An amusing quote from Anthony Kenny’s A Path from Rome (1985), via Laudator Temporis Acti:
The Latin spoken by most examinees was halting and incorrect; that of the lecturers and examiners was fluent but far from classical. The accent of an Englishman, an American, a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a German differed so much from each other that it took some time to realize that the lecturers were not all speaking different languages. Lecturers did not scruple to translate the idioms of their own tongue literally into Latin, leaving foreigners to make what they could of them. Thus a Frenchman would speak of a far-fetched interpretation of a Scripture text as being ‘ad usum delphini’, while an American would drawl ‘haec theoria non tenet aquam’.
[….]
Though Latin was the official language of communication at the Gregorian, it was hardly ever used for spontaneous conversation between students of different nationalities. The ten-minute breaks between the lectures gave, instead, a great opportunity for would-be linguists (‘spekkers’) to practise foreign languages. But most remained resolutely Anglophone.
“Ad usum Delphini est une locution latine signifiant « à l’usage du Dauphin ». […] Aujourd’hui, cette expression est employée de façon ironique pour désigner un ouvrage expurgé afin de pouvoir être mis entre toutes les mains.”
Why did I think the expression was ad usum delphinorum (presumably referring to present and future ones)?
Évidemment, vous n’êtes pas français !
Or rather: Patet, Gallicus non es.
Turns out it’s a distinct thing, and due to Nietzsche.
Interesting, thanks for finding that.
Ad usum Delphini means “bowdlerized”, AFAIK – not simply “for beginners” but “censored for children”.
Like this
I did not know that Delphi, dolphins and Dauphin are related:/
Related by brotherly bonds, no less.
“Ad usum Delphini means “bowdlerized”, AFAIK – not simply “for beginners” but “censored for children”.
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The phrase has been used in both ways (the following quotations are taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_usum_Delphini):
(1) The Delphin Classics or Ad usum Delphini was a series of annotated editions of the Latin classics, intended to be comprehensive, which was originally created in the 17th century.
The first volumes were created in the 1670s for Louis, le Grand Dauphin, heir of Louis XIV […]. The main features included the main Latin texts; a paraphrase in the margins or below in simpler Latin prose (an ordo verborum); extended notes on specific words and lines, mainly about history, myth, geography, or natural sciences; and indices. One useful pedagogical feature of this series is that it keeps students reading and working in the target language (Latin).
(2) The expression Ad usum Delphini was sometimes used to refer to other texts which were expurgated because they contained passages considered inappropriate for the youth. The expression is still used more generally as pejoratively to indicate any work that was censored for the sake of younger audiences (not just within context series of Latin texts and commentaries).
Indeed, the last paragraph of the post mentions the two uses of the phrase.
The meaning “bowdlerized” is also the one I was familiar with; maybe it’s just the one more frequently in use in German-speaking lands.
This reminds me of the following anecdote Boswell tells about Samuel Johnson:
1-Hat: It should be “Évidemment”, not “Évidemmant”. Yes, French spelling is nowhere near as bad as English, but it still contains plenty of traps (the fact that the word is realized as /evidamɑ̃/ and not as */evidɛmɑ̃/ is another!)
2-Latin spelling, on the other hand, is sufficiently phonemic (the absence of any vowel length representation is not that serious a matter, considering how few minimal pairs involving vowel length there are) that I suspect that for educated L2 speakers of Medieval/Church Latin it took a relatively short while to adjust to different Latin “accents” caused by different L1’s/different Latin reading traditions/some combination thereof.
3…Which in turn makes me wonder whether there ever existed any Latin reading tradition which exhibited autonomous features, i.e. features not reducible to the speakers’ L1 (whether in terms of its phonology or orthography) or to Latin orthography. Would anyone more knowledgeable on the matter care to comment?
This breaks down spectacularly once somebody has a Great Vowel Shift.
The New High German diphthongization (which began soon after the beginning of Middle High German on the southern fringe and then gradually spread north) allegedly had this effect before it made it into German spelling and wasn’t interpreted into Latin anymore.
The stress of Latin words in German pronunciation is not predictable from German (and only partially from Latin orthography without length marking).
All of Slavic (plus Hungarian) renders c + front vowel as /ts/ even though one or two kinds of /tʃ/ are also available. For the languages that use Latin letters, that should probably be blamed on German; for those that use Cyrillic letters, Polish must be the culprit.
Danish can keep {c} for /s/ (not /ts/, which is not a thing except in pizza) before front vowels in (mostly) French loans. When it’s /k/, it’s mostly respelled as {k}; kadence shows both. Except exceptions, of course. The Swedes and the Norwegians are more hardcore about respelling, but you probably guessed already.
(To be a bit more rigorous, /ts/ is two phonemes in Danish and forbidden as a syllable onset. {z} usually spells /s/ as well, pizza is just a foreign way of spelling /pit.sa/).
/ts/ is two phonemes in Danish and forbidden as a syllable onset
How then do they say, reprovingly, “tsk! tsk!” ?
Everything but the /t/ is phonotactically forbidden, so we reprove with t. More seriously, we use something similar to /!/ for the purpose, which might be spelled ts. Onomatopoietica do not have to resolve into phonemes.
1-Hat: It should be “Évidemment”, not “Évidemmant”.
Thanks, fixed. I was so focused on making sure I didn’t put -a- in the third syllable I let it slip into the fourth! I really do know the rules…
@Lars Mathiesen
Out of sheer curiousity, I wonder if you could provide any nice minimal pairs between (Copenhagen) Danish /t/ (= [d̥ˢʰ] or the like) and /ts/. Also, Is the German initial affricate spelled z usually perceived by those Danish speakers whose /t/ is affricated as their affricated /t/, or as a foreign cluster /ts/ ?
In the other direction, I find Danish to “2” indistinguishable from German Zoo; I don’t think anything is aspirated or (unlike the Mandarin-in-Pinyin z) lenis about it. I haven’t heard it often enough to do statistics with, though.
@dm
A palatalised final t in Irish (or Hiberno-English) can sound very s-like…not quite ts but intermediate between t and s.
All of Slavic (plus Hungarian) renders c + front vowel as /ts/
Among Russian Latinists, there famously exist(ed?) two feuding schools of thought: in St.Petersburg/Leningrad they read it as /ts/, while in Moscow, as /k/. Whence any number of inside jokes like the story about two scholars, one from each city, who meet at a conference, and the Moscow luminary sarcastically asks his colleague, “Что, всё цакаете?” — and the other one retorts, “А вы, значит, всё какаете?”.
Heh.
Final /t/ in Hiberno-English is supposedly an apical-alveolar version of [θ]; and indeed that’s what it sounds like to me, very much unlike a German or Danish or Slavic or Italian [t͡s].
I’m not sure if I’ve even heard any natively spoken Irish; from what I’ve read about it, its palatalized /tʲ/ has drifted off to [t͡ɕ], which is what the ć in my name stands for. There’s no palatalization going on in most of Germanic, though, including the [t͡s] of German and Danish.
Instead, [tʰ] > [t͡s] has also been going on in parts of England, sometimes along with [pʰ] > [p͡ɸ] and [kʰ] > [k͡x ~ xk͡x ~ xː]. It’s what the High German Consonant Shift was all about, and Grimm’s law was probably quite similar.
@David M: “All of Slavic”
You can add Lithuanian to this.
I imagine Latvian too, but have not come across any Latvian textbooks that would corroborate this.
In Croatian, there were two main pronuncuations of Latin up until the end of 19th century:
The first was the northern pronunciation which used CE and CI in common with the Slavic and Hjngarian that you mentioned.
The second was the southern pronunciation which used ĆE and ĆI. Thus the traditional Croatian title of the Austrian emperor was Ćesar in the southern pronunciation and Cesar in the north.
The northern, supported by the educational authorities headquartered in Zagreb won out. It was incidentally, similar to the pronunciation use by the Serbian educational authorities based in Belgrade. For that reason the northern pronunciation was used extendively during the First and the Second Yugoslavia. While the southern was forgotten.
In c 1970s, the reconstructed pronunciation using KE KI replaced the traditional pronunciation in Croatia. Though traditional pronunciation is still tought.