Bk Of French Prosody W Specime

Author : Arthur Gosset
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781503026094
Total Pages : 122 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (26 download)

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Download or read book A Manual of French Prosody written by Arthur Gosset and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE month of September is far from being a harvest month with English printing-presses, but it is even more of a dead season with French publishers. We have to-day to notice nothing but school-books, and most of those English. In the first lace and most closely connected with literature, may be notice Mr. Gosset's Manual of French Prosody, a very good book in itself, and one to be the more welcomed that it comes from a Fellow of New College, Oxford. For whatever the educational advantages or disadvantages of "the modern side" maybe, the advantages at least will never be fully experienced till the studies of the modern side are made in the full sense liberal and academic. Mr. Gosset justly says that the way in which English boys and English men are for the most part supposed to know French versification by the light of nature is "singular," and if he had chosen he might have given instances of the still more singular results of the supposition. In one of the foremost magazines for this month there is a parcel-French poem, signed with initials which appear to indicate a well-known and learned Professor, and containing lines which the writer evidently supposes to be of the value of eight syllables each. These, according to French prosody, vacillate cheerfully between seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and, if we mistake not, in one instance, twelve, actual syllabic integers, owing apparently to sheer ignorance on the writer's part of the value of the mute e and of the law of elision. Such an absurdity could never be committed by anyone who had even glanced through Mr. Gosset's very useful little book, which is equally suited for schools and for the reference shelf of the library. On his strict subject he is generally sound, but we must not be understood as pledging ourselves to his general theories in prosody, and especially in English Prosody. For instance, we are entirely at issue with him on e point that "French verse is superior to English in the purity of its assonances," unless he means that good French verse is superior to bad English verse on this point, which is true, but unimportant. From Mr. Gosset's remark that the vowel sound in "Geneva" and "believer" is the same, and that "'Genevah' is an undoubted cockneyism" (the truth being that "believah" is the cockneyism), we can only suppose that he is himself inclined to a most culpable laxity in English rhyme. Of course to any one so disposed French rules must seem stricter. But those of us who would as soon think of rhyming" Geneva" to " believer" in English as of rhyming "croitre' to "maitre" in modern French can hardly admit that to a good English. The truth is, however, that really good renunciation of English is getting yearly rarer, and that the folly of spelling reformers, who try to reduce everything to rule, helps the errors of those who have been unlucky enough not to have their ears educated by surroundings of careful speech and their eyes by the study of good books. This, however, is a digression, and the slight censure implied in it must not be understood to detract from our general recommendation of Mr. Gosset as a teacher in his own subject.... -The Saturday Review