THE FATHER OF THE FAIRY TALE - CHARLES PERRAULT

That’s Charles Perrault, not CBS’ “On the Road” Charles Kuralt, though both were story-tellers. On first reading the names, you might rhyme them. Not even close!  Perrault’ is pronounced in the French way, and you know what that means: ‘pehr-OH’

So why should you know the name Charles Perrault? This man, born 390 years ago this month, wrote some of the fairy tales we love to this day. He is considered the Father of the Fairy Tale.

Grandfatherly-looking gentleman -
and that has to be a wig he's wearing.

During his fairly long life, Perrault was, by training, a lawyer, working in the government as one of the officials charged with royal buildings, among them, le Château de Versailles. Indeed, he wrote the guide to the labyrinth and its fountains. Promoting literature and the arts, he also wrote poems, treatises, and commemorative pieces. He was part of the ongoing and often violent debate called “Ancients and Moderns,” that argued the relative merits of ancient Greek and Roman literature versus those of the contemporary writers. During this Age of Reason, at the height of French literature, the times of Louis XIV, the late years of the Renaissance, Perrault wrote for the modernists.

Be that as it may, after an interesting life and having just lost his government post, at the age of 67 he published his collection of fairy tales named “Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals.” Of course you know “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.” What child of the Disney era doesn’t? “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Blue Beard” are his creations too.

The infamous Bluebeard -
a cautionary tale, if there ever was one

Perrault’s collection was subtitled “Contes de ma mère l’Oye” in French, or in English, “Tales of Mother Goose.” This is cited as being the beginning of “Mother Goose” collections. When the tales were first translated into English, the editors added more stories and nursery rhymes. In the long printing history of “Mother Goose” recipe for the mix of these two has varied from publication to publication.

Fairy tales and fables, stories and poems, had certainly been around before Perraul’s time. They were usually meant as life lessons for children, and every parent had cautionary tales to pass on to the next generation. Perrault recognized the need to flesh out simple folk-tales, creating what then were fairly grim stories. For example, “Little Red Riding Hood” was meant to warn young ladies not to listen to strangers lest, like the heroine, they wind up as the wolf’s dinner. In the original version, that’s exactly what happened. “All the better to eat you with, my dear.” And no woodsman came to her rescue, as he does in more modern versions of the story. 

You know who these two are.

And speaking of grim, the brothers Grimm are often credited with writing tales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, but Perrault wrote them down over a century before. Getting the tales into print solidified them, so to speak, and preserved them for a population that was increasingly literate and less in the habit of telling folk tales as an evening’s entertainment.

Cinderella - and not your Disney version.
There are many more illustrated versions of the story.
This is by Gustav Doré.

 Today, in this age of almost universal literacy, we’ve books and electronic devices to provide the lessons. We usually read to our little ones, rather than pass down or make up stories, and consider as quaint the stories from Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, even Aesop. Quaint or not, lessons are universal – we just dress them in modern clothes.

ARE YOU ANXIOUS?

He makes a lot of folks anxious, doesn't he?

Anxious

Excited

Eager

Over a year ago, my Canadian friend wrote this is her New Year’s email:

Well, it’s 2017, and now we’ll see how your fearless leader makes out as the new President of the United States.  He makes me very, very anxious, that man does, and I’m not even a U.S. citizen!  I hope and pray for the best.  These times are like that so-called Chinese curse:  May you live in “interesting” times.

Interesting times indeed. The year has been very interesting indeed, and that man still makes a good majority of us anxious. That’s “anxious” use in the true sense of the word: there’s a definite sense of anxiety.

I’d really like to smack the first person who used the word “anxious” in place of the word “eager,” and got that definition accepted into common usage. In my handy, dandy Random House College Dictionary dated 1984, there is no such usage.

THE FATHER OF PINYIN

Every once in a while, Google celebrates a person I’ve never heard of. Today is one of those days – they celebrate the 112^th birthday of Zhou Youguang, the Chinese “economist, banker, linguist, sinologist, publisher and supercentenarian, known as the “father of Pinyin.” (I had to look up that supercentenarian – it means he lived over 100 years – he lived exactly 111 years, to be exact.) This man was a polymath, as one can guess from the range of his expertise, and he lived through some very turbulent times.

Google gives this brief definition of Pinyin, taken from Wikipedia. (And what would the curious mind do without those two?) The definition also gives the various ways to pronounce pinyin, which means “spell sound.” There’s the reason for my interest: pronunciation, actually, pronunciation versus spelling.

Pinyin

Language writing system

Hanyu Pinyin, often abbreviated to pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China and to some extent in Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is normally written using Chinese characters. Wikipedia

Yale Romanization: Pingyām [developed in the 1940's to help G.I.s communicate with their Chinese counterparts]

Canton Romanization: Ping yem

Bopomofo: ㄆㄧㄣ ㄧㄣ   [a phonetic script]

Wade–Giles: P‘in-yin [the old pronunciation system used in the west]

Jyutping: Ping jam   [Cantonese pronunciation]

Hokkien POJ: peng-im/pheng-im [pronunciation in most of China's southeast]

I’ve always wondered why the Latinized spelling of Chinese words, at least the spellings we use today, too often doesn’t match the sound of the word. The western world used the Wade-Giles pronunciations up until the late 1970s. In 1955, the Chinese government set about revising their language to increase literacy. They charged Youguang with the task of revising the way the language is represented using the Latin alphabet. They changed Peking, the Wade-Giles spelling and pronunciation, to Beijing. O.K. they could do that.

Beijing is pronounced bei (bay) jing – spot on

Guangzhou is pronounced guang zhow – close

Feng Shui is pronounced fung schway – not close at all

So, that I what I learned in the hour or so since I turned on my PC this morning. I’m still wondering why some spellings aren’t closer to their pronunciation, but now I know that pronunciations vary within China, as they do here in America, and I know who gets the blame: Zhou Youguang. I can still learn a lot in my old age.

OUR COLORS ARE RUNNING

This post is about flags, not the expression on his face.

They broke in to yesterday afternoon's TV programs on the "broadcast" channels to televise the press conference of our President and Norway's Prime Minister, Erna Solberg. I was involved in something else, so I wasn't paying too much attention.

I looked up and first recognized the Norwegian flag. I never fail to spot that flag, even if it is only one in a U.N. type flag array. (In this household we are very partial to anything Norwegian.) So I listened for a while. I had no idea of the question that had just been asked of him, but the man was going on about Hillary Clinton. What in the world could she have to do with our relations with Norway? Nothing. He just threw her into the mix, three times in fact, as I later learned. He'll take any opportunity to bolster himself. Don't get me started on what I think of that man.

But I digress... One thing that struck me, flag-spotter that I am, was the relative states of those red, white, and blue flags. The colors of the Norwegian flag are crisp and clean. The colors of the American flag are running. That white is getting a bit pink. It's time to replace a few things at the White House.

MCMLXVIII - 1968 – FIFTY YEARS GONE BY

Historians mark 1968 as one of the most important years in the last century of our country’s history. Good things were happening, but the year was rife with hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, plane crashes and sea craft sinking, racial demonstrations, student unrest, bombings, shoot-outs, and world-wide protests against many ills. Some of my readers might be too young to remember the major events of the year, but many were in their adult years, and they well remember, if not the specific date and year, then the incident itself.

1968 started off, history wise, in January, with the Pueblo Incident. The North Koreans captured the U.S. Navy’s lightly armed intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, in what they said were their waters, and what the U.S. maintained were international waters. The crew was detained and tortured. It took almost a year to resolve the problem and bring the men home by that Christmas. The North Koreans, still a problem, still have the ship.

In that same month, in a customary time of truce during the Lunar New Year, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. After the incident, public support of the war began to wane, and historians see this bloody battle as the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. The My Lai incident took place in March, and the war raged on.

While those two incidents touched many of us, they happened overseas. In the next few months, history hit right at home. We all remember where we were in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we likely remember where we were in April and June of 1968, when the Reverend Martin Luther King and then-Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy were also gunned down. Their assassins were found and convicted, but as with JFK’s shooting, the conspiracy theories are still with us.

In October of 1968, perhaps reacting to and empowered by the assassinations and by protests and demonstrations across our country, the gold and bronze medalists at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, in a silent protest against racial bias in the U.S., raised black-gloved fists during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner.” We scarcely remember their sport or their names but, sadly, we can’t be unaware that such racial bias continues today.

 

In 1968, the world in continued on, as it usually does, with its basic schedule of events. There were games and awards, elections, inventions, and debuts and introductions, weddings and funerals. Among them were some of the good things:

·         The Winter Olympics were held in Grenoble, France, where Norway won the most medals

·          “60 Minutes” debuted, and is still airing, minus Mike Wallace and Andy Rooney, on CBS

·         “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In debuted on NBC” (Sock it to who?)

·         “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” debuted on network TV

·         Boeing introduce the first 747, the jumbo jet that could carry 374 passengers

·         Oscars for the best movie of 1968 went to Oliver! And Katharine Hepburn, in The Lion in Winter, and Barbra Streisand (“Hello, gorgeous.”) in Funny Girl, tied for Best Actress

·         The Beatles produced the two-record “White Album” 

·         It was the year of Super Bowl II – the Green Bay Packers beat the Oakland Raiders,

·         And the year the Detroit Tigers, down 3-1, came back to beat the St. Louis Cardinals 4-3 in the World Series

·         Richard Nixon was nominated as the Republican candidate, and Hubert Humphrey as Democratic candidate for President

·         Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis

·         “The Mother of All Demos” demonstrated the first computer mouse, and almost all of the other basic elements, both hardware and software, of the modern, personal computing we use today

·         The Gold Standard was repealed

·         The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index closed over 100 for the first time (It’s now way over 2500 and rising.)

And in December, the crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to travel around the moon. This very successful mission was a wonderful close to a year that had seen too many tragic events. In his book, A Man on the Moon, about the Apollo Program, Andrew Chaikin relates that after they returned home, the astronauts got hundreds of telegrams and letters, one of which was particularly meaningful. The telegram said “You saved 1968.”

                                                       “Ob-la-di  Ob-la-dah, life goes on”