Speak, that I may see thee

假日亂翻書，《Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe》：

摘錄：
In the earliest known version, the story claimed that the emperor ‘used to say, that he spoke Spanish to his God, Italian to courtiers,French to his ladies and German to his horse’. In variants of the story, he speaks German to his enemies or to his soldiers, French to his friends, Italian to ladies, and English to the birds. In the early version of the story,French is presented as a female language, but in a later version, the female language is Italian.
這段，就很吳儂軟語vs東北鄉音。

As for Shakespeare, he coined some seventeen hundred neolo-gisms, derived in the main from Latin, and about two-thirds of these, from‘antipathy’ to ‘vast’, were accepted into the language. years between 1590 and 1609, when some six thousand terms were added to the language.

漢語能出現這種幾千個詞的短時期爆發嗎？貌似不能。這其實談不到機動性，一個純潔性就關注點太多了。雖然歐洲從來也不乏堅持法語純潔，清除垃圾語言啥啥的。

Estienne quoted the same proverb in an amplified form: ‘the Italians sigh, the Spaniards groan, the Germans howl and the French sing’ (or ‘crow’:Balant Itali, gemunt Hispani, ululant Germani, cantant Galli). The pun ‘cantant Galli’, suggests that the Latin version was the original one.

In the seventeenth century, Bouhours developed this idea still further,allowing a character in one of his dialogues to claim that ‘The Chinese, and almost all the peoples of Asia, sing; the Germans rattle; the Spaniards declaim; the Italians sigh; the English whistle. To be exact, only the French speak。

推普，學術上真不是一個推字就了了的。

漢語如歌，四聲首功。

In the eighteenth century, the Italian writer Melchiorre Cesarotti concurred, writing in his essay on Italian that ‘no language is pure’ (Niuna linguae pura).

要不是有現在標題，一定把no language is pure提上去，漢語純潔性的一切論文，在這句面前，小垃圾了。

The English language being mixed is therefore more and not less to be esteemed。

有容乃大，此之謂也。

In the words of Irenius, a character in a dialogue by Edmund Spenser – who was engaged at the time in imposing English rule in Ireland – ‘the speech being Irish the heart must needs be Irish, for out of the abundance of the heart the tongue speaketh’.‘Speak that I may see thee’.

畫地為牢，中外，幾人逃得出？