2 - Sound Zones: Linguistic Subjectivity in Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage

Summary

IN THE THIRTEENTH century an English knight called Walter of Bibbesworth composed a ‘treatise’ on language that ostensibly teaches the French language and English vocabulary to medieval aristocratic readers, especially children. Beginning with the French vocabulary for midwifery, childbirth, and youth, the verse text presents an array of topics relating to the natural world and agriculture. These include extended sections on husbandry and estate management, a list of agricultural procedures, including the verbs for ploughing, sowing, weeding, kneading, and brewing, and the French for the woods, fields, pastures, gardens, flowers, and fruits. The treatise includes two sections that provide specific indications for how to pronounce words related to the animal kingdom. One gives the vocabulary for collective groups of animals and birds, just as modern speakers of English might say a ‘swarm’ of bees, a ‘pack’ of wolves, or a ‘murder’ of crows. Another catalogs the sounds animals make in French with glosses of certain words in Middle English, written either beside the lines or above the words they translate. Drawing on grammatical knowledge and vocabularies in French and English, this list demonstrates that audiences of the text, who might be grasping how to speak or write in at least two human languages, can simultaneously master nonhuman noises:

Vache mugist, gruue groule, cow lowes crane crekez

Leoun rougist, coudre croule, romies hasil quakez

Chivaule henist, alouwe chaunte, neyez larke

Columbe gerist e coke chaunte croukes

(Tretiz, 250–3)

[Cow (cow) moos (moos), crane (crane) crows (crows), lion roars (roars), hazel-tree (hazel) shakes (trembles), horse whinnies (neighs), lark (lark) sings, dove coos (croaks) and cockerel sings.]

The list of animal sounds in the Tretiz is the first example of such a list to be written in any European vernacular. It has been the subject of extensive investigations on Anglo-French language-learning and vocabulary associated with medieval estates. The list follows a formula common to medieval Latin nominalia and catalogs of animal sounds, termed by modern scholars voces animantium, which may have been a key resource for young students of Latin. The Latin lists present the sounds of animals with subjects followed by third-person verbs usually derived from the substantive: ouis balat, canis latrat, lupus ululate, sus grunnit, bos mugit (sheep bleats, dog barks, wolf howls, pig grunts, cow moos), and so on.