Richard Carroll on Nostr: One neat thing about Nicholas Orme’s book Medieval Children are small things like ...
One neat thing about Nicholas Orme’s book Medieval Children are small things like this that help us picture the Medievals as real people much like us.
On baby talk in the Middle Ages:
Adults who speak to babies use baby-talk, mixing words with sounds like babies make. The practice may be as old as Homo sapiens, and it was noticed in the mid thirteenth century by Bartholomew in his encyclopaedia. Describing the duties of a nurse, he observes that she ‘stammers and, as it were, breaks her speech as if to teach [the child] to speak more easily’. As John Trevisa puts it in his translation of 1398, she 'whilispeth and semisouneth the words, to teach the more easily the child that cannot speak'. ‘Semisoun’ means 'to talk quietly' and ‘whilispeth' is the old form of ‘lisp'; both writers therefore imply that nurses spoke baby-language. Bartholomew was a broad-minded friar who not only noticed the habit but approved it as helpful to a child's development. That feeling was not shared by everyone. Sir Thomas Elyot, the author of The Governor, a famous book on education published in 1531, described those using baby-talk as 'foolish women'. He criticised the custom as 'a wantonness, whereby divers noblemen's and gentlemen's children (as I do at this day know) have attained corrupt and foul pronunciation'. Nurses and other servants in charge of the young, he urged, should take care to speak proper English: 'clean, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced, omitting no letter or syllable'.
On baby talk in the Middle Ages:
Adults who speak to babies use baby-talk, mixing words with sounds like babies make. The practice may be as old as Homo sapiens, and it was noticed in the mid thirteenth century by Bartholomew in his encyclopaedia. Describing the duties of a nurse, he observes that she ‘stammers and, as it were, breaks her speech as if to teach [the child] to speak more easily’. As John Trevisa puts it in his translation of 1398, she 'whilispeth and semisouneth the words, to teach the more easily the child that cannot speak'. ‘Semisoun’ means 'to talk quietly' and ‘whilispeth' is the old form of ‘lisp'; both writers therefore imply that nurses spoke baby-language. Bartholomew was a broad-minded friar who not only noticed the habit but approved it as helpful to a child's development. That feeling was not shared by everyone. Sir Thomas Elyot, the author of The Governor, a famous book on education published in 1531, described those using baby-talk as 'foolish women'. He criticised the custom as 'a wantonness, whereby divers noblemen's and gentlemen's children (as I do at this day know) have attained corrupt and foul pronunciation'. Nurses and other servants in charge of the young, he urged, should take care to speak proper English: 'clean, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced, omitting no letter or syllable'.