular. So it’s not even clear whether da Ponte was being polite or underlining a status difference.
And apparently, lower-class people then addressed each other in the 3sg – use of the 3sg as an address is still not extinct in Berlin. Took me a while to figure out who that cashier was talking to: me.
Around the 18th century English speakers apparently found saying „I love you” more comfortable than the more intimate „I love thee”. Wasn’t that because „thee” was used with servants and children? And thus became almost insulting?
Travellers encountered a sometimes bewildering variety of local dialects and national languages on the increasingly well-worn routes through France and Italy
Yes, I’ve often wondered how any foreigner managed to learn spoken Italian (or German) in the 18th century. It must have been rather like learning „Arabic” today and trying to get around Egypt and Lebanon using MSA.
@Vanya; yes, but that just seems like another signpost along the highway to the T-form pronouns becoming completely obsolete in normal registers of English, which has still not happened in German.
Indeed. V-V began with the urban middle classes, but spread upward, downward, and outward until it pushed all T out except:
1) in religious language, because of the 1611 King James Bible;
2) among the Plain People (Quakers, Mennonites, etc.), who thoued everyone on religious principle until the late 19C or early 20C;
3) in some rural dialects (mostly in the North of England), where it survived until the mid-20C: “Don’t tha ‘thou’ me, thou! I’s ‘you’ to thee!”;
4) (in the phonetic forms du, dee) in the local dialect of Shetland, where there is still a sharp diglossia as opposed to the smooth range from basilect to acrolect that one finds in the rest of Scotland and in AAVE.
3SG agreement became normal, however in varieties 2, 3, 4, and the accusative displaced the nominative in varieties 2, 3 just as you-ACC displaced ye-NOM.
And isn’t going to at this rate: since 1968 the trend has been slowly going in the opposite direction.
… since 1968 the trend has been slowly going in the opposite direction.
It sure is, and I’m one of those who make life hell for the trenders. You see, young folks (for it is they!) apparently expect that being per Du means everybody will be nice to everybody. I can’t imagine where they got that idea from. Nor why it is so important to them to believe that.
When one of them offers me Du right off the bat, as happened just today on the phone, I accept because it makes them briefly happy. Who am I to take the chew-toy away from a puppy ? But I continue to speak and act as I always have. Then they are unhappy.
Selbst schuld. Schule des Lebens halt. Aka get a life!
What? No. Saying “fuck you, you fucking fuck” is much easier to accomplish if the “you” part is in the T form.
That means you come across as young, too.
young folks (for it is they!) apparently expect that being per Du means everybody will be nice to everybody
English has been per Sie for half a thousand years, and that doesn’t mean that everyone treats everyone else with respect.
And apparently, lower-class people then addressed each other in the 3sg – use of the 3sg as an address is still not extinct in Berlin. Took me a while to figure out who that cashier was talking to: me.
Interesting. I lived in Berlin for a couple of months twice and never came across that. I assume you’re not talking about over-polite or mock-polite addressing people as der Herr / die Dame with 3rd person singular agreement, but really addressing people with er?
Saying “fuck you, you fucking fuck” is much easier to accomplish if the “you” part is in the T form.
That’s the way things still are outside of the big organizations I work for. Among the semi-literate, earnest young IT people I deal with there, nobody ever says anything like that. They don’t seem to be aware of the polemogenic possibilities of intimacy. They’re nice to each other because they are uncertain of what life has to bring, I think – like 30-year-old puppies.
That guy today, after I said I have nothing against the Du, murmured something like “that’s a relief, I find it much easier to deal with people this way”. Maybe they “have problems with authority”, or think they do.
That means you come across as young, too
Hadn’t thought of that. But I’m just like I’ve always been – pleasantly bad-assed. Like the wolf dressed up as Rotkäppchens grandmother.
He said he called me because I had mentioned to one of his people that I have worked with version control products for more than 30 years. He was absolutely shocked when I told him I was 73 – I think he then erased that information from his memory.
I assume you’re not talking about over-polite or mock-polite addressing people as der Herr / die Dame with 3rd person singular agreement, but really addressing people with er?
I wondered about that too. In a kiosk around the corner there’s a Kurdish guy who always addressed me as verehrter Herr. He may have learned German shop assistent manners from his great-great-grandfather. His German is fairly fluent, just not colloquial in this respect.
When Russians disapprove of using T-form with them, they should say indignantly “Мы с Вами на брудершафт не пили!” (I am not only never heard it in real life, I cannot imagine it being actually said) = We didn’t drink at a Brüderschaft, which presumably means that that’s how Germans supposed to do it.
An old-fashioned indignant expression is wir haben doch keine Schweine zusammen gehütet = “we never worked together herding pigs”. Nowadays someone might say “we never went camping on Brokeback Mountain”.
When I started working in the early 90s, V was still the standard among colleagues, although T was already the default among younger colleagues who joined the company around the same time. With other colleagues, it took a couple of years and common experiences like projects abroad to move to T, often accompanied by having a couple of beers together, and even then not usually with colleagues where there was an age difference of more than 10-15 years. Nowadays, T is the default at our company and near-default at the group of companies I work for (for the latter, I might use V for an introductory mail or call, but it’s usual and expected to switch to T as soon as possible after that).
At least around here — and this is New England, so I suppose it started earlier elsewhere — nobody ever uses Mr. or Mrs. with surnames any more; young whippersnappers meeting me for the first time in a doctor’s office or somewhere else that traditionally was a locus of formality will greet me as “Steve.” It rubs me the wrong way, but I’ve learned to grin and bear it.
Hans, you’re over 50, I think. Do many men of that age use T among each other even when they’ve just met – apart from your “group of companies” ? The ones who do so – do they wear Hawaiian shirts and come to work on a skateboard ?
Well, the men my age (BTW, your assumption is correct) I normally meet are a) colleagues (T, as described above), b) internal clients at other group companies (V switching quickly to T, as described above), c) international clients (English language, so no V/T distinction and first names), d) friends (T), e) neighbours and distant acquaintances (V or T, depending on how well we know each other), f) strangers (V), although that also depends – I have been at parties with start-uppish crowds where everyone used T, even though they didn’t wear Hawaii shirts. So in my age group, V is still the norm for people you just met, but the step to T is much faster than it was 30 years ago, people feel much less inhibited about proposing the switch, and refusing it because you hardly know the guy has changed from a situation where the proposer withdraws in embarrassment at their impertinence to a situation where refusing the switch has become a faux pas.
The latter, and it’s quite confusing. It’s not common, but my impression is not that it’s marked somehow (oddly).
Bruderschaft, brotherhood with a grammatically singular brother. Bruderschaft trinken (no preposition) is the old-fashioned formal version of the “having a couple of beers together” Hans mentioned.
In Russia, брудершафт пить used to involve men twining their arms and drinking (presumably usually vodka) at the same time; I assume they got that, like the word, from long-ago Germans.
nobody ever uses Mr. or Mrs. with surnames any more
The change in New England culture I am too old to accept is children addressing their friends’ parents by their first names. No 10 year old is calling me “Jon”, dagnabit.
Damn straight!
*waves cane angrily*
In Russia, брудершафт пить used to involve men twining their arms and drinking (presumably usually vodka) at the same time; I assume they got that, like the word, from long-ago Germans.
Funnily, I ever only did that ritual with people from the former USSR, never with Germans.
It took me a long time, even as a young adult, to get used to calling older people by their given name (I’m talking Britain in the 1970s) — but I found it wryly amusing some 20 years ago to hear the neighbour’s toddlers call out “Hello, Kate”.
“children addressing their friends’ parents by their first names”
Here in Australia, a few years back I was surprised to be called by my son’s friends as “N’s dad”
You can hear this a lot in popular Australian cartoon “Bluey” where “Lucky’s Dad” is one of the characters.
Reminded me of the Arab custom of naming parents after their children – eg. Abu Musa
@JC: English has been per Sie for half a thousand years, and that doesn’t mean that everyone treats everyone else with respect.
For half a thousand years there has been no T/V distinction in English, so “English has been per Sie in that period” makes no sense, nor does “English has been per Du in that period”.
In any case, “respect” is not the issue here. What I wrote was:
young folks (for it is they!) apparently expect that being per Du means everybody will be nice to everybody
I believe ithe neutral tone among people who are per Sie is one thing that the YF don’t like. They want nice, not respect. If they even know what respect is, they don’t want to hassle with it. “Nice” is a big warm puddle of levelling puppy pee.
Also, Sie/Du represent verbal acknowledgment of social distinctions. The YF don’t like that either, not one bit. Of course using Du all the time does not change the realities, but merely pulls a cognitive veil over them. Your boss can fire you if you don’t do what she tells you to do, no matter how much you Du her.
Here in Australia, a few years back I was surprised to be called by my son’s friends as “N’s dad”
That seems to be a thing in England, too, if you believe John Allison’s web comics.
Here in the NYC suburbs, I used to be called “N’s dad” by other kids when they were pretty young (like four or five years old), but they generally graduated to “Mr. Brewer” once they mastered the relevant register and were able to keep track of surnames. I suspect I was already doing the “Mr./Mrs. SURNAME thing at a somewhat younger age because there was more social reinforcement for it (including explicit modeling by ones own parents) in those days, though.*
In one interesting instance, a then-young boy on our block (who must be 19 or 20 by now, in between the ages of my two daughters) would call me “R.’s dad” even when R. (my older daughter) was not present and I was standing right next to L. (my younger daughter). That still wasn’t enough to change the form of address to “L’s dad.” The boy had apparently mastered one way of referring to me and he wasn’t going to tweak it depending on context.
*Another factor might be that it is much more common than it was in my childhood for “N. mom” to have a different surname than N does, so there’s more family-specific stuff you need to learn to get it right.
Dagwood Bumstead’s neighbor kid, Elmo, calls him “Mr. B.”
But Elmo is pushing seventy, at least.
I used to be called “N’s dad” by other kids when they were pretty young (like four or five years old)
Irene’s teachers used to call me “Irene’s dad” when she was about that age; I presume the kids picked it up from them
would call me “R.’s dad” even when R. (my older daughter) was not present
That suggests that “R’s dad” had become a name rather than a description.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunya_(Arabic)
I recall when I was on a Boy Scout camping trip in my teens, I had to ask the father of one of the first-year scouts* for some help with something. I certainly didn’t know the father’s first name, and I might or might not have known his last name. I wasn’t going to address him as, “So-and-so’s dad,” although certainly some of the boys addressed the fathers that way. Having never interacted with him before, I called him “sir.” However, it took a little while for him to realize that I was trying to get his attention; he said practically nobody had ever called him that before.
* “Johnny scouts” had been a nickname for them in our troop—and maybe others in the area. However, the adult leaders had decided around the time I joined the troop that it was too pejorative and tried to stamp it out.
Unrelatedly, I have occasionally wondered whether Sabri Khalil al-Banna took the kunya de guerre “Abu Nidal” (meaning “father of struggle”) before or after he actually had a son named “Nidal.”
Addressing the lower classes as han and hun was certainly a thing in Danish up to maybe the 18th century. I don’t know if a shopkeeper could address a maid sent shopping like that, though, I have only encountered it in old plays where peasants are on the receiving end.