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:
Cultures across Africa have riddling traditions, and there are some nice African riddle books for children. Here is one by Verna Aardema (who wrote several books of African folktales for children), with illustrations by the great Jerry Pinkney, and it's just a click away at the Internet Archive: Ji-nongo-nongo Means Riddles.
This book draws on riddle traditions from across Africa, with forty riddles as found in about a dozen different tribal traditions; you can find information about the sources used in the credits section at the front of the book. The title comes from the Kimbundu language of Angola, and refers to a traditional Angolan guessing game.
Lots of the riddles have to do with animals, just as so many proverbs are also about animals, and these riddles often have a proverbial value to them. For example:
Who has a house too small for guests?
The answer is..... the tortoise.
This Yoruba riddle plays with the physical fact of the tortoise's shell, but it also resonates with the greedy selfishness of the trickster tortoise in Yoruba culture; being hospitable is not one of the tortoise's qualities. And if the tortoise does invite you to dinner, you better be careful!
The illustrations are in Pinkney's beautiful, distinctive style; here's a page that accompanies some of the animal riddles:
And one of my favorite proverbs in the book gets its own full-page illustration:
What can the buffalo do that two strong men can not?
I'll put the picture here so that you can think about it; the picture gives you a clue, and you'll find the answer below the picture.
The answer: Grow horns!
And here's another one with a nice proverbial quality to it:
What is it that even the ostrich with its long neck and sharp eyes cannot see?
Again, I'll put the answer down below the illustration so you can ponder...
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.
