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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Why the emphasis on Victorian Values?
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ExclamationMark
Shipmate
# 14715
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
No corner of society was safe from these determined, capable women -
I rather think it all passed over the existence of the rural poor.
Determined and capable? Without doubt they had time on their hands. But many who were campaigning for the reform of prostitution were working their kitchen maids for 16 hour days and putting them to sleep in damp attics. many who wept over little Nell in Dickens, made the life of teenage servants hell.
Even in the move to reform prostitutes, there was a vested interest. The use of such "services" was pretty universal in the metropolitan towns (in London 1 in 6 women were estimated to be prostitutes): it wasn't just Mrs Beeton who caught syphilis from a prostitute via her husband.
Posts: 3845 | From: A new Jerusalem | Registered: Apr 2009
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
What's your source for the claim that "in London 1 in 6 women were estimated to be prostitutes"? That suggests that every man in London was financially supporting 1/6 of a prostitute. Which seems improbable.
Or do you mean that 1 in 6 women had turned to prostitution at some point in their lives?
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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la vie en rouge
Parisienne
# 10688
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Posted
Never mind a few years of schooling, I have a degree in (French and) Latin and I wouldn’t be able to speak it spontaneously. I could probably compose a sentence if I was writing down*, but I’d have to think about it. Compare with my French. I codeswitch into French with complete ease; when I speak French, I think in French. These days I find speaking French no harder than speaking English.
*or at least I could have done just after I finished University. I've forgotten it all now.
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ExclamationMark
Shipmate
# 14715
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
What's your source for the claim that "in London 1 in 6 women were estimated to be prostitutes"? That suggests that every man in London was financially supporting 1/6 of a prostitute. Which seems improbable.
Or do you mean that 1 in 6 women had turned to prostitution at some point in their lives?
Sorry! It's the latter - 1 in 6 at some point ....
The source is twofold though I can't quote page no.s at the moment - Henry Mayhem - London's Underworld; Charles Booth London Labour and the London Poor
Posts: 3845 | From: A new Jerusalem | Registered: Apr 2009
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
The sources that I'm familiar with - all Scottish- drew a distinction between women who earned their living from prostitution and those who earned their living in some other way (piece work in dress-making or millinery was often cited) who turned to prostitution when work was scarce, perhaps only at a single point in their lives.
One of the objections to the Contagious Diseases Acts was that women in the latter category could find themselves labelled as prostitutes, when they regarded themselves as "dressmakers" or whatever.
If the latter were categorised as "prostitutes" rather thanm say, "milliners" the the 1 in 6 becomes plausible.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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HCH
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# 14313
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Posted
I have sometimes wondered how anyone knows with any confidence the correct pronunciation of Latin, or indeed of any language spoken before sound recording (or before the phonetic alphabet was devised). I know people claim to know such things, and I know some deductions can be made from spelling and rhymes and such, but how confident can one be?
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
This worries me a great deal. I am writing a time travel novel.
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Doublethink.
Ship's Foolwise Unperson
# 1984
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Posted
Don't give dialogue phonetically, it is a bugger to read anyway, just stick with - she could tell from his accent he was Londinium or else that she noticed latin didn't sound how Mrs Bayford had taught them, it took her a while to get her ear in.
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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. George Orwell
Posts: 19219 | From: Erehwon | Registered: Aug 2005
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M.
Ship's Spare Part
# 3291
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Posted
Exclamation Mark,
quote:
The source is twofold though I can't quote page no.s at the moment - Henry Mayhem - London's Underworld; Charles Booth London Labour and the London Poor]
It's Henry Mayhew, of course, but I prefer your version.
M.
[code]
[ 25. June 2014, 21:35: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
Posts: 2303 | From: Lurking in Surrey | Registered: Sep 2002
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ExclamationMark
Shipmate
# 14715
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
The sources that I'm familiar with - all Scottish- drew a distinction between women who earned their living from prostitution and those who earned their living in some other way (piece work in dress-making or millinery was often cited) who turned to prostitution when work was scarce, perhaps only at a single point in their lives.
One of the objections to the Contagious Diseases Acts was that women in the latter category could find themselves labelled as prostitutes, when they regarded themselves as "dressmakers" or whatever.
If the latter were categorised as "prostitutes" rather thanm say, "milliners" the the 1 in 6 becomes plausible.
The same is true of those termed "Charlady" in London. It was a convenient cover for a lady's real source of income.
Posts: 3845 | From: A new Jerusalem | Registered: Apr 2009
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
But "milliner" or "dressmaker" wasn't "a convenient cover for a lady's real source of income"; it was their main occupation and the main source of their income over the majority of their life; prostitution was the last resource when work was scarce.
Millinery was a barometer of economic conditions; if times were hard, buying a new hat was easily deferred, if times were good, everyone wanted a new hat.
This left milliners susceptible to boom and bust personal finances; but to say that prostitution was their "real source of income" is a gross distortion.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I'm inclined to agree with that, bar one small quibble. The word seamstress was used, I have been led to believe (not only by Terry Pratchett), in some quarters, as slang for prostitute. Hence the historical change in name from Gropec**t Street to Threadneedle Street (which I have recently seen referred to as a real change to fabric working businesses, so maybe what I was originally taught is wrong).
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St Deird
Shipmate
# 7631
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
When... ![[Biased]](wink.gif) - I think the way the LoB clip resonates with everyone I know who learnt Latin indicates it may not always be taught well. I think your experience might be quite unusual; most folk I've talked to recall lessons entirely in English with Latin read, written and translated, but never spoken. Noses to the grindstone learning principle parts, but never spontaneously firing the gerund of Scribo in anger.
I think it largely depends on the way you're taught Latin.
It sounds like betjemaniac was taught with the Cambridge Latin Course, which is highly focused on natural conversational style (there are at least two page-long conversations per chapter, as well as more dialogue in the pages of narration). It's a style of teaching which leads to less ability to conjugate without a thought (ala Monty Python), but more ability to construct your own sentences for conversation.
(The CLC was first created in the 70s, and is becoming increasingly popular, so I imagine there's also a gap between Latin students based on age.)
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
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# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
I have sometimes wondered how anyone knows with any confidence the correct pronunciation of Latin, or indeed of any language spoken before sound recording (or before the phonetic alphabet was devised). I know people claim to know such things, and I know some deductions can be made from spelling and rhymes and such, but how confident can one be?
Reasonably. When a language has several descendants, it's possible to narrow down the number of possible ancestral forms a given sound may have had; Latin 'c' before i/e, for example, gives "ch" (as in Eng. Church) in Italian, but "ss" in French and Spanish. It cannot therefore have been "ch" in Vulgar Latin, as "ch" cannot readily become "ss", but it could have been "ts" which can. Given that the Romans invented their own spelling, and used the same symbol for this and for the sound before o/u (which is "k" in all Romance languages), it's a reasonable conclusion that it was originally "k" in all positions - a conclusion which is supported by cognates and borrowings.
Or take the Latin consonantal "u", often written "v", as in the famous "Veni, vidi, vici". The Spanish reflex is a bilabial fricative; in the other Romance languages it was a labio-dental fricative (as in English). The Romans gave us "wine" from "vinum" and "Wight" (as in the Island) from "Vectis". Had it been a fricative when these words were borrowed, then the Anglo-Saxons would almost certainly have used their nearest equivalent, which was "f" - which had two allophones in complementary distribution equivalent to modern English "f" and "v". An Anglo Saxon would almost certainly have heard "vinum", with a fricative "v", as "finum".
Reconstruction is mostly a process of looking at borrowings and descendant languages. Spelling mistakes are useful as well; we know that Vulgar Latin short "i" and "e" fell together in the later period because they're frequently written for each other - we even have texts by the pedants of the day complaining about it.
Greek's even more fun. Especially since there's a certain amount of pride amongst Greeks that they still speak Greek after 3000 years. There can be a reluctance amongst some Greek speakers to accept how much their language has changed from that of Socrates and Plato; anyone bored enough can look up the talk page on Wikipedia's Ancient Greek Phonology article to see the fur fly. But I digress.
[ 26. June 2014, 11:43: Message edited by: Karl: Liberal Backslider ]
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betjemaniac
Shipmate
# 17618
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by St Deird:
It sounds like betjemaniac was taught with the Cambridge Latin Course, which is highly focused on natural conversational style (there are at least two page-long conversations per chapter, as well as more dialogue in the pages of narration). It's a style of teaching which leads to less ability to conjugate without a thought (ala Monty Python), but more ability to construct your own sentences for conversation.
Bit of both really - CLC alongside endless rote conjugation which those who had Kennedy's Latin Primer inflicted on them would recognise. The intention of the latter being to address exactly the point you raise about the CLC not giving you instinctive grammatical facility. By the 4th form we'd moved onto Virgil anyway.
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And is it true? For if it is....
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
No no, I agree. Transcribing dialect like Twain or even Dickens is right out. If I cannot indicate accent and social stratum purely by pace, vocabulary and tone, I am failing in my art.
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
What is meant by "Victorian values" ?
To British people, the Victorian era was the time in history when we were the most powerful nation, the most advanced economy. A certain amount of confidence and pride goes along with that. Not individual pride, but being part of a successful society (exporting "civilisation" to the benighted foreigners...)
It was before the welfare state - self-reliance and a positive attitude to hard work were a requirement.
It was a time of optimism and belief in the progress of science.
It was a time of expansionist capitalism, when the entrepreneurs who could see how to harness the technology could be elevated to the peerage. It was before socialism, so the peerage meant something. It was a class-divided society where upward movement was possible.
It was the time of pre-Raphaelite painters. It was a can-do society, a time of philanthropists and Boy Scouts.
In our modern cynical world with all its problems, there's something very attractive about the Victorian outlook...
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
It was a time when if you were not a white male upper class person, you were SOL.
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Net Spinster
Shipmate
# 16058
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
It was a time when if you were not a white male upper class person, you were SOL.
I would say upper-middle class white men also had it fairly well. Note there are some subtle differences between Britain and the US. In Britain you couldn't be real upper class without some recognition from the existing upper class that you were at least gentry so the poorest upper class were considerably poorer than than the richest upper-middle class. Admittedly a generation or two of wealth and a few marriages usually eased the wealthiest upper middle class families into the upper class (along sometimes with a change in religion to CoE if they weren't that already).
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spinner of webs
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ChastMastr
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# 716
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Posted
I hope the following doesn't come across as rude--it is certainly not meant personally, but it is my honest reaction to the array of ideas in question. Please imagine "I believe" at the start of each of my responses.
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
What is meant by "Victorian values" ?
To British people, the Victorian era was the time in history when we were the most powerful nation, the most advanced economy. A certain amount of confidence and pride goes along with that. Not individual pride, but being part of a successful society (exporting "civilisation" to the benighted foreigners...)
And thank God that's in the past now. The US desperately needs to get over it as well. I agree with Chesterton that the whole "empire" thing was a terrible, terrible thing for England--as it has been for the US--and, of course, for the numerous victims worldwide of both of our empires.
quote:
It was before the welfare state
Which, while it needs to be improved on both sides of the pond, is a hell of a lot better than unbridled capitalism.
quote:
It was a time of optimism and belief in the progress of science.
Optimism is good, working on the sciences is good, but the whole science-worship of the last couple of centuries was a ghastly mistake on a number of levels.
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It was a time of expansionist capitalism
To me this is by no means a good thing.
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when the entrepreneurs who could see how to harness the technology could be elevated to the peerage.
On the backs of the workers, yes.
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It was before socialism
And thank God we've improved some in that regard.
quote:
In our modern cynical world with all its problems, there's something very attractive about the Victorian outlook...
Honestly, I find a lot of it horribly repugnant. I find the attitude here in the US about such things--especially among a lot of the wealthy and powerful--to be excruciatingly and dangerously toxic.
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Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
Originally posted by Russ:
quote:
It was before the welfare state - self-reliance and a positive attitude to hard work were a requirement.
The origins of the welfare state can be traced back to Victorian times - and much earlier. In Scotland Poor Relief was administered by the church from the initial legislation in 1579 until it was transferred to the state by the Poor Law Act of 1845.
Poor relief provided the bare minimum but it did exist. In my village I've used the poor records (which are an excellent resource for family historians) to trace one family through three generations of dipping in and out of poor relief - initially an unmarried mother who relied on poor relief when her children were little, came off when her children started earning, her daughter then became an unmarried mother and went onto poor relief, and so on.
I assume England had similar legislation.
So if you regard the "welfare state" as state provision of aid to the poor, then it was existence from an early part of Victorian times, and grew from there.
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Heavenly Anarchist
Shipmate
# 13313
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
I assume England had similar legislation.
England had in the mid 16th century a parochial poor rate, collected from parishioners, to provide for the poor, it became statutory obligation in 1568. There were also various poor laws made, culminating in the Poor Law in 1601, some of these included the provision of work for benefits but provision was also made for those incapable of work, and benefits might include money, food or clothing. Parishes made individual emergency payments too, for providing for poor women who had just given birth or nursing sick parishioners, for example. They provided care and schooling for orphans, wet nurses in the country for orphaned infants and provided money for families of the poor deceased.
Of course, state hospitals also existed in the 16th c, Barts was jointly paid for by Henry VIII and the City of London.
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Posts: 2831 | From: Trumpington | Registered: Jan 2008
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
I agree with Chesterton that the whole "empire" thing was a terrible, terrible thing for England--as it has been for the US--and, of course, for the numerous victims worldwide of both of our empires.
Seems to me that US "imperialism" is at its most attractive in those who really believe that democracy is a great good that everyone should be able to share in, and that helping other peoples get there by joining them in fighting their tyrants is a good thing.
That value can be abused - used as rhetoric to cover interventions designed for economic self-advantage or one's own geopolitical power. And it can be acted out in a blinkered and culturally-insensitive way. If you want to condemn any particular act of US foreign policy, I'll probably agree with you.
But it's the value system itself rather than the consequences of any particular attempt to enact it that we're focussing on here.
And expansionist capitalism seems to me better than zero-sum capitalism - the assumption that so many make today that all wealth is at someone else's expense.
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
Posts: 3169 | From: rural Ireland | Registered: May 2001
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Jay-Emm
Shipmate
# 11411
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Posted
The thing is it's* attitude to democracies who've voted the wrong way is slightly questionable.
(and often come back to bite it)
I mean if just claiming Democracies good is enough then North Korea must be the most attractive country in the world. (it isn't, in case you hadn't noticed)
*And the UK's, especially 100 years ago
[ 29. June 2014, 13:41: Message edited by: Jay-Emm ]
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jay-Emm:
if just claiming Democracies good is enough then North Korea must be the most attractive country in the world. (it isn't, in case you hadn't noticed)
Perhaps you're confusing democracy with voting ?
Some of the most valuable elements of western democracy as we know it are less to do with which bunch of bastards gets to hold the reigns of power and more to do with limiting the harm that they can do to us when they get there.
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
Posts: 3169 | From: rural Ireland | Registered: May 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
Some of the most valuable elements of western democracy as we know it are less to do with which bunch of bastards gets to hold the reigns of power and more to do with limiting the harm that they can do to us when they get there.
... valuable to who? Isn't "limiting the harm that they can do to us" (italics mine) missing the point of whether a governmental system becomes better or worse?
Forgive me if I misunderstand you here, but I think that the whole "change the rest of the world to suit us" mindset is indeed a horribly toxic kind of imperialism--and, yes, was spiritually deadly to England in the past, and is so to the US now.
Believing that one has a good thing and wanting to share it with others (in this case, western-style democracy, and often with some sort of Christianty) is great, but the ends never justify the means.
I am OK with some kinds of capitalism (someone opening their own fish and chip shop is great, etc.), but what that often was, and continues to try to become (at least here in the US) seems to come from a very definitely "I win, you lose, screw the poor" mindset. There's a lot of Ayn Rand's "no one has a social obligation to help anyone else" attitude here amongst those with massive amounts of wealth and power. It is perhaps easy to paint all kinds of/approaches to capitalism with that broad brush right now, but I don't mean that people should not be able to make products that other people want to buy and use money as a means of exchange.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
In one of the Lord Peter novels, his fellow investigator Miss Climpson recalls Victorian social strictures as difficult and humiliating. That's what strikes the modern researcher -- that the rules were so complex, so strict, and so ultimately pointless. it was not possible to exclaim, "Who cares?" People were confined in these rigid systems.
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blackbeard
Ship's Pirate
# 10848
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Posted
The term "Victorian Values" seems to have more than one meaning; for instance, "the way things are", or "the way things should be". And Victorian society was complex, as ours today is, and values in one part might not be the same as in another.
One of the things I admire about the Victorians is the way some of them, at least, believed that life could be better and worked towards that end - in some cases with success. They might not have eliminated poverty, sickness, and injustice, but some of them, at least, had a pretty good try. We, today, are in their debt.
Of course there were some nasty ideas and some nasty people around then, as there still are. But the overall impression I get is energy, optimism and a desire for progress.
Blackbeard, looking on the bright side
Posts: 823 | From: Hampshire, UK | Registered: Dec 2005
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
What strikes me (I have been researching like gee golly whiz) is the chiaroscuro -- the tremendous contrasts. The darks were very dark and the brights tremendously bright. Appalling poverty, a misery that is hard to find today, side by side with stupendous wealth that is also hard to find today (although possibly I do not move in the right circles). Tremendous creativity and invention, right alongside the most stultifying conservatism and unwillingness to change.
Modern society has, by and large, smoothed over the highs and the lows to some extent.
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Russ:
[qb]I am OK with some kinds of capitalism (someone opening their own fish and chip shop is great, etc.), but what that often was, and continues to try to become (at least here in the US) seems to come from a very definitely "I win, you lose, screw the poor" mindset. There's a lot of Ayn Rand's "no one has a social obligation to help anyone else" attitude here amongst those with massive amounts of wealth and power. It is perhaps easy to paint all kinds of/approaches to capitalism with that broad brush right now, but I don't mean that people should not be able to make products that other people want to buy and use money as a means of exchange.
I appreciate the distinction you're making.
"I win, you lose" is zero-sum thinking. That's not the Victorian (English) mindset. I imagine that the Victorians would say something like "industry makes wealth" with no implication of taking away from anyone.
I'm tempted to add that taking away is what governments and brigands do, but that might get us sidetracked...
Philanthropy is part of "Victorian values". Many English towns have a civic park that was given to the people by a local rich industrialist. Don't know if soup kitchens are a Victorian invention - it wouldn't surprise me.
They didn't invent missionaries, but Protestant missions were a part of Victorian culture.
So I don't see either aggressive business competitiveness or absence of social concern as strong elements of what English people mean when they talk of Victorian values, although the emphasis in the US may be different. I see the Victorians as more paternalistic. (You may not think much of that either).
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
Posts: 3169 | From: rural Ireland | Registered: May 2001
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
I have in my possession a cherished table and two chairs bought from the estate of one Charlotte Despard by my grandparents, who respected her as a suffragist. (Not sure if they knew she later supported Sinn Fein.) She was a little later than Victoria, and the reason her furniture was sold was because it had been seized as a result of her not paying fines. The fines were because she refused to pay taxes without representation. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the taxes she wasn't paying were the National Insurance payments for her household staff. So her principles trumped care for the poorer members of society. Very Victorian. And an attitude we can see in politics now.
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
I see the Victorians as more paternalistic. (You may not think much of that either).
I think genuine paternalistic care is at least well-meaning; I believe very strongly in nobless oblige myself. There can be issues with it, such as the assumptions about various people (especially ethnocentric or sexist assumptions), but those could be corrected with experience and openness--the principle of trying to help those who are perceived as weaker than oneself, or in need, is I believe an absolutely right one.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
One thing that impresses me very favorably about the Victorians is that prominent scholars and scientists, such as Thomas Huxley, were willing to give talks at Workmen's Institutes describing their work in terms that the hearers could understand.
The audience was self-selected, but any man who wanted to learn could attend these lectures.
Moo
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
Yes, that was a new thing. Nothing like it, so far as I know, previous to that time. We are spoilt, with our Google and internet. There was a time when to find out something quite simple (how to propagate a begonia, for instance) took some doing. Or you just dived in and reinvented the wheel yourself, experimenting until you made it work.
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
One thing that impresses me very favorably about the Victorians is that prominent scholars and scientists, such as Thomas Huxley, were willing to give talks at Workmen's Institutes describing their work in terms that the hearers could understand.
The audience was self-selected, but any man who wanted to learn could attend these lectures.
Moo
Oh dear, this has reminded me of a story retailed in a dictionary of Sussex dialect compiled by a vicarage daughter who did not wholly understand the Sussex rural people. She tended to assume lack of education meant stupid, and she had no sense of humour. This story does suggest that people would turn up to be lectured on anything, though.
At such an institute, the lecturer was announced and the assembled locals told the subject was to be "Optics", at which an elderly attender spoke up. "I don't know about where you come from, but round 'ere, we calls 'em 'op-poles'." (I have omitted most of the dialect indicators she wrote, out of good manners.)
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chris stiles
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# 12641
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
One thing that impresses me very favorably about the Victorians is that prominent scholars and scientists, such as Thomas Huxley, were willing to give talks at Workmen's Institutes describing their work in terms that the hearers could understand.
I think this owes more to the beginnings of the mass labour movement than to the Victorian era - as similar things were replicated across different countries.
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by chris stiles:
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
One thing that impresses me very favorably about the Victorians is that prominent scholars and scientists, such as Thomas Huxley, were willing to give talks at Workmen's Institutes describing their work in terms that the hearers could understand.
I think this owes more to the beginnings of the mass labour movement than to the Victorian era - as similar things were replicated across different countries.
But it was middle-class people like Huxley who were willing to give their time and effort to this.
Moo
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Kerygmania host
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See you later, alligator.
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chris stiles
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# 12641
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
But it was middle-class people like Huxley who were willing to give their time and effort to this.
Moo
and where they didn't, you had libraries in working men's clubs and free debate. It's really very little to do with the Victorian era.
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Brenda Clough
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# 18061
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Posted
In this novel, my Victorian hero is in the pamphlet business. Informational pamphlets, everything from begonia propagation to (gasp!) birth control. A proto Google...
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
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Net Spinster
Shipmate
# 16058
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
In this novel, my Victorian hero is in the pamphlet business. Informational pamphlets, everything from begonia propagation to (gasp!) birth control. A proto Google...
I thought birth control literature was frowned upon by most Christian denominations then and distribution generally done by the freethinking side (Annie Besant [at that time an atheist] and Charles Bradlaugh were convicted in 1877 for publishing a book on birth control and then had the conviction dismissed on a technicality) though England didn't go to the lengths the US did in forbidding birth control literature. However wasn't you hero somewhat on the church side?
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spinner of webs
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Pomona
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# 17175
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
No corner of society was safe from these determined, capable women -
I rather think it all passed over the existence of the rural poor.
Determined and capable? Without doubt they had time on their hands. But many who were campaigning for the reform of prostitution were working their kitchen maids for 16 hour days and putting them to sleep in damp attics. many who wept over little Nell in Dickens, made the life of teenage servants hell.
Even in the move to reform prostitutes, there was a vested interest. The use of such "services" was pretty universal in the metropolitan towns (in London 1 in 6 women were estimated to be prostitutes): it wasn't just Mrs Beeton who caught syphilis from a prostitute via her husband.
It's really interesting reading Agatha Christies from the earlier ones to the later ones, and seeing the gradual shift from young girls going into service to them working in shops, cafes etc - accompanied by the upper-middle-class characters complaining about not being able to find 'suitable' staff. Something which was written with the aim of arousing sympathy for the mistress of the household, rather than being heartened at fewer girls in service (though obviously by this point working as a servant was not much like its Victorian equivalent).
One of the more concerning things is the return to cheap domestic labour as the norm - though this time it's imported rather than home-grown. I see little difference between the Victorian woman who campaigns against prostitution but works her teenage servant half to death, and a modern woman campaigning against FGM but paying her Latvian cleaner £5 an hour cash in hand.
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
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ExclamationMark
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# 14715
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
quote:
Originally posted by ExclamationMark:
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
No corner of society was safe from these determined, capable women -
I rather think it all passed over the existence of the rural poor.
Determined and capable? Without doubt they had time on their hands. But many who were campaigning for the reform of prostitution were working their kitchen maids for 16 hour days and putting them to sleep in damp attics. many who wept over little Nell in Dickens, made the life of teenage servants hell.
Even in the move to reform prostitutes, there was a vested interest. The use of such "services" was pretty universal in the metropolitan towns (in London 1 in 6 women were estimated to be prostitutes): it wasn't just Mrs Beeton who caught syphilis from a prostitute via her husband.
It's really interesting reading Agatha Christies from the earlier ones to the later ones, and seeing the gradual shift from young girls going into service to them working in shops, cafes etc - accompanied by the upper-middle-class characters complaining about not being able to find 'suitable' staff. Something which was written with the aim of arousing sympathy for the mistress of the household, rather than being heartened at fewer girls in service (though obviously by this point working as a servant was not much like its Victorian equivalent).
One of the more concerning things is the return to cheap domestic labour as the norm - though this time it's imported rather than home-grown. I see little difference between the Victorian woman who campaigns against prostitution but works her teenage servant half to death, and a modern woman campaigning against FGM but paying her Latvian cleaner £5 an hour cash in hand.
Agree with you 100% What's worse - they pay minimum wage or less, not the living wage.
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by la vie en rouge:
Never mind a few years of schooling, I have a degree in (French and) Latin and I wouldn’t be able to speak it spontaneously. I could probably compose a sentence if I was writing down*, but I’d have to think about it.
You probably wouldn't have to. Many years ago my Latin teacher told me that spoken Latin was different from written Latin, and that people spoke a rather more colloquial form than you might expect from the written texts that have survived.
Interestingly, the same is true of Arabic today, in that there is a formal written Arabic, also used for news broadcasts and other occasions, which is widely understood across the Arabic-speaking world but not used at home, where people speak whatever regional dialect of Arabic they happen to have been brought up in, so I see no reason why that shouldn't have been true of Latin.
I have to say the grammatical rules are quite a lot easier in colloquial Arabic - you can just get on and speak it, whereas the niceties have to be observed in formal Arabic. I find it hard to believe that every Latin speaker was punctiliously correct, especially in the provinces where their own native languages would have influenced not only their accent but their syntax and vocabulary, innit?
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Jane R
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# 331
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Posted
Ariel: quote:
I find it hard to believe that every Latin speaker was punctiliously correct, especially in the provinces where their own native languages would have influenced not only their accent but their syntax and vocabulary, innit?
Some linguists have suggested that modern Romance languages are really all dialects of the same language (pause for furious splutterings from the Academie Francaise). If you add all the non-standard dialects and minority languages such as Catalan, Galician and Occitan into the mix you can produce a rather nice dialectal continuum that covers most of what used to be the Roman Empire - although a lot of these are edging towards extinction, especially in France where the government refuses to recognise minority languages.
But yes; it's very unlikely (I'd say impossible) that Latin had a single spoken variety that was exactly the same as literary Latin and was spoken in exactly the same way throughout the empire. It goes against everything we know about how languages work.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
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# 76
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Posted
Vulgar Latin - mind, the problem is that as it was a spoken vernacular we have a lot less to go on to reconstruct it. I'm sure that Latin speakers did observe correct noun cases and so on, as speakers of languages that decline nouns today generally do. The loss of the Latin case marking system through the Vulgar Latin and Romance periods was more to do with a falling together of sounds in endings than a fundamental issue with case marking itself.
Nevertheless, even spoken Classical Latin is simplified compared with the written, just as it is in English where there's no official distinction between vernacular and written. One has the space in writing to compose long sentences with lots of dependent subclauses, clearly considered good style in Classical times, given the output of Caesar and Cicero that you may or may not have suffered at school, where the subject and the verb can be separated by many words and clauses. Spoken language is more spontaneous and tends to avoid that sort of thing, simply because brains don't like holding onto unresolved bits of language waiting for the bit that makes sense of them.
[tangent]
For example, take Puella (girl), First Dec. Fem.
Nom. Puella
Voc. Puella
Acc. Puellam
Gen. Puellae
Dat. Puellae
Abl. Puella (long a)
First of all, final -m had ceased to be pronounced in the days of the Republic, becoming a nasal preceding vowel, and lost completely during the Empire. That causes the Nom. and Acc. to fall together, requiring word order to serve to avoid ambiguity.
Secondly, the vowel length distinctions were lost, causing the Nom./Voc./Acc. endings to fall together with the Ablative - hence there's now a need for prepositions to distinguish Ablative functions from Accusative.
-ae fell together with -e, giving us only two forms in the Sing. - Puella/Puelle. And Puelle is of course identical with the plural Nom./Voc. forms.
Similar falling together occurred in 2nd Dec. Masc. nouns; -us changed to -o, -um also to -o
Once you're using word order and prepositions, the semantic load of the case marking system is lessened, and can become unstable, especially when that analytic move has resulted from a reduction in distinctiveness of the case endings themselves.
[/tangent]
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
a lot of these are edging towards extinction, especially in France where the government refuses to recognise minority languages.
Oi! That's not strictly true. France may not have ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Language (although it did sign it), but according to this page, the constitutional law of July 23, 2008 recognised "Regional languages belong to the patrimony of France".
Admittedly, recognising anything other than the mythical "Republican ideal", of which French is the language and in which ethnicity does not exist, is intrinsically complicated here.
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
For fictional purposes I can fudge my birth control publications a bit. I am well used to taking shocking liberties with reality in the cause of a good story, and this is irresistible. (I never resist temptation.)
Everything will be clearly labeled for the married couples only, and be distributed by women's health institutes and medical missions serving the poor. And lost in a welter of pamphlets about the nature of the Eucharist, and propagating begonias...
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
Some linguists have suggested that modern Romance languages are really all dialects of the same language (pause for furious splutterings from the Academie Francaise).
Mm yes. I'd be inclined to agree with that - being able to speak French and Italian (and having done Latin at school) has been very helpful in that so far I haven't needed to learn either Spanish or Portuguese to be able to get the gist of the written languages.
I believe it was Henry Beard who came up with the Latin phrase for "French is really just badly pronounced lower-class provincial Latin."
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Penny S
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# 14768
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Posted
I heard a radio programme which argued that the people of Ancient Rome were speaking something much more like Italian than might have been expected - the evidence being the misspellings in graffiti, which, assuming that the writers were actually recording speech phonetically, were readable as that.
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I heard a radio programme which argued that the people of Ancient Rome were speaking something much more like Italian than might have been expected - the evidence being the misspellings in graffiti, which, assuming that the writers were actually recording speech phonetically, were readable as that.
Late Imperial Rome, yes. But Vulgar Latin retained the case system for example which Italian has lost; it still exists in Old French, albeit reduced to two cases, and a relatively complex case system still exists in Romanian. However, it's really quite hard to know how far back the periphrastic tense forms which gave rise to the tenses used in modern Romance languages go; the French future for example is derived from Infinitive+to have, and the French perfect and pluperfect are not derived from the Latin tenses either but from forms of "to have", in the present or imperfect tenses + past participle. We will probably never know whether the Roman in the street would have said "Ire habeo ad villam" (which would give rise to the modern French future tense construction) or "Ad villam habebo" (as our Latin teachers would have taught us)*.
A parallel can be seen in Modern Colloquial Welsh compared with the literary language; the latter has an inflected imperfect which cannot be used in the colloquial language which uses a periphrastic construction to express the tense; the inflected imperfect exists in speech only as a conditional. The preterite and future can both be expressed using inflections or periphrastic constructions using gwneud - "do"; should the inflected forms fall out of colloquial use then a similar disparity would exist as between Classical Latin and Romance, and quite possibly between Classical and Vulgar Latin. It may be that at certain periods our Roman in the street might have used either sentence, perhaps as an matter of register.
*Apologies now for any errors in Latin grammar; it was over thirty years ago.
[ 03. July 2014, 18:54: Message edited by: Karl: Liberal Backslider ]
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
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