Recently, I was reading Asterix apud Britannos. I’m getting pretty good with the reading of Latin, but I was confused for a bit about the dialogue. Turns out that they have all the Brits using only the infinitive form of the verb.
So, is this how people who speak inflected languages see English? Is it hilarious? For me, it would have been a better word game to go ahead and flatten out the case structure as well. It would be trickier to read, but I think by the time you’re reading a comic book in Latin, you’re up for such a challenge.
Lingua Franca, the medieval Mediterranean trade contact vernacular, did the same thing with Italian verbs: only the infinitive form was used for all persons, numbers, and tenses. It’s a normal simplification of morphology used in pidgins around the world. It doesn’t really depend on the typology of the source language.
So the *Astérix *series is basically portraying the British as speaking pidgin Latin.
BTW, English verbs are inflected too; they just don’t seem like it in comparison to more copiously inflected verbs in languages like Latin or French.
Edit: Ironically, the ancient Celtic Britons in the story in reality spoke a language as highly inflected as Latin.
I first read *Astérix *in French, and one story had a British guy visiting Gaul. So they had him prefacing his statements with “Je dis!” (I say!)— the stereotypical interjection of the modern English people.
Compared to Latin, the distinction would be pretty sharp, of course.
The story, as I’m sure you can imagine if you’ve ever read Asterix, is highly anachronistic, getting some mileage out of modern British stereotypes.
I had been making this metalinguistic joke, I think I would have gone for the imperative form as the inflection-less verb, or at least the stem before inflections. I would have guessed that this was more likely an outcome for a pidgin, but you cite one case where the infinitive was in fact adopted. Peculiar. And I don’t know any example of a contrary outcome that developed as a natural language.
So, this would suggest a yes, then? The english verb structure does “feel” like using the infinitive for everything?
Funny you should ask. I’ve been collecting the Latin versions, and all the Asterix I’ve ever read has been in Latin. So, they’re linked to the language in my mind. I have to keep reminding myself that the Latin is not the “normal” version.
It’s a “hmmm…” They made it a rough analogy. Perhaps, if Lingua Franca is any evidence, it was a property inherent to Romance languages to pidginize the verb using the infinitive form. It’s very unlike English-based pidginization, because we have to use a two-word phrase to make infinitives. Which is why it’s fine to arbitrarily “split” infinitives (unless you insist on applying Latin grammar rules to English). No, English-based pidginization from what I’ve seen always uses the completely uninflected basic dictionary-entry verbs.
There may be exceptions… e.g., “Everybody want to go to heaven, but nobody want to dead!” It sounds odd to pidginize an inflected English verb. The infinitive is itself a sort of inflection, relative to the bare dictionary-entry form, n’est-ce pas? E.g. do is simpler than to do. French verbs don’t have a bare dictionary-entry form, so they use the infinitives as dictionary entries; e.g. faire ‘to do’. In Arabic they don’t have infinitives as such, so the citation form is third-person masculine singular perfect; e.g. fa‘ala ‘he did’. The conventional Latin citation form is first-person singular present active; e.g. facio ‘I do’ (pronounced approximately “fuck yo”)— even though Latin uses infinitive endings.
The reason each of these was chosen as the citation form in their respective languages is the speakers had a sense that these were somehow the most basic, elemental forms of verbs. So I think those, respectively, are what each language tends to use as raw material to construct pidgins. The Latin text you’re reading is translated from the French original, and the Francophone-minded author used infinitives to represent pidgin. If it had been originally written in Latin, they might have based it off the first-person citation form, if my hypothesis holds water.
If you think English is uninflected, try Thai! The sentence
Pai Talad ( ไปตลาด )
can mean “I’m going to the market”, “they went to the market” or even the imperative “Go to the market.” Thais have pronouns and helping verbs, but they’re often omitted. Often an ambiguous sentence will be followed with clarifying question/answer, but sometimes the ambiguity isn’t noted. (Thai is not my native language, so I don’t consider any personal confusion: I’m reporting strictly on conversations I’ve overheard between fluent native speakers.)
Among specific examples would be an occasion where I witnessed a conversation between my wife and a nurse, with both obviously confused. It was only on the drive home that I suddenly said “Aha! She was talking of a future event, you of the past.”
But the “uninflected basic dictionary-entry verb” is the infinitive form. With the one English verb which has a distinct infinitive form, “be” is the infinitive form, not “to be” – “to” is just a particle that goes with the infinitive. When you say “I will be” and “I can be”, “be” is in the infinitive form, because the infinitive form is used with verbs like “will” and “can”. (And incidentally, the verbs “will” and “can” have no infinitive form in Modern English.)
And with illiterate English that doesn’t inflect verbs, “be” is the form chosen of this verb: “I be going to work”; “He be my best friend”; etc.
It also had a woman with a Princess-Anne-lantern-jaw drinking tea and going on about the wonders of boiling as a cooking technique.
I’m not sure that they’re going for an “English feel” but rather a “doesn’t speak Latin well feel.” In humorous English-language stories, foreigners might often be depicted as speaking in an English pidgin, when, logically speaking, they would be speaking their own languages with correct grammar. It’s a conceit of humor rather than of reflecting reality, much the same way as English-speaking aliens in Star Trek or Napoleon speaking English with a French accent in a historical movie.
I actually think that the infinitive is the base form of a Latin verb. The 1st person singular present active indicative serves to distinguish third conjugation from the 3rd -iō conjugation, and some peculiarities that only appear in that inflection such as an -eō in what is otherwise a regular 4th conjugation verb.
I have been given to understand that the declension of nouns is listed in the familiar order because it was copied from the models used for Greek, and I speculate that something like that accounts for the way verbs are traditionally identified. Otherwise, for example, Oerberg’s text series Lingua Latīna per sē Illustrāta, identifies verbs starting with the infinitive, appending after that -iō and whatnot where appropriate.
But, it is noted in literature on childhood language acquisition that children learning an inflected language first produce verbs clipped of inflections. That would suggest a certain “baseness” of the stem itself. Except, you know, that it turns out that the evidence suggests that children are not keen observers of the difference between the word they produced and what they intended. For example, a kid who says “fis” when he means “fish” will not see an adult’s rendering of “fis” as having the same referent. In the kid’s head, he said “fish”.
So, there’s that.
There also seem to be jokes about French regional stereotypes that are going over my head.
I’d see it, but it won’t be in American theaters or on Netflix. I don’t know what the deal is. I hear it’s really popular around the world. Hell, I know it is because of the amount of merch that turns up if you look up Asterix in eBay. This is not obscure stuff.
The movies are doing ok internationally, but it is mostly because Asterix is well known in Europe (the fact that the comic book has a lot of its stories focused on Asterix and Obelix traveling in one of Europe’s countries explain its popularity there).
The merch is probably more linked to the comic book than the movies (except for the second one, they are rather crappy for me).
The reason why they took Asterix and the Britons as next adaptation is to get a better access to the English speaking market (and Asterix and the Britons is the most popular Asterix album in the UK).
I’m more of a Tintin fan anyway, you wouldnt read those in Ancient Greek, btw ?
Exactly. Astérix en Corse was the first one I read. From it I learned that the Corsican likes stinky cheese and will start a vendetta on you for looking at his sister. And that invaders don’t stand a chance against Corsican guerrillas in the scrub brush. Well, I already knew about that last one (the maquis) before I read any Astérix, which helped some.
I don’t have my copy handy so I cannot make sure, but I don’t remember the original of Asterix in Britain having the Britons speak in pidgin. As you point out, they speak in a literal French translation of stereotypical British expressions. (René Goscinny, the author, was fluent in English and Spanish as well as French, but apparently didn’t know any Classical Latin.) On the other hand, Obelix & Co. does contain numerous examples of pidgin French, when the economist guy (a caricature of Jacques Chirac) tries to explain economics to the Gauls or to the Romans. The features of this pidgin are all personal pronouns being in the objective case and all verbs being in the infinitive, and preceded by the particle “y’en a.” (e.g. instead of “je mange” it’d be written “moi y’en a manger.”) I’m curious to know how this was translated in English, or in Latin.
So did I and the funniest thing was “bonte gracieuste” (goodness gracious) and the fact that all their adjectives preceded their nouns. This had Obelix so confused that he ended up talking about a chien petit (normal French has the adjective petit preceding the noun). There is also the scene in which someone says: Bois ta biere, elle va refroidir (drink your beer, it’ll get cold).
Then there is the ending. Asterix asks the Englishman what their magic potion is called. He answers (don’t read this if you are planning to read Asterix.
you read Asterix in latin?
?