Re: Roumania...

On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, John Cowan wrote:

> Raymond A. Brown scripsit:
>
> > That reminds that 'Rome' in English did change to /ru:m/ during the great
> > vowel shift of the Tudor period (IIRC this pronunciation is implied
> > somewhere in the Shakespearean corpus)
>
> In the great description of Falstaff's death in _Henry V_:
>
> "He was rheumatic [Rome-atic], and talk'd of the whore of Babylon
> [insulting Protestant name for the Pope]".
Keep in mind that this is the same bit as "his nose was as sharp as a
pin/and a Table of greenfields".  In other words, might be corrupted (my
guess is by a printer trying to fit whatever Shakespeare actually wanted
Miss Quickly to say into a single line -- they (printers) did more of that
than you might suspect, which is why we have entire secttions of perfect
iambic pentameter rendered in prose, and entire sections of prose broken
into ostensibly"verse" lines.

Those darned renaissance printers; the idiots actually thought that prayer
books and sermons were the most vital things -- they kept plays till last.
(the prayerbooks sold better!)