Latin mnemonics
Encyclopedia
A Latin mnemonic verse or mnemonic rhyme is a mnemonic
Mnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...

 device for teaching and remembering Latin grammar
Latin grammar
The grammar of Latin, like that of other ancient Indo-European languages, is highly inflected; consequently, it allows for a large degree of flexibility in choosing word order...

. Such mnemonics have been considered by teachers to be an effective technique for schoolchildren to learn the complex rules of Latin accidence and syntax. One of their earliest uses was in the Doctrinale by Alexander of Villedieu
Alexander of Villedieu
Alexander of Villedieu was a French author, teacher and poet, who wrote text books on Latin grammar and arithmetic, everything in verse. He was born around 1175 in Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy, studied in Paris, and later taught at Dol in Brittany. His greatest fame stems from his versified...

 written in 1199 as an entire grammar of the language comprising 2,000 lines of doggerel
Doggerel
Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value. The word probably derived from dog, suggesting either ugliness, puppyish clumsiness, or unpalatability in the 1630s.-Variants:...

 verse. Various Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 mnemonic verses continued to be used in English schools until the 1950s and 1960s.

Authors who have borrowed Latin mnemonics from Latin textbooks for their own works include Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in...

 and Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...

. For example, in Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw (opera)
The Turn of the Screw is a 20th century English chamber opera composed by Benjamin Britten with a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, "wife of the artist John Piper, who had been a friend of the composer since 1935 and had provided designs for several of the operas". The libretto is based on the novella...

, he used the words of a Latin mnemonic that he had found in a Latin grammar book belonging to Myfanwy Piper's aunt for Miles' "malo" song.

Jacques Brel
Jacques Brel
Jacques Brel was a Belgian singer-songwriter who composed and performed literate, thoughtful, and theatrical songs that generated a large, devoted following in France initially, and later throughout the world. He was widely considered a master of the modern chanson...

 wrote a song in 1962 about a Latin mnemonic verse. Schoolchildren have had varying opinions of them in later life. Some mnemonics have been recited to hymn tune
Hymn tune
A hymn tune is the melody of a musical composition to which a hymn text is sung. Musically speaking, a hymn is generally understood to have four-part harmony, a fast harmonic rhythm , and no refrain or chorus....

s.

History

Mnemonic rhymes have been considered by teachers to be an effective technique for schoolchildren to learn the complex rules of Latin accidence and syntax.

One of the earliest uses of mnemonic verse to teach Latin was the Doctrinale by Alexander of Villedieu
Alexander of Villedieu
Alexander of Villedieu was a French author, teacher and poet, who wrote text books on Latin grammar and arithmetic, everything in verse. He was born around 1175 in Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy, studied in Paris, and later taught at Dol in Brittany. His greatest fame stems from his versified...

, which was an entire grammar of the language comprising 2,000 lines of doggerel
Doggerel
Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value. The word probably derived from dog, suggesting either ugliness, puppyish clumsiness, or unpalatability in the 1630s.-Variants:...

 verse produced in 1199. It was used as a standard Latin grammar textbook across Europe for three centuries, and continued to be used in Italy and other places until relatively recently. Apart from Terentianus Maurus' De litteris syllabis et metris Horatii, discovered at Bobbio
Bobbio
Bobbio is a small town and commune in the province of Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy. It is located in the Trebbia River valley southwest of the town Piacenza. There is also an abbey and a diocese of the same name...

 in 1493, all ancient grammatical texts prior to the Doctrinale had been prose works, with the only verse therein being citations from Roman poets; although some, such as those by Petrus Helias and Paolo da Camaldoli, contain mnemonic verses. Critics of Alexander at the time considered it to be "a monstrous idea to squeeze an entire grammar into verses".

The verse form of Doctrinale in fact arose by accident. Alexander had been employed by the bishop of Dol-de-Bretagne to teach Latin to his nephews, using the grammar of Priscian
Priscian
Priscianus Caesariensis , commonly known as Priscian, was a Latin grammarian. He wrote the Institutiones grammaticae on the subject...

. He had noticed that the boys could not remember Priscian as prose, so he translated its rules into verse form. When Alexander was away one day, the bishop asked his nephews a grammar question, and was surprised when they answered in verse. The bishop persuaded Alexander to compile and to publish an entire book of such verses, which became the Doctrinale.

Many grammarians adopted Alexander's innovation soon afterwards, including John of Garland
Johannes de Garlandia (philologist)
Johannes de Garlandia or John of Garland was a philologist and university teacher. His dates of birth and death are unknown, but he probably lived from about 1190 to about 1270...

 (incidentally Alexander's harshest critic) who wrote grammatical treatises in verse, Simon di Vercelli ("Maestro Sion") who wrote Novum Doctrinale somewhere between 1244 and 1268 (it only being transcribed by one of his pupils when he died in 1290), and Everard de Béthune
Eberhard of Béthune
Eberhard of Béthune was a Flemish grammarian of the early thirteenth century, from Arras...

 who wrote Graecismus in 1212. From that point onwards, it was rare for a grammatical work to not at least contain the principal rules as mnemonic verses. Even the new humanistic
Renaissance humanism
Renaissance humanism was an activity of cultural and educational reform engaged by scholars, writers, and civic leaders who are today known as Renaissance humanists. It developed during the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and was a response to the challenge of Mediæval...

 grammars of the 15th century included mnemonic verses excerpted from Doctrinale or other versified grammars. This method of Latin grammar instruction was used by teachers well into the 20th century, it still being used in English schools in the 1950s and 1960s.

Thomas Sheridan
Thomas Sheridan (divine)
Thomas Sheridan was an Anglican divine, essayist, playwright, poet, schoolmaster and translator. He was born in Cavan, Ireland, the son of James Sheridan, and grandson of the Reverend Dennis Sheridan. Two of his uncles were William Sheridan, Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh and Patrick Sheridan,...

 wrote several mnemonic poems, with the intention of helping students to remember various parts of Latin grammar, prosody, and rhetoric, which were published as An Easy Introduction of Grammar in English for the Understanding of the Latin Tongue and A Method to Improve the Fancy. One of the shorter ones is "Of Knowing the Gender of Nouns by Termination":



All nouns in a make Feminine,
If you like "Musa" them decline,
Except they're from a Graecian line,
Or by their sense are Masculine.


Examples and analysis

In his opera The Turn of the Screw
The Turn of the Screw (opera)
The Turn of the Screw is a 20th century English chamber opera composed by Benjamin Britten with a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, "wife of the artist John Piper, who had been a friend of the composer since 1935 and had provided designs for several of the operas". The libretto is based on the novella...

, Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...

 used the words of a Latin mnemonic that he had found in a Latin grammar book belonging to Myfanwy Piper
Myfanwy Piper
Mary Myfanwy Piper was a British art critic and opera librettist.Myfanwy Evans was born into a Welsh family in London. She attended North London Collegiate School and read English Language and Literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She married the artist John Piper, with whom she lived in rural...

's aunt for Miles' "malo" song:



Malo: I would rather be
Malo: In an apple tree
Malo: Than a naughty boy
Malo: In adversity



The rhyme explains the Latin homonym
Homonym
In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that often but not necessarily share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings...

 sentence "malo malo malo malo", where each is a different meaning for the word "malo". One of its functions is to remind students that the ablative of comparison does not employ a preposition and that the preposition typically employed with the ablative of place where is sometimes omitted (typically in verse). Thus "in an apple tree" can be rendered "malo", instead of the more common "in malo".

Another author who borrowed from Latin grammar textbooks was Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in...

. In his play A Mad World, My Masters
A Mad World, My Masters
A Mad World, My Masters is a Jacobean stage play written by Thomas Middleton, a comedy first performed around 1605 and first published in 1608....

the character Follywit addresses a treasure chest that he is about to rob:


Ha! Now, by my faith, a gentlewoman of very good parts: diamond, ruby, sapphire, ’onyx cum prole silexque‘. If I do not wonder how the quean 'scaped tempting, I'm an hermaphrodite!


The Latin phrase is a line taken from William Lily's Latin grammar Brevissima Institutio, from a mnemonic poem entitled "The Third Special Rule", the particular verse of which is entitled "Nouns of the doubtful Gender excepted":



Sunt dubii generis, cardo, margo, cinis, obex,
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