Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism and Medieval Texts. Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the...

NOTE TO READER [January 2018] This is a preprint copy of an essay to appear in this collection: Catherine Batt and René Tixier (eds.), Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis. The Medieval Translator 14 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, forthcoming as of December 2017). Publications referencing this forthcoming essay: Robert Stanton, “Bark Like a Man: Performance, Identity, and Boundary in Old English Animal Voice Catalogues.” In Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, ed. Alison Langdon (New York: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 91-112. Susan Crane, “‘The lytel erthe that here is’: Environmental Thought in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 1-30. Michael J. Warren, “‘Kek kek’: Translating Birds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 109-132. Publications discovered after this essay was originally submitted: Emma Gorst, ‘Interspecies Mimicry: Birdsong in Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Tale” and The Parliament of Fowls.’ In David Lawton, Wendy Scase, and Rita Copeland (eds.), New Medieval Literatures 12 (Brepols, 2010): 137-154. Robert Stanton, ‘Mimicry, Subjectivity, and the Embodied Voice in Anglo-Saxon Bird Riddles.’ In Irit Ruth Kleiman (ed.), Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 29-41.

Hsy, ‘Between Species’ [TMT 14] 2

Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism and Medieval Texts

Jonathan Hsy

Animal Voices

This essay explores new approaches to a diverse tradition of medieval animal-sound

wordlists, most commonly identified in scholarship by a Latin title heading such as voces

variae animantium (which one could render very literally as ‘the different voices of

animate things’). These lists took many different forms across the Middle Ages, but the

one thing they had in common is — at the very least — a list of animals with the

appropriate Latin verb denoting the sound each one produces.1

1 For insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay, I thank Karl Steel, Chris

Piuma, Jeffrey Cohen, and readers of the In The Middle blog (including Paolo Galloni,

Robert Stanton, and an anonymous reader). For an overview of medieval animal-sound

list traditions, see D. Thomas Benediktson, ‘Polemius Silvius’ Voces Varie Animancium

and Related Documents of Animal Sounds’, Mnemosyne, 53.1 (2000), 70-79. See also D.

Thomas Benediktson, ‘Cambridge University Library L1 1 14, F. 46r-v: A Late Medieval

Natural Scientist at Work’, Neophilologus, 86 (2002), 171-77. For an important early

study on these materials, see Wilhelm Wackernagel, Voces variae animantium: Ein

Beitrag zur Naturkunde und zur Geschichte der Sprache (Basel: Bahnmaier, 1869).

Benediktson acknowledges that some scholars trace these Latin wordlists back to

Isidore’s Etymologies, while others look to the writing of Roman author Suetonius; on the

rich range of animal sound conventions in Classical Antiquity (Greek and Latin), see


One such Latin medieval wordlist, provided here more or less at random for

illustrative purposes, reads as follows:

Voces Variae Animancium

Ovis bobat Anser sclingit

Canis latrat Grus gruit

Lupis ululat Milvus liungit

Sus grunnit Apis bobit

5 Bos mugit Turtur gemit

Equus hinnit Rana coaxat

Asinus rudit Hirundo minurit

Ursus saeuit Populus strepit

Leo fremit Ignis crepitat

10 Elephans barrit Cursus aquarum mumu-

Corvus croccit rat

Merulus frindit Ferru[m] stridit

Turdus trucula[t] Aes tinnit2

Maurizio Bettini, Voci: antropologia sonora el mondo antico (Turin: Giulio Einaudi,

2008), esp. ch 1, ‘Un’enciclopedia sonora’, pp. 9-33; ch. 2, ‘Versi di uccelli, cinguettii di

poeti’, pp. 34-48; ch. 4, ‘Icone sonore’, pp. 62-78; and ch. 5, ‘La voce si fa densa’, pp.

79-103. See also Bettini’s appendix of Latin and Greek texts, pp. 265-83.

2 St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. MS 225, p. 132. This transcription preserves the


Left column: The sheep bleats, the dog barks, the wolf howls, the pig grunts, the

cow moos, the horse whinnies, the ass brays, the bear growls, the lion roars, the

elephant trumpets, the crow caws, the blackbird chirps, the thrush coos.

Right column: The goose honks, the crane creaks, the kite cries, the bee buzzes,

the turtle-dove moans, the frog croaks, the swallow twitters, the crowd resounds,

the fire crackles, flowing water murmurs, the sword (e.g., iron tool) grates, copper

(e.g., coinage) clangs.3

Such lists are interesting for many reasons. Among other things, they often trouble our

(modern and Western) ideas of exactly constitutes an ‘animate’ non-human agent in the

first place. For instance, fire and running water are listed among non-human things that

make sound: ‘Ignis crepitat’ [fire crackles], ‘Cursus aquarum murmurat’ [flowing water

murmurs]. Adding to this complexity, other Latin animal-sound wordlists are

accompanied by parallel translations of these nouns and verbs into other languages. This

essay concentrates on the human/animal interface throughout such lists, and it entertains

the notion that these works offer a series of animal-to-human translations.4 These lists, in

textual layout of the manuscript. See <http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/csg/0225/132/>.

3 Unless indicated otherwise, all modern English translations are my own.

4 Although one might argue it is more accurate and nuanced to refer to a distinction

between ‘human and non-human animals’, I refer in this essay to the categories of the

‘animal’ and the ‘human’. In my usage of these terms, I follow the lead of Karl Steel,


all their variety and complexity, provide rich and at times surprising venues for

examining a range of medieval language-crossings — movements across species

boundaries, and movements across (human) cultures.

On its broadest level, this essay argues that these Latin animal-sound wordlists

can be more fully understood once they are placed in a broader context of how medieval

texts — both literary and non-literary — stylize non-human sounds and enact diverse

modes of animal mimicry. As befits the esteemed honoree of this essay collection, this

discussion sets out to address both the theory and the practice of medieval translation,

and it enacts a wide-raging traversal of linguistic and cultural boundaries. Through a wide

sampling of medieval texts — including animal-sound wordlists, language instruction

manuals, vernacular literary works, and hunting treatises — this essay investigates

medieval strategies for conceiving acts of translation not only across human languages

but also across species: including animal-to-human, human-to-animal, and inter-species

modes of communication.

Before proceeding to the medieval texts themselves, it is worth noting just how

counter-intuitive these animal-sound lists can appear to a modern reader. It can indeed be

quite disorienting to discover that medieval people represented animal sounds (or the

sounds of non-human things) in ways that were very different from the ways we think

about them now. In a similar fashion, present-day people from different linguistic

backgrounds might find it quite disorienting — and amusing — to learn that a familiar,

everyday animal ‘sounds totally different’ once situated in an alien cultural environment.

How To Make A Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio

State University Press, 2011), pp. 19-20.


When prompted to state what sound a dog makes, for example, a modern English speaker

might respond woof woof (or bow wow); a modern Mandarin Chinese speaker would

indicate that the same animal goes 汪汪 (wang wang).5 Some of the broad (diachronic

and synchronic) similarities among animal sounds across different languages might

suggest a certain degree of pan-cultural onomatopoeia, perhaps indicating that humans

might share some sort of ‘universal’ or deeply ingrained tendency to mimic animal

sounds in similar ways. Indeed, even languages that are not related to one another can

exhibit strikingly similar strategies for animal-sound mimicry: cats across human cultures

utter something remarkably like ‘meow’, snakes use some sort of sibilance (s-sounds),

and a rooster — in Indo-European and unrelated non-Indo-European languages alike —

produces some sort of multisyllabic sound full of voiceless velar stops (i.e. consonant k).6

Cross-linguistic research in the field of linguistic anthropology can, at times, support

possible points of connection between animal mimicry and sonic phenomena that move 5 In this particular instance, this use of onomatopoeia is potentially polysemic; the ‘water’

radical in the character 汪 is an indication of its use in literary contexts to refer to the

sound of water (especially when it is broad and deep).

6 Many animal-sound databases exist online, but see Derek Abbott’s Animal Noise Page,

which claims to be the ‘world’s biggest multilingual list’ of animal sounds:

<http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/animal.html>. For a list of rooster

sounds in English, French, Ojibwa, and East Asian languages, see Young-mee Yu Cho,

‘Sound Symbolism in Korean’, in Korean Language in Culture and Society: Korean

Language in Culture, ed. by Ho-Min Sohn (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006),

pp. 65-73 (p. 72).


across human languages. For instance, the frequent occurrence of ‘r’ and ‘g’ sounds in

frog names in two hundred languages in New Guinea — some of these languages related

to one other, but many of them not — could suggest pan-linguistic strategies of frog

imitation.7

Although these apparently ‘universal’ features across languages are intriguing, it

should be remembered that a nuanced understanding of animal mimicry across languages

requires a good deal of sensitivity to local cultural factors as well as careful attention to

historical context. After all, there can be considerable internal variance in how any given

language — medieval or modern — stylizes animal sounds (even in modern English, a

dog might say bow wow or woof woof in one context but arf arf, yip yip, or grrrr in

another). Moreover, the manner in which any one language transmits the sound of a given

animal may depend on the particular context, discursive register, or genre of writing

being employed.8

What the medieval wordlists readily reveal, in any case, is the sheer complexity of

the messy zoo-anthro-linguistic soundscape that we earthly creatures inhabit. The phrase

‘lupus ululat’ [the wolf howls], for instance, is a formulation that appears in many of

these medieval Latin animal-sound lists, and translating such a statement into modern

English poses a significant challenge. Here, the verb actually denotes two things at once:

7 Terence E. Hays, ‘Sound Symbolism, Onomatopoeia, and New Guinea Frog Names’,

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 4.2 (1994), 153-74.

8 For a linguistic analysis of the lexical field of verbs for animal sounds in modern

English and German, see Barbara Klein, The Semantics of Verbs Denoting Animal

Sounds (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2005).


it indicates the creature’s action, and it offers a mild imitation of the sound the creature

produces. In ‘lupus ululat’, the assonance of ‘u’ sounds in the verb paired with the noun

‘lupus’ strongly reinforces the sound of a wolf’s howl (‘Aooooo!’). But ‘ululat’ is also

employed (elsewhere in other lists) to denote the utterance-and-sound of an owl, so one

might say the verb functions as something like mimetic homonym. The Latin ‘ululat’

splinters into two different modern English verbs: ‘hoots’ (in the case of an owl) or

‘howls’ (in the case of a wolf).9

This multivalent sound-action ‘ululat’ serves as an invitation to think more

closely about the relationship between animal vocalization (as ventriloquized via human

language) and bilingualism. Indeed — in modern as well as medieval contexts — animal

sounds can serve as part of a pedagogical strategy for second-language acquisition. A

modern website for established for instruction in English as a Second Language (ESL), to

provide just one example, seeks to engage and build a global online community through

audio-recordings of animal sounds in different languages.10 Contemporary social science

research reveals that such strategies may be fruitful in the traditional classroom as well.

One study on Francophone contexts reveals that onomatopoeia (including animal

9 The etymological link between the Latin verb ululāre (shriek, howl) and ulula (screech-

owl) is readily apparent; see Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879).

10 ESL Language Studies Abroad Website: <http://www.esl-languages.com/en/animal-

sounds.htm>.


mimicry) can play a key role in fostering student engagement in language classrooms.11

To draw on a different cultural setting, Japanese researchers have suggested that verbs

that have onomatopoeic patterns — including ones that imitate animals — may actually

facilitate their mastery by schoolchildren.12

In a medieval context, this animal-human interface could help to facilitate

language learning as well. In Aelfric’s Grammar, for instance, the translation of Latin

animal sounds into Anglo-Saxon becomes a pivotal point that establishes a shared

grammatical feature across languages while also opening an opportunity for creative

translation. The text translates a sequence of third-person Latin verbs expressing the

actions of non-human agents (e.g., Latin pluit becomes rinþ, ‘it rains’); in the case of

animal utterances the inherent sounds of the relevant third-person Latin verbs only

haphazardly ‘carry over’ into their Anglo-Saxon verb equivalents. Some of the

Latin/Anglo-Saxon pairs read as follows (and, once again, translation into modern

English is admittedly tricky): ouis balat / scep blaet = the sheep bleats (says baaa); bos

mugit / oxa hlewð = the cow says moo (the ox lows); equus hinnit / hors hnægð = the

horse whinnies (neighs).13 What sort of imaginative work do these bilingual animal

11 Jean-Paul Brunet, ‘L’Onomatopée dans la classe de français (Onomatopoeia in the

French Class)’, Canadian Modern Language Review, 45.1 (1988), 139-45.

12 Mutsumi Imai, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo, and Hiroyuki Okada, ‘Sound symbolism

facilitates early verb learning’, Cognition, 109 (2008), 54-65.

13 I cite the entire passage here: ‘Manega word synd, þe ne magon habban þa twegen

forman hadas, ac habbað þonne þriddan: tinnit swegð, pluit rinþ, tonat ðunrað, fulminat

hit liht […]. Ealswa be nytenum: canis latrat hunt byreð, lupus ululat wulf ðytt, equus


sounds perform? Rather than thinking of these pairings as instances of the same animal

vocalization replicated divergently in Latin or in the vernacular, I would like to entertain

the possibility that the reader (medieval or modern) is actually invited to process these

disparate linguistic units concurrently, approximating in one’s memory to arrive at a zoo-

vocalization that can never be transcribed (in any human language or writing system).14

Dwelling on these bilingual examples from Aelfric’s Grammar grants us a fresh

point of access to the voces variae animantium wordlists. Rather than thinking of a ‘one

way street’ of translation from animal sound to human imitation, we can see medieval

people as experimenting with the possibility of mutual inter-species exchange or

convergence, or uttering two species-marked languages at once. Each of these verbal

vocalizations — rather than providing inadequate anthro-imitations of animal sounds —

are perhaps best construed as ambilingual utterances that resonate across species

difference.

To put things another way, modern scholars need not necessarily follow the lead

hinnit hors hnaegð, bos mugit oxa hlewð, ouis balat scep bleat, sus grunnit sing runað.’

[There are many verbs that may not have the first two persons but have the third one: it

sounds, it rains, it thunders, it lightens (i.e., lightning strikes) […] It is the same way with

animals: the dog barks, the dog wolf howls, the horse neighs, the ox lows, the sheep

bleats, the pig grunts]. (Julius Zupitza, Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar [Berlin:

Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880], pp. 128-29.)

14 On the voces variae animantium as a memory tool, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of

Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2008), pp. 138; 158-60.


of Priscian and other medieval Latin grammarians by segregating the ‘inarticulate’

animal vox (voice, utterance) from rational human speech that can be set to writing.15

While scholastic taxonomies of vox articulata and vox inarticulata are very useful for

certain types of discussions, such vocabulary has the potential to constrain how modern

people think about these particular medieval lists. That is, reproducing medieval

taxonomies in present-day critical discourse can have the effect of discouraging us from

adopting more creative ways of imagining what sort of sonic or sensory worlds these

medieval wordlists seek to inhabit. Keeping a more expansive view of the voces of

animals and humans in mind, the next two sections of this essay will turn to medieval

literary texts (vernacular poetry) and non-literary texts (Latin treatises), attending to the

dynamic interface between species utterances in these works. The readings that follow

examine near and partial modes of understanding, probing perceived gaps between

inarticulate sound and proximal modes of (human) articulation.

Languages Collide

15 This is beyond the scope of this particular essay, but there is a long and scholastic

discussion about how vox is defined, particularly in the service of defining notions of

human/animal difference; see for instance Steel, 20 (note 69) and 49 (note 40); see also

Umberto Eco, Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni, ‘On

animal language in the medieval classification of signs’, in On the Medieval Theory of

Signs, ed. by Umberto Eco and Costantino Marmo (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989),

pp. 1-41.


Animal-sound wordlists are just one avenue for exploring the contours of inter-species

communication in the Middle Ages. A literary text like Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, for

example, offers the fantasy of universal cross-species translation: a ‘queynte ryng’, worn

on the finger, allows a Tartar princess to understand the ‘leden’ [speech or utterance] of a

‘faucoun peregryn [o]f fremde land’ [peregrine falcon from a foreign land] (435, 428-

429).16 In this text, though, the bird’s ‘leden’ is fully rendered as Middle English

discourse, and the poet does not provide any hint of the actual sounds of bird vocalization.

Other literary texts explore what I might call concurrent trans-species language

processing through an overt mimicry of bird sounds. In Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale, the

god Phoebus teaches his pet bird how to speak (or to imitate human speech — the text is

a bit unclear about the distinction).17 The bird witnesses Phoebus’s wife having an affair

16 The meaning of ‘leden’ is disputed; Larry Benson glosses this word as ‘language’ in

The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, gen. ed. Larry Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2008), p. 74. The Middle English Dictionary additionally provides a slightly broader

meaning of ‘speech, utterance’ (def. 2a) or an additional definition of birdsong or animal

noise (def. 3a and 3b). Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor capitalize the word ‘Leden’

with this explanation: ‘The term “Latin” here can be taken to mean “foreign language”,

since in the Middle Ages Latin was the universal second language’ (p. 232, note 2);

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Buffalo, NY: Broadview, 2008). In this

literary context, of course, this polysemic term could mean all of these things

simultaneously.

17 The narrator states that Phebus ‘taught it [the crowe] speke as men teche a jay […] And

countrefete the speche of every man / He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale’ (ll. 132-35).


with another man, and when the bird reveals the news to Phoebus the bird’s utterance is

recorded as ‘Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!’ (243). This moment is a ‘joke’ on many levels.

First of all, in Middle English, this would have registered as a near-pun with the utterance

‘Cuckold! Cuckold! Cuckold!’ Second, the bird conspicuously speaks Middle English

here, breaking any fiction that this exchange is happening in ancient Greek or whatever

Phoebus would have actually spoken ‘back in the day’ with his bird. Third, the bird could

be interpreted as simply ‘being a bird’ at this point in the narrative — i.e., the bird

produces ordinary avian squawks that accidentally sound as if it is speaking in Middle

English. At this moment in the story, Chaucer provides an onomatopoeic transcription of

bird vocalization that simultaneously conveys meaning in a human language.

Other literary texts find inventive means to encode intra-species avian

communication as well. In John Clanvowe’s late fourteenth-century The Boke of Cupide,

a cuckoo and nightingale engage in an extended debate, and the literary discourses

employed by these two different kinds of birds are differentially encoded as if through

two different human vernaculars — or at least two distinct sociolinguistic registers within

a single human language (Middle English). Throughout this text, the cuckoo asserts that

his language is clear and plain, and his simple English diction conveys this effect; the

nightingale — whose sonic performance is considered much more sophisticated — utters

a ‘nyse, queynt crie’ [strange, unfamiliar cry] that employs obscure forms of French-

inflected vocabulary (133). She (the nightingale) utters ‘Ocy! Ocy!’ — a common way of

transcribing birdsong in French, enacting a longstanding literary French-language pun on


the imperative form of occrire: ‘Kill! Kill!’18 The simple (English) cuckoo does not

understand what this (French) nightingale-vocalization means, and he requires verbal

translation (The Boke of Cupide, ll. 126-35). In this case, two different types of bird

vocalization awkwardly clash across two languages within a single literary text.

Further collision of animal sounds across languages can be enacted through

versified animal-sound lists. For instance, Walter of Bibbesworth’s Le Tretiz (dating from

the middle of the thirteenth century) sets out to teach an aristocratic woman and her

children how to speak French; the work contains a versified list of the sounds of animals

(‘la naturele noise des toutes manere des bestes’), and Cambridge University Library MS

Gg 1.1 copy of this text transmits the French verse in columns alongside interlinear

‘cribs’ in Middle English.19 Reading across these glosses, one can discern cases when

some aspect of onomatopoeia is preserved across the two languages, e.g., ‘louwe oule’

and ‘wolfe yollez’ (256); in other cases consonant clusters are slightly transmuted, e.g.,

‘gruue groule’ and ‘crane crekez’ (250); elsewhere, strategies of animal mimicry are

18 V. J. Scattergood, The Complete Works of John Clanvowe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1975),

p. 84, note to lines 124-35. See also Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature,

and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p.

244; on ‘oci’ as the stylized song of the nightingale in medieval French culture, see p. 91.

19 Walter de Bibbesworth: Le Tretiz, ed. by William Rothwell (Aberystwyth: The Anglo-

Norman Hub, 2009). On Cambridge MS G.g. 1.1 in particular, see William Sayers,

‘Animal vocalization and human polyglossia in Walter of Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-

century domestic treatise in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English’, Sign Systems

Studies, 37, 3/4 (2009), 525-41.


transmuted, e.g., the French ‘vache mugist’ — with an implicit ‘moo’ sound discernable

in the first part of this verb — gives way to a repetition of vowels in the English ‘cow

lowes’ (250).

In his excellent work on the Tretiz, William Sayers identifies the work as ‘the first

extensive list of animal vocalizations in a European vernacular’, and he points out that

the juxtaposition of English and French in Cambridge MS G.g 1.1 ‘invit[es] both

diachronic and synchronic views of the capacity of languages of onomatopoeic formation

and reflection on the interest of social and linguistic communities and zoosemiotics’

(525). This apparent interest in recording animal-sound verbs across human vernaculars

‘carries over’ into other acts of translation throughout the Tretiz. For example, the poet

exploits the interplay between homophones (or near-homophones) and the sound of

stylized animal utterances. Walter ‘strings together five French words (all but one, verbs)

— baleier, baler, bale, baaler, bailler — that unravel in English into the varied meanings

of bleating, dancing, bales of goods, yawning, and delegating’ (534). This reading of

Walter’s poetic expansion of verbs could be developed even further: through his creative

acts of verse translation, Walter invites the reader to process the English text while also

‘thinking in French’, and the sensitive reader might very well discern the trace of sheep’s

bleat through a series of disparate and seemingly unrelated English verbs and nouns.

This strange blurring of linguistic boundaries in the Tretiz coincides with an

oscillation between human and non-human vocalization in the poem’s catalogue of

animal utterances. When Walter introduces the verse list of the vocalizations of many

creatures, he states: ‘Home parle, ourse braie/Ki a demesure se desraie’ [The man


(human) speaks; the bear cries when it rages uncontrollably] (248-49).20 While an initial

reading of these lines in the text would appear to juxtapose the wild, inarticulate beast

with the rational speaking human, the relative pronoun and reflexive verb ‘Ki […] se

desraie” [who/that rages] make the dependent clause just ambiguous enough to support

the reading that it is either the ‘home’ [human] or the ‘ourse’ [bear] acting in an

uncontrolled manner. Indeed, other manuscripts register the apparent ambiguity of this

episode in the poem, confusing the act of speech and inarticulate cry — identifying both

sounds as emanating from a single creature: ‘Homme parle, homme brayhe,/Saunz resoun

sovent se deraye’ [The man (human) speaks; the man (human) cries,/without reason he

often rages] (209-10).21 Regardless of which manuscript of the Tretiz one reads, the text’s

versified catalog of vocalizations is structured through third-person verbs that draw a

parallel between the ontological status of human speech (‘Home parle’) and all the other

creaturely utterances that follow: ‘Vache mugist, gruue groule,/Leoun rougist […]

Chivaule henist, alouwe chaunte […] Chate mimoune, cerpent cifle” [The cow lows, the

crane croaks, the lion roars […] the horse neighs, the lark sings […] the cat meows, the

snake hisses] (249-54). Although the sounds of these vocalizations are quite varied, the

parallel grammatical structure across these statements implicitly equates human and non-

human utterances. The Tretiz, however unwittingly, foregrounds not only the

phenomenological status (sonic quality) of human speech itself; the text also invites the

reader to entertain the possible intelligibility — the tantalizingly ‘speech-like’ quality —

of animal vocalizations in turn.

20 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 1.1, fol. 283ra.

21 Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.2.21, fol. 123v.


In the bilingual (bird/English) episode in Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale, the inter-

linguistic (French/English) translation of birdsong enacted by Clanvowe’s nightingale,

and the glosses throughout bilingual versified wordlists, animal utterances serve as a

disruptive and generative force that tests the very limits of language and mobilizes

expanding strategies of (human) vocalization. Rather than conceiving human and non-

human utterances as operating on separate tracks — or thinking of animal vocalizations

by means of mere analogy to human linguistic utterances — these verse texts all entertain

a collaborative processing of languages: the human working in close operation with the

non-human. In recording such nuanced and subtle linguistic exchanges, literary and non-

literary texts illustrate a range of different vernacular modes of troubling the dichotomy

between the inarticulate animal vox and rational human speech.

Encoding Human Difference

In the section above, I have examined how vernacular (English and French) verse texts

employ animal mimicry to divergent ends. Chaucer’s fabliau enacts bawdy cross-

linguistic puns, Clanvowe’s debate poem features a dynamic interplay between

vernaculars, and Walter’s Tretiz exposes slippages across human and non-human forms

of vocalization. In Latin writings, the stylization of animal sounds can encode perceptions

of human cultural and linguistic difference, but such texts often strive to reinforce —

rather than dismantle — the barriers between different linguistic groups. One oft-cited

Latin proverb (with possible origins in fourteenth-century France) humorously aligns

different types of animal performance — including vocalization — with broad (ethnic or


national) social groupings: ‘Galli cantant, Angli jubilant, Hispani plangunt, Germani

ululant, Itali caprizant’ [The French sing, the English shout joyfully, the Spanish wail, the

Germans howl (i.e., like wolves), the Italians caper (i.e., like goats)].22 The notion that

Germanic speakers howl like canines makes its way into other contexts throughout

medieval texts. In one narrative, for instance, Mattheus Herbenus describes crossing over

from the Mosel to the Rhine, and he reflects upon how his whole manner of vocalization

shifts as a result of his new cultural environment: ‘vox mea teutonizat; dixerat alii

fortasse: ululat’ [my voice became Germanized; perhaps others might say: he is

howling].23 In other words, the Latin ‘Germani ululant’ trope can be mobilized in a range

of unanticipated contexts from music theory to travel narrative.

The influence of Latin animal-sound verb conventions becomes more complex

when medieval writers use verbs to articulate cross-cultural inter-perceptions. In his

Rhetorica antiqua (c. 1215), most strikingly, Boncompagnus of Signa observes that

‘Greci Latinos dicunt ut canes latrare et Latini dicunt, quod Greci ganniunt sicut vulpes’

[the Greeks say the Latins bark like dogs and the Latins say the Greeks growl like foxes]

(1.19.3, line 1).24 Elsewhere, he expands upon his own use of Latin animal-sound verbs to

22 William Chappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time, 2 vols (London: Cramer, Beale,

& Chappell, 1859), I, ix.

23 Matthew Herbenus, De natura cantus ac miraculis vocibus (1496), ed. by Joseph Smits

van Wasberghe, Beiträge zur rheinischen Musikgeschichte, 22 (Cologne, 1957), p. 31.

24 Boncompagnus of Signa, Boncompagnus [also known in modern scholarship as

Rhetorica antiqua], ed. by Steven M. Wight (Scrineum: Saggi e materiali on line di

scienze del documento e dellibro medievali. Universita degli studi di Pavia, 1999). See


offer this vivid catalogue of cross-cultural stereotypes:

Diverse nationes et dispares gentes diversimode sibi displicent in cantando. […]

Asserunt Gallici quod Ytalici semper […] delirant, unde illos dedignantur audire.

Ytalici e contrario perhibent, quod Gallici et Teutonici ad modum febricitantium

tremulas voces emittunt, et cum per immoderatam vocum emissionem celum

propulsare nituntur, aut arbitrantur Deum esse surdum. (1.19.3, lines 1 and 4-5)

Diverse nations and different people in different ways dislike each other’s way of

singing. […] The French say that the Italians groan […] so that they scorn to hear

them. Conversely, the Italians claim that the French and the Germans utter

tremulous sounds as if they were feverish, and strive to pierce the sky through an

excessive emission of the voice, as if thinking that God is deaf.

In this passage, a list of Latin animal-sound verbs facilitates lively observational prose.

Boncompagnus da Signa takes apparently conventional Latin animal-sound verbs and

repurposes them in a manner that straddles the modern-day disciplines of zoology and

ethnography (or ethnomusicology), as well as (cultural and linguistic) anthropology.

It is worth noting that other medieval lists provide some traces of human mimicry

of animals that do not involve sonic utterance or vocalization but rather entail certain

forms of somatic, non-verbal expression. In his fascinating study of the practices and

social meanings of silence in medieval monastic communities, Scott Bruce traces the

nuanced role of (deliberately minimalist) systems of gestures; since monastic

<http://scrineurn.unipv.it/wight/bonindx.htm>.


communities were obliged to take a vow of silence, a very rudimentary form of non-sonic

communication was permitted — and only in limited contexts — as a substitute for

speech.25 In a discussion of one medieval Latin record of the Cluniac sign lexicon (not so

much a ‘wordlist’ as a ‘sign list’), Bruce notes that the acknowledged (permitted) ‘sign

for a book written by a pagan author involved a gesture that mimicked a dog scratching

its ear because, as the author of the sign lexicon explained, people without faith were

comparable with dogs’ (64).26 In this suggestive system of codified gestures, those who

are ‘not like us’ — those who inhabit an existence across a boundary of religious

difference — are equated with animals. While this exclusionary sentiment effectively

dehumanizes other people (along the lines of the stereotyping of linguistic alterity in the

Rhetorica antiqua), this compound Cluniac sign nonetheless requires a humbling act of

embodied mimicry: a human must perform a silent becoming-animal gesture.

The Latin verb lists and sign lexicons discussed in this section serve very different

25 Scott G. Bruce, Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac

Tradition c. 1900-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

26 Full Latin citation: ‘Pro signo libri secularis, quem aliquis paganus conposuit, premisso

generali signo libri adde, ut aurem cum digito tanga, sicut canis cum pede pruriens solute,

quia nec inmerito infidelis tali animanti conparatur’ [For the sign of secular book

composed by a pagan (Classical author), in addition to the sign of a book, add this: you

touch your ear with a finger just as a dog scratches itself with its foot, because the spirit

of the unfaithful are not undeservedly compared with such animals] (134). Walter Jarecki,

Signa loquendi: Die cluniacensischen Signa-Listen eingeleitet und herausgegeben

(Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1981).


functions, yet both genres of writing offer intriguing opportunities for investigating the

interface between human and animal modes of communication. When Latin animal-

sound lists assert species boundaries as a way of encoding human difference, their acts of

animal mimicry are profoundly dehumanizing: sounds of foreign languages are portrayed

as animal (i.e., sub-human) vocalizations, and a pagan author is reduced to the status of a

dog.27 This being said, such stylized acts of pseudo-animal mimicry suggest that species

boundaries are not entirely insurmountable, and medieval people could at least attempt to

enact modes of vocalization or performance that are conventionally perceived as alien to

one’s own experience.

Trans-Species Pidgin

27 A longstanding Greek literary tradition aligns foreign (non-Greek) people with

inarticulate sound, including the barking of dogs: ‘The etymology of the Greek [word]

“barbarians” suggests that it comes from phoneic mimicking of the incomprehensible

speech of foreigners, “bar-bar-bar-bar” […] This implies that ancient Greeks saw only

themselves as fully human’ (480, note 2). Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Maria

Alburquerque Candela, and Keren Lilu, ‘“Culture Has No Internal Territory”: Culture as

Dialogue’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology, ed. by Jaan

Valsiner and Alberto Rosa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 460-83.

On barbarian speech and (as) animal noise in Greek epics, see Deborah Levine Gera,

Ancient Greek Ideas on Speech, Language, and Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2003), p. 2.


The sections above have examined how human vernaculars (English and French) come

into contact through stylized forms of animal mimicry. In the Tretiz of Bibbesworth and

poetry of Clanvowe, versified conventions of French and English collide through an

intricate animal-human interface. Clanvowe stylizes birdsong (bird vocalization) via

English and French registers; Bibbesworth reveals both the differences and occasional

overlaps between the ways that French and English mimic animal vocalizations. This

essay concludes by once again bringing human vernaculars together via inter-species

interaction: this time through English and French hunting cries.

As anyone who has pets (or interacts frequently with animals) would know, much

inter-species communication is non-verbal and also non-sonic: facial expressions,

somatic mimicry, physical contact (aggressive or playful), biting, motion (e.g. pointing,

blocking one’s path), and many other modes of interaction could be listed here. Medieval

hunting manuals — which record the intimate coexistence of aristocrats, birds of prey,

and domesticated dogs — showcase some of the profound interactions between species

that extend beyond sonic vocalizations. In the ensuing examination of medieval hunting

manuals, all the strands of previous sections of this essay come together. These medieval

texts about hunting not only transmit stylized forms of human-to-animal vocalization

through internal wordlists, but they also they trace the concurrent activation of sonic and

non-sonic modes of inter-species communication.

In a lucid and insightful analysis of fourteenth-century hunting treatises in written

in French and English, Susan Crane traces how ‘information is passed back and forth

between species’ in these manuals, and she characterizes the transcription of human

hunting cries as ‘the most puzzling element in [the] cross-species communication


system’.28 For example, La Chase dou Cerf of Gaston Phoebus (c. 1387-1389) states:

Se tu oz c’ons chiens le destorne,

A çaus qui ne l’auront oï

Dois parler, se saches de fi,

Et lor dois dire assez, non po:

Ta ça ta ça ta ho ta ho!29

If you hear that one of your hounds has gone back to the correct track, you must

speak to the hounds who have not heard him, saying to them over and over, ‘Ta ça

ta ça ta ho ta ho!’30

A treatise in English transmits a similar hunting cry: ‘And if yowre houndes chase the

hare or the hert and the houndes be at defauut, ye shal say in this maner then “sohow,

28 Susan Crane, Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), ch. 4., ‘The Noble Hunt as Ritual

Practice’, pp. 101-19, at p. 112.

29 Gaston Phébus: Livre de chasse, ed. by Gunnar Tilander, Cynegetica 18 (Karlshamm:

E. G. Johannsons, 1971), p. 193.

30 Translation follows Crane, p. 112.


hosaine, hosaine, stou, ho ho sa, hossaine, ariere, hossaine, sohow”’.31 Such hunting cries

— which would appear to reduce elements of French or English to near-nonsense

syllables — may register as bizarrely unintelligible to a non-elite person (or modern

French or English speaker) untrained in the rituals of medieval aristocratic hunting. Crane

helpfully explains that such the ‘two- and three-syllable collocations’ such as ‘so how’,

‘ho ho sa’, ‘ta ça’, and ‘ci va’ are actually ‘contracted versions of meaningful phrases’,

e.g., ‘par ci il va’ [he goes this way] becomes ‘ci va’, and such cries actually ‘adapt

French and English to communicate with nonspeakers’ — in this case, the hounds.32

Crane furthermore compares such a process of linguistic simplification and repetition of

syllables to the bluntly reduced forms of speech that people use when attempting to

communicate with foreigners or speaking to infants. In particular, these cries ‘rely

heavily upon consonant-vowel combinations (to ci va and veci compare mummy for

mother […] wawa for water)’, and they employ ‘a reduced repertoire of ordinary words

[…] in virtually syntax-free constructions, removing copulatives, pronouns, and definite

articles’ along the lines of ‘foreigner talk’.33 In other words, such hunting cries can be

31 La Vénerie de Twiti: Le plus ancient traité de chasse écrit en Angleterre: la version

anglaise du même traitié de Craft of Venery, ed. by Gunnar Tilander, Cynegetica 2

(Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1956), p. 50.

32 Crane, p. 113.

33 Crane, p. 114. As Crane explains: ‘Think of the tourist in Berlin saying to a taxi driver,

not “we’re going to the airport,” but “airport, airport” hoping that simplifying the

message and repeating it will do the trick’ (p. 114). On the simplified linguistic features

across spoken pidgins (also known as ‘foreigner talk’ or ‘baby talk’) – including reduced


interpreted as adopting communicative strategies along the lines of a spoken pidgin. As

intermediate modes of speech, these stylized utterances employ radically simplified

linguistic structures in order to bridge the gap between disparate social groups.

Attending to the processes of linguistic adaptation in the hunting cry does not just

reveal the nuances inherent in the human’s strategies of communication. While the trans-

species pidgin transcribed in the form of hunting cries offers an indication of how

humans sought to speak to animals, these medieval treatises also suggest that humans

could be trained to understand animal vocalizations in turn. Indeed, a sense of mutual

understanding between hounds and humans emerges throughout these treatises. Both

human and canine hunters respond to horn calls in the same way, for instance, and the

huntsman is instructed to ‘know and listen for the cries and voices of his hounds’.34

Moreover, huntsmen can redirect hounds who stray from pursuit of the designated prey

(the hare or the hart) by means of non-verbal action — lashing with a whip — and

through loud scolding.35 Throughout these treatises, realms of sonic linguistic contact not

only include inter-cultural (human) contact — the transcribed cries mixing syllables of

English and French, for instance — but these texts also suggest concurrent modes of

sonic and non-sonic contact between species. Taken as a whole, these French and English

hunting treatises effectively thwart the idea that an inarticulate beast occupies a state of

vocabulary, simplified structures, copula omission, and repetition of morphemes – see

Hans Henrich Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics, 2nd edn (Berlin: Mouton de

Guyer, 1991), ch. 16, section 4 (pp. 512-15).

34 Crane, p. 112.

35 Crane, p. 111.


linguistic understanding entirely apart from that of the rational, speaking human. Rather

than inhabiting entirely separate realms, the animal and the human meet somewhere ‘in

the middle’ through an intricate system of truncated sonic vocalization, embodied

gestures, and actions. Exploiting simplified clusters of vernacular syllables along with a

ritualized set of sonic and non-sonic cues, humans and non-humans engage in an intimate

partnership that bridges species boundaries and language difference.

Conclusion

This essay has examined animal-sound wordlists, stylized mimicry of animals, and

pragmatic representations of human-animal forms of vocalization, and it has interrogated

the false dichotomy between meaningless, inarticulate animal sound and rational,

recordable (writeable) human speech. In her recent work, Susan Crane provocatively

observes that scholarship on literary texts ‘is well placed to examine the subtle

mechanisms of imagination through which medieval encounters shaped and defined

animals’.36 My analysis of medieval animal-sound wordlists and related materials reveals

how both literary and non-literary medieval texts to do not work so much to define

animals as to ‘offer […] an opportunity to explore how bodies, minds, and affects

interpenetrate within and across species’.37 Extending Crane’s astute observations, I

maintain that medieval animal-sound wordlists perform much more than a ‘breaking

down’ of the conceptual boundaries between species; such materials suggest a profound

36 Crane, p. 8.

37 Crane, p. 9.


medieval understanding that the sonic features of language are potentially boundless.

Earthly creatures, human and nonhuman alike, can creatively adapt to and accommodate

all kinds of sonic utterances and diverse vocalizations that register as alien to their

ordinary lived experience. Ultimately, medieval wordlists and literary texts do not simply

reify dominant taxonomies of species difference or stabilize one cultural mode of

encoding animal sounds; they gently encourage readers to inhabit blurry and fuzzy

communicative zones where anthropocentric and zoocentric worlds can meet, shape, and

transform one another.

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