[BERLEMONT, Noël de]

Lovely pocket edition of this popular polyglot linguistic manual and commercial guide in eight languages, first published in this format in Amsterdam in 1585. This Venetian edition retains all the features of the original, including the publisher’s letter to the reader and references to ‘these Netherlands’ in the multilingual preface.

The original work from which this one was derived was the manual by Noël de Berlemont (d. c.1530) of conversations in several languages, followed by a vocabulary list. At first designed for the use of French, Spanish and Italian readers unconversant in Flemish, it eventually reached eight languages, as here: Latin, French, Flemish, German, Spanish, Italian, English and Portuguese. Its compact size and the conversational elements were just some of the reasons for its extreme popularity, which continued into the nineteenth century.

The conversational chapters are divided into a dinner of ten persons – in which the various characters are gradually introduced – buying and selling – bartering over an ell of cloth – settling debts, asking directions, taking a room at an inn, conversation for the morning – breakfast and churchgoing – and discussing merchandise, i.e. more bartering. There is also a guide to writing letters and contracts. For an English readership the guide is interesting and occasionally entertaining for its strange orthography and freaks of typography and spelling, such as ‘mother tougonlier’ for ‘mother tongue,’ and one of the ten diners reporting that his cousin has the ‘agne.’ At times the dinner descends into complete nonsense: ‘F: Be you there Roger? R: Yea, I am beere, is your fatste rat home? F: Yea, and my nok ralso,’ etc.