TWO GOODIES FROM LA GRANDE ROUSSE.

1. Alphabets. You won’t believe the wonderful stuff on this site. A couple of examples: evolution from Phoenecian to Latin, and language families (useful for checking on French language names: of the Dravidian languages, “Telougou” is obvious, but “Tamoul” and “Canara” are not). Just scroll down the sidebar and keep clicking.

2. A nice little Anthologie de la poésie, with poems both French and translated (including Wendell Berry and Meleager). The best-represented author is Victor Hugo, and there will be no “Hélas” from me*; if you can read French and haven’t read “Booz endormi,” do so at once. The line “Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth” contains the pure essence of poetry.

*When Gide was asked who in his opinion was the greatest poet in the French language, he responded: “Victor Hugo, alas!”

Update (Oct. 2023). Alas, La Grande Rousse lasted only three years — the last post was mars 31, 2005. I liked that blog…

Comments

  1. Brilliant – always like a bit of alphabeticality.

    Is it Uzbekistan where they are using three sets now? Soviet Cyrillic. Ataturk-style Latin, and Islamicist Arabic? May a hundred squiggles bloom!

  2. By the way, though you restored the original page look now – I’d just like to say, the deviant one was not that bad in my view!

    This older one is better, but the other was not as much of a disaster as you seemed to think….

  3. M is for Marvelous.

  4. Thanks, Mark — I appreciate the comforting words, but here’s what thisclassicallife.com had to say:

    “In other news, if this kind fellow wouldn’t mind turning down the font size a touch, I just might become hooked.”

    “This kind fellow” was, alas, me.

  5. Glad my little discoveries pleased you ! ;)) (hope my English here is ok…I understand it very well but write it very badly ;((

  6. Mais voyons, c’est du baratin! Pas de problème avec l’anglais. Et je suis ravi de vous voir ici…

  7. I have just learned, after all these years, that Jérimadeth was invented by Hugo for the purpose of a rhyme (with “demandait”), and in fact itself is a pun: « j’ai rime à “dait” » (‘I have a rhyme for “dait”). I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  8. John Cowan’s recent posts page is borked at present. This thread correctly shows up at the top, but everything else near the head of the list has no recent comments.

  9. Trond Engen says

    I wonder if he is in the process of rebuilding the page after the last time it got botched. Good news if true.

  10. I’ll bet it has to do with this post, whose title reads “TWO GOODIES FROM” in the recent posts page. When I came here I saw that the title had a link in it and remembered that the software reacts badly to such things, so I removed the link from “LA GRANDE ROUSSE.” But maybe it was too late for the posts page.

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