jlc

Yes. Thank you for the nicely modernized quote and for the question.

I had to persuade Jethro (a real person; fights with a longsword and has a Swiss persona) to have a little sister. (His persona originally was a single child.) He immediately said that her name was "Hilda", and then he tried to kill me with his sword.

If I get the chance to write another poem for him, then my topic is going to be his taking Ellar's two marks (all that Ellar got paid upfront) back to England to William Pytte's farm. Ellar, originally something of a ne're do well, will settle down (with Hilda) to run the family farm in the Lindt valley for Jethro's (aging) folks, since Jethro's calling is obviously to cut people in two with his bright sword.

At the Pytte family farm, Jethro would meet not only William and his lady wife, but also the wife's sister - whose name will be Alice Upton (Jethro's lady's name...or more correctly her persona's name). I think I can do something with this basic plot...

Jan, plotting and planning
(I think I would make Jethro fight tournaments and battles all the way across Europe, though, and not let it be just a pleasant stroll.)

Slanchad!

Well, he should not do that. As Wm comments, when a government changes radically, one of the things they do is release the prisoners from the Bastille. It would be well worthwhile for a future gov to review the causes of imprisonment for a few tens of thousands of prisoners and then have some way of releasing the ones for whose crime there were no victims.

Jan

Yes, language is fun.

Jan

I tried to gloss the weird words. How reading it work out?

Jan

I live near where you moved out of - I am in a section of Castaic. Most of the people around me are Latino or mixed race (black-white) marriages (this area apparently has a rep as being welcoming). This is not a problem. Most of the people around me are working for a living.

While I do not like illegal immigration, I would rather spend the effort to eliminate people from welfare and dissolve Obamacare. If people are looking for freebies, then they should move elsewhere. If people want to Work, then I really do not care what language they speak.

So I see the 'sweet spot' as making the US attractive to people who want to produce and not to people who want to be parasites. If we can get people productively working such that the jobs are filled, and there are no niches for people to just move in and get welfare, then the impetus to immigrate might be less. (Kinda like the Gas Laws...)

Jan

Thanks. Helped.

Jan

This is entirely too reasonable a view. You probably should be sentenced to life imprisonment but I am feeling lazy - will 8-10 years be OK for you?

Jan

Perhaps the gag order is a thing we can do something about. I doubt the legality of gag orders in the first place, and I certainly doubt that they are applicable in a situation when a person has been put into prison. He should be writing a book.

Jan

Me too. My father's family is from Louisiana...

Jan

It is fun to imagine what the conversation would have looked like to someone able to understand both sides.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by and look at my poem. I appreciate it.

Jan

One of my favorite variants in the poem was j-nough. It makes sense, when you think about it: j = i and i would be a long ee sound. eee-nough. Yeah. But when you first look at the word "j-nough" it looks really strange.

I remember a joke about a man taking one of the first velcro-closed wallets on a trip to Scotland. When he got some money out to pay for the purchase at a store, the proprietor said (you'll have to imagine the brogue), "That's a good wallet: It SCREAMS every time you open it."

Jan

I think I will not claim to equal your dad in thriftiness, but I do see that claiming to 'squeeze six cents out of every nickle' may become part of my everyday speech.

Jan

You can look up some samples on Youtube. I listened to those for several days to get into the right mood for writing the poem.

Jan

Thank you for taking the time to read it. One of the problems I had was the fact that Middle English dictionaries are oriented towards Chaucerian Middle English. So I would come up with a line in modern English, use the ME dictionaries to look up the words in Chaucerian ME, and then try to find those words (or versions thereof) in the Paston letters, which are Late ME. I would then use the Paston variation of the word in the poem.

Interestingly enough, the words that 'worked' were almost all more similar to modern English than they were to Chaucerian ME. I had not realized that 1477 was so close to being Shakespeare's English.

Jan

It was directed at you, Zanphamy, and at your anger at a society which is playing really rude tricks on men who happen to be while males. I wanted to remind you that here, in the Gulch, you were not going to be treated that way by your fellow Gulchers.

Since the topic of this thread is Rape, however, I thought it appropriate to add in that male 'strength' is not attractive when it becomes 'abuse'. I revel in the strength of capable men around me - and many of them are much stronger than I am. But if they thought to use that strength in an inappropriate fashion, they would have real trouble from me: most of them are not so much stronger that I would not be able to tear holes in them in a confrontation.

It is unfortunate that we live in a world where I have to keep this in mind. (Happily, most of the really strong men around me are also of noble disposition and if they saw me in trouble, I would not fight alone.) I think that the physical difference between men and women is less than it is write up to be. Imagine a Victorian woman, vs a modern female athlete. The Victorian woman has been protected from any physical exertion during her whole life, so the delta of strength between her and her husband is going to be large. Now take the female athlete: She and her husband both play tennis and work out at the gym. He is still significantly stronger than she is, but the difference is not as great as it was between the Victorian woman and her spouse.

We are still in the midst of changing what we think of as a woman "achieve all she can as a female" and a man "achieves all that a male can". I want to maximize both potentials. And yes, that includes the fact that you should be able to volunteer to help take a 4th grade class on a museum trip without someone putting you on a predator watch list.

Jan

I think it is more likely to be due to the merchantile success of the British than because of class separation. One of the things that surprised me (researching a different poem, several years ago) was that it was pretty easy to move from commoner to noble in England, even as late as the 16th century. If you were an alderman of a major city and had a lot of money it was pretty automatically a bump-up into the nobility. So, unlike France and Spain, there was a lot of fluidity in classes. The Pastons (whose letters I mined for vocabulary) were country squires with good connections, writing in 1450-1500 and they wrote in English. So at least by that time, English was used by the upper classes (plus Latin and French, one would suppose).

Thanks for your comments. I am pleased that you made a go at reading my poem.

Jan

Thank you. I have posted a version of it on a separate thread: A Letter from an Englishman...

Jan

OK. I fixed most of it. Better now...

Jan

Oh dear. I thought I had deleted it! My glosses (which are supposed to be in parentheses in this format) are without parentheses from partway though the third verse onward. I have a question out to Eudaimonia as to how to fix this...

I am a bit embarrassed. Please do not think it amiss if I delete it now.

I have instantly decided that I admire both your dad and your turn of phrase: eight pennies out of a nickle. I have never heard that before - Did you make it up?

Jan, waiting a few minutes before delete

I am trying to post it as a new thread, but I am having trouble with the formatting. Trouble, in this case, means that halfway through the poem I stopped being able to edit it.

Jan

I think it did - "budet" means "will be" and "idet" means "will go" I guess. I got them backwards. It has been more than 40 years. And I took "universalnyya" to be University rather than 'universal'.

Jan, has indeed forgotten all

Well, it worked. You said Of course, I went to University and [something] truth.

Ya tozhe. Y pa isuchala v instetute - no ya pa zabuilla fco.

I tried to say, "Me too. I studied it in Institute - but I have fogotten all."

At least I still have something...

Jan

Translating weird words out to the side.

Jan