This is another one of the Latin nursery rhymes that I found in Arundines Cami, published in 1851. It's a Latin rendition of the classic English nursery rhyme:
Toм, Tom, the piper's son,
Stole a pig, and away he run:
The pig was eat, and Tom was beat,
And Tom ran crying down the street.
While the rhymes are not as good in the Latin, there is a brilliant pun which more than makes up for it: fur it! furit!
This is not quantitative meter; instead it follows the 4-beat rhythms of the English, which occasionally violates the normal Latin word accent, but that happens in some English rhymes too. I've underlined the beats:
Today I decided to translate the "London Bridge Is Falling Down" nursery rhyme into Latin. Some of you may know only the first few lines of this rhyme; when I was little, that was all I ever heard. But it is actually a really great chain-tale nursery rhyme, so before you read the Latin, you might want to read this English version (there are lots of different versions!):
Writing my Latin version, I didn't stick to the exact words, but I followed the same pattern, although I made mine circular! I'm pretty proud of that; circular chain-tales are my favorites.
I am having fun finding some nursery rhymes in old Latin textbooks and also in writing my own Latin versions of traditional rhymes... and of course I also need to recommend the brilliant book by Milena Minkova and Terence Tunberg: Mater Anserina, which has around 30 nursery rhymes done in Latin, plus an audio CD along with Soundcloud versions online. There are also used copies at Bookfinder!
I'll probably end up doing my own versions of many of the rhymes they have done, and it's fun to compare my version with theirs. In adapting rhymes like this, of course you have to take all kinds of liberties, which means that every version comes out differently! Years ago I created a collection of Latin Christmas songs, and I was amazed by the number of different versions of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, for example. In my opinion, we need all the versions of these songs and rhymes as we can get because they are so useful for language learners, making the Latin words both fun and memorable.
As you can see from the cover, the rhymes are accompanied by the famous Kate Greenaway illustrations; here is an 1890 Greenaway Mother Goose at the Internet Archive.
This is another one of the Latin nursery rhymes that I found in Arundines Cami, published in 1851. The English nursery rhyme "The North Wind Doth Blow" is not a famous one, but I really like it; I've included a YouTube recording below which includes additional verses:
This is another nursery rhyme that I turned into Latin; it is one of my favorite English nursery rhymes too! You can find out more about this rhyme at Wikipedia.
I was thinking about my "Puella in Sella" rhyme and wanted to give it more of a sense of ending, so I decided to add a happy ending (new part in bold):
Here's a little Latin nursery rhyme I wrote, inspired by "Little Miss Muffet," although the Latin came out differently: no tuffet (whatever that is!), no curds and whey, and no spider. Instead, I had the little girl dozing in the chair, surprised by a snake:
I'm working on Latin nursery rhymes, finding all the public domain ones that I can, and then I'm going to try writing some of my own too. Here's a familiar one to start with: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, although you might not know these additional verses (I didn't know them). More at Wikipedia about this rhyme, and for a wonderfully inventive set of variations see this article: Change Things Up! Ten “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” Variations.
This is a fun little riddle/rhyme from The Nursery Rhyme Book edited by Andrew Lang. You can find out more at Wikipedia, which explains that while the answer is only ONE was going to St. Ives (the speaker), but if the creatures that person met were all added up it would be: 2,802, i.e., the narrator, the man and his seven wives, 49 sacks, 343 cats, and 2,401 kittens!
So, this one looks like a math riddle, but it's really a gotcha riddle!
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives; Every wife had seven sacks, Every sack had seven cats, Every cat had seven kits: Kits, cats, sacks, and wives. How many were there going to St. Ives?
