Language Contact in Piers Plowman
Language Contact in Piers Plowman
复制标题
Piers Plowman 语言接触
作者：
T. Machan
先从熟悉的开始：皮尔斯·普洛曼（Piers Plowman）充满了拉丁语。有拉丁诗句、拉丁谚语和拉丁圣经引文。其中有一些寓言人物，例如财富的女儿之一康库皮森西亚·卡尼斯（Concupiscencia Carnis），她的名字都是拉丁文，而且还有零星的拉丁单词和短语。根据手稿的红字，甚至这首诗的结构划分也带有拉丁标题 passus，而不是本土的标题。今天同样熟悉的是，所有这些拉丁语都具有重要的叙事和结构目的。四十年前，D. W. Robertson 和 Bernard Huppe 认为，“这首诗的文本中存在大量的圣经引文，为了解其寓言意义的最终来源提供了钥匙……这些引文不是随意的、装饰性的或马卡罗式的，而是与诗的句子密切相关。”最近，约翰·阿尔福德不仅致力于识别几乎所有的拉丁文引文，而且还证明这些引文实际上是皮尔斯·农夫的核心：它们可以被视为产生这首诗的材料的思想和词语，朗兰以传教士的方式用英语对其进行了详细阐述。2这种熟悉性可能掩盖了这样一个事实：皮尔斯·农夫的拉丁语仍然有一些极其奇怪的地方，几乎所有角色（包括梦想家）都可以在明显的任何主题或句法点上改变语言。此外，虽然有些角色显然无法理解拉丁语，但他们似乎都没有发现对话者从英语转换为拉丁语然后再转换回来有什么不寻常。从这个角度来看，Piers Plowman的拉丁语是非常陌生的。在现存的中古英语诗歌和散文中，当然有通俗易懂的歌词、个别人物改变句子或整个演讲语言的戏剧，3以及以拉丁文标题为框架的白话作品。但现存的双语作品中，没有哪部作品能像这样让这么多的说话者在如此多的句法点上如此普遍地改变语言。事实上，在这方面与皮尔斯·农夫最相似的作品根本不是文学作品，而是纪实作品，例如行会记录和法庭卷宗。4甚至赋予叙事和结构意义
To begin with the familiar: Piers Plowman is loaded with Latin. There are Latin verses, Latin proverbs, and quotations from the Latin Bible. There are allegorical characters like Concupiscencia Carnis, one of Fortune's daughters, whose very names are in Latin, and there are scattered Latin words and phrases. Even the structural divisions of the poem, according to manuscript rubrication, bear the Latin title passus and not the native fit. Just as familiar today is the fact that all this Latin serves significant narrative and structural purposes. Forty years ago D. W. Robertson and Bernard Huppe argued that the "existence of a large body of Scriptural quotations in the text of the poem furnishes a key to the ultimate source of its allegorical meaning.... These quotations are not haphazard, decorative, or macaronic, but are connected intimately with the sentence of the poem."'I More recently John Alford has worked not only to identify nearly all the Latin quotations but also to demonstrate that the quotations are in fact the heart of Piers Plowman: they can be seen as the ideas and words that generated the material of the poem and upon which Langland, in the manner of a preacher, elaborated in English.2 This familiarity can obscure the fact that there is nonetheless something extremely odd about the Latin of Piers Plowman, about the way almost any of the characters (including the Dreamer) can change languages at apparently any topical or syntactic point. While some of the characters, moreover, clearly cannot understand Latin, none of them seem to find it the least bit unusual for their interlocutors to move from English into Latin and back again. From this perspective, the Latin of Piers Plowman is very unfamiliar. Among the extant Middle English poetry and prose there are, of course, macaronic lyrics, plays where individual characters change languages for sentences or entire speeches,3 and vernacular works framed by Latin rubrics. But there are no other extant bilingual works in which so many speakers change languages so pervasively at so many syntactic points. In fact, the works that perhaps most closely resemble Piers Plowman in this regard are not literary at all but documentary, such as guild records and court rolls.4 Even granting the narrative and structural significances