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92-422: Jean de La Fontaine ( UK : / ˌ l æ f ɒ n ˈ t ɛ n , - ˈ t eɪ n / , US : / ˌ l ɑː f ɒ n ˈ t eɪ n , l ə -, ˌ l ɑː f oʊ n ˈ t ɛ n / ; French: [ʒɑ̃ d(ə) la fɔ̃tɛn] ; 8 July 1621 – 13 April 1695) was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables , which provided

184-417: A 100 franc coin to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death, on the reverse of which the fable of the fox and the crow is depicted. Another commemoration that year included the strip of 2.80 euro fable stamps, in the composite folder of which appeared a detachable portrait without currency. In 1995 equally, the asteroid 5780 Lafontaine was named in his honour. Other appearances on postage stamps include

276-559: A century as Received Pronunciation (RP). However, due to language evolution and changing social trends, some linguists argue that RP is losing prestige or has been replaced by another accent, one that the linguist Geoff Lindsey for instance calls Standard Southern British English. Others suggest that more regionally-oriented standard accents are emerging in England. Even in Scotland and Northern Ireland, RP exerts little influence in

368-523: A certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendôme, Chaulieu and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693. What followed

460-530: A duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, &c., with, for a contrast, those of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness in company. It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description by Jean de La Bruyère , that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade , La Bruyere's chief literary enemy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it

552-508: A greater movement, normally [əʊ], [əʉ] or [əɨ]. Dropping a morphological grammatical number , in collective nouns , is stronger in British English than North American English. This is to treat them as plural when once grammatically singular, a perceived natural number prevails, especially when applying to institutional nouns and groups of people. The noun 'police', for example, undergoes this treatment: Police are investigating

644-500: A high stone pedestal surrounded by various figures from the fables. The work was melted down, like many others during World War II , but was replaced in 1983 by Charles Correia's standing statue of the fabulist looking down at the fox and the crow on the steps and plinth below him. There are more statues in Château-Thierry, the town of the poet's birth. The most prominent is the standing statue by Charles-René Laitié , which

736-408: A kind of legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux . His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it, including the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere! , of his insisting on fighting

828-406: A lesser class or social status and often discounted or considered of a low intelligence. Another contribution to the standardisation of British English was the introduction of the printing press to England in the mid-15th century. In doing so, William Caxton enabled a common language and spelling to be dispersed among the entirety of England at a much faster rate. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of

920-485: A man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois , however, put an end to this quarrel. Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair,

1012-433: A marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of fourteen, who brought him 20,000 livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both beautiful and intelligent, but the two did not get along well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part, raised long afterwards by gossip or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that can be positively said against her

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1104-419: A medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux , on Fouquet's famous country house . It was about this time that his wife's property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything that he owned; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him. In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard , and this

1196-576: A model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages. After a long period of royal suspicion, he was admitted to the French Academy and his reputation in France has never faded since. Evidence of this is found in the many pictures and statues of the writer, later depictions on medals, coins and postage stamps. La Fontaine

1288-474: A museum, outside which stands the life-sized statue created by Bernard Seurre . Inside the museum is Louis-Pierre Deseine ’s head and shoulders clay bust of La Fontaine. Further evidence of La Fontaine's enduring popularity is his appearance on a playing card from the second year of the French Revolution. In this pack royalty is displaced by the rationalist free-thinkers known as Philosophes , and

1380-659: A process called T-glottalisation . National media, being based in London, have seen the glottal stop spreading more widely than it once was in word endings, not being heard as "no [ʔ] " and bottle of water being heard as "bo [ʔ] le of wa [ʔ] er". It is still stigmatised when used at the beginning and central positions, such as later , while often has all but regained /t/ . Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p , as in pa [ʔ] er and k as in ba [ʔ] er. In most areas of England and Wales, outside

1472-576: A prominent if sometimes aesthetically debased role throughout Western literature. Poets whose body of work features occasional poetry that stands among their highest literary achievements include Pindar , Horace , Ronsard , Jonson , Dryden , Milton , Goethe , Yeats , and Mallarmé . The occasional poem ( French pièce d'occasion , German Gelegenheitsgedichte ) is also important in Persian , Arabic , Chinese , and Japanese literature , and its ubiquity among virtually all world literatures suggests

1564-484: A range of blurring and ambiguity". Variations exist in formal (both written and spoken) English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire , whereas the adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within

1656-520: A regional accent or dialect. However, about 2% of Britons speak with an accent called Received Pronunciation (also called "the King's English", "Oxford English" and " BBC English" ), that is essentially region-less. It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. In

1748-432: A wider sense, we could use it as a name for nearly all poetic works: but if we take it in the proper and narrower sense we have to restrict it to productions owing their origin to some single present event and expressly devoted to its exaltation, embellishment, commemoration, etc. But by such entanglement with life poetry seems again to fall into a position of dependence, and for this reason it has often been proposed to assign

1840-725: Is also due to London-centric influences. Examples of R-dropping are car and sugar , where the R is not pronounced. British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are usually preserved, and in several areas also /oː/ and /eː/, as in go and say (unlike other varieties of English, that change them to [oʊ] and [eɪ] respectively). Some areas go as far as not diphthongising medieval /iː/ and /uː/, that give rise to modern /aɪ/ and /aʊ/; that is, for example, in

1932-418: Is based on British English, but has more influence from American English , often grouped together due to their close proximity. British English, for example, is the closest English to Indian English, but Indian English has extra vocabulary and some English words are assigned different meanings. Occasional poetry As a term of literary criticism , "occasional poetry" describes the work's purpose and

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2024-456: Is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes , which appeared in 1664. He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published. It

2116-795: Is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times newspaper, the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press . The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules , and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style . Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style for published American English ,

2208-520: Is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Common Brittonic —the insular variety of Continental Celtic , which was influenced by the Roman occupation. This group of languages ( Welsh , Cornish , Cumbric ) cohabited alongside English into the modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages , influence on English

2300-484: Is often lyric because it originates as performance, in antiquity and into the 16th century even with musical accompaniment; at the same time, because performance implies an audience, its communal or public nature can place it in contrast with the intimacy or personal expression of emotion often associated with the term "lyric". Occasional poetry was a significant and even characteristic form of expression in ancient Greek and Roman culture , and has continued to play

2392-484: Is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain's unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine's version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis , was not printed till 1669. Meanwhile, the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he

2484-533: Is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine , a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine's attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartet, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon le bonhomme or le bon (by both which titles La Fontaine

2576-402: Is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader; La Fontaine himself was constantly away from home, was certainly not strict in point of conjugal fidelity, and was so bad a man of business that his affairs became involved in hopeless difficulty, and a financial separation of property ( separation de biens ) had to take place in 1658. This was a perfectly amicable transaction for

2668-463: Is the case for English used by European Union institutions. In China, both British English and American English are taught. The UK government actively teaches and promotes English around the world and operates in over 200 countries . English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what

2760-667: Is the manuscript of the fable of the fox and the grapes , while at his feet a fox is seated on his hat with its paw on a leather-bound volume, looking up at him. Small scale porcelain models were made of this by the Sèvres pottery and in polychrome porcelain by the Frankenthal pottery . In the following century small models were made of the bronze statue by Etienne Marin Melingue , exhibited in Paris in 1840 and in London in 1881. In this

2852-511: Is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. J'y allais was La Fontaine's answer. In 1692, the writer had published a revised edition of the Contes , although he suffered a severe illness. In that same year, La Fontaine converted to Christianity . A young priest, M. Poucet, tried to persuade him about

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2944-547: The Chambers Dictionary , and the Collins Dictionary record actual usage rather than attempting to prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other varieties of English, and neologisms are frequent. For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the ninth century, the form of language spoken in London and

3036-658: The East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education in Britain. The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect levelling and a thought of social superiority. Speaking in the Standard dialect created class distinctions; those who did not speak the standard English would be considered of

3128-593: The Fables , with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating, at the instance of the Port-Royalists , as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the Prince of Conti . A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for

3220-535: The Philadelphia Museum of Art , and another at the castle of his former patron Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte (see below). In Paris there is a full-length marble statue by Pierre Julien , now in the Louvre , that was commissioned in 1781 and exhibited at the 1785 Salon. The writer is represented in an ample cloak, sitting in contemplation on a gnarled tree on which a vine with grapes is climbing. On his knee

3312-493: The Royal Spanish Academy with Spanish. Standard British English differs notably in certain vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation features from standard American English and certain other standard English varieties around the world. British and American spelling also differ in minor ways. The accent, or pronunciation system, of standard British English, based in southeastern England, has been known for over

3404-490: The Scots language or Scottish Gaelic ). Each group includes a range of dialects, some markedly different from others. The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. Around the middle of the 15th century, there were points where within the 5 major dialects there were almost 500 ways to spell the word though . Following its last major survey of English Dialects (1949–1950),

3496-573: The University of Leeds has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects. The team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC , in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout

3588-610: The West Country and other near-by counties of the UK, the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as non-rhoticity . In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word beginning with a vowel. This is called the intrusive R . It could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently. This

3680-470: The (Chinese) lunar new year. Issued since 2006, these bullion coins have had his portrait on the reverse and on the face each year's particular zodiac animal. Fictional depictions have followed the fashionable view of La Fontaine at their period. As a minor character in Alexandre Dumas 's novel The Vicomte of Bragelonne , he appears as a bumbling and scatterbrained courtier of Nicolas Fouquet. In

3772-563: The 2007 film Jean de La Fontaine – le défi , however, the poet resists the absolutist rule of Louis XIV after the fall of Fouquet. British English British English (abbreviations: BrE , en-GB , and BE ) is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England , or, more broadly, to

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3864-629: The 21st century. RP, while long established as the standard English accent around the globe due to the spread of the British Empire , is distinct from the standard English pronunciation in some parts of the world; most prominently, RP notably contrasts with standard North American accents. In the 21st century, dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary , the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ,

3956-510: The 55 centimes issue of 1938, with a medallion of the fable of The Wolf and the Lamb below him; and the Monaco 50-cent stamp commemorating the 350th anniversary of La Fontaine's birth in 1971, in which the head and shoulders of the fabulist appear below some of the more famous characters about which he wrote. Another coin series on which he appears is the annual Fables de La Fontaine celebration of

4048-836: The English Language (1755) was a large step in the English-language spelling reform , where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling. By the early 20th century, British authors had produced numerous books intended as guides to English grammar and usage, a few of which achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers . Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication

4140-613: The Germanic schwein ) is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork (like the French porc ) is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans. Another example is the Anglo-Saxon cu meaning cow, and the French bœuf meaning beef. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English;

4232-922: The Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English that writers can turn to in the absence of specific guidance from their publishing house. British English is the basis of, and very similar to, Commonwealth English . Commonwealth English is English as spoken and written in the Commonwealth countries , though often with some local variation. This includes English spoken in Australia , Malta , New Zealand , Nigeria , and South Africa . It also includes South Asian English used in South Asia, in English varieties in Southeast Asia , and in parts of Africa. Canadian English

4324-712: The South East, there are significantly different accents; the Cockney accent spoken by some East Londoners is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation (RP). Cockney rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand, although the extent of its use is often somewhat exaggerated. Londoners speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors. Estuary English has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. Immigrants to

4416-486: The Statue of Jupiter" (IX.6), for example, reads like a satire on superstition, but its moralising conclusion that "All men, as far as in them lies,/Create realities of dreams" might equally be applied to religion as a whole. The second division of his work, the tales ( Contes et nouvelles en vers ), were at one time almost equally as popular and their writing extended over a longer period. The first were published in 1664 and

4508-550: The UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country and particularly to London. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 125 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's schoolchildren. Notably Multicultural London English , a sociolect that emerged in the late 20th century spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London . Since

4600-576: The United Kingdom , as well as within the countries themselves. The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England (which is itself broadly grouped into Southern English , West Country , East and West Midlands English and Northern English ), Northern Irish English (in Northern Ireland), Welsh English (not to be confused with the Welsh language ), and Scottish English (not to be confused with

4692-426: The United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English . The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. Globally, countries that are former British colonies or members of the Commonwealth tend to follow British English, as

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4784-465: The West Scottish accent. Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect. Once regarded as a Cockney feature, in a number of forms of spoken British English, /t/ has become commonly realised as a glottal stop [ʔ] when it is in the intervocalic position, in

4876-488: The award of the grant in 2007, Leeds University stated: that they were "very pleased"—and indeed, "well chuffed"—at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the Black Country , or if he was a Scouser he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a "canny load of chink". Most people in Britain speak with

4968-535: The benefit of the family; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quarrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of de la Fontaine's life he lived in Paris while his wife remained in Château -Thierry which, however, he frequently visited. One son was born to them in 1653, and was educated and taken care of wholly by his mother. Even in the earlier years of his marriage, La Fontaine seems to have been much in Paris, but it

5060-465: The celebrated Ancient-and-Modern squabble in which Boileau and Charles Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for better comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus ) took the Ancient side. About the same time (1685–1687) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d'Hervart, and fell in love with

5152-455: The centrality of occasional poetry in the origin and development of poetry as an art form. Goethe declared that "Occasional Poetry is the highest kind," and Hegel gave it a central place in the philosophical examination of how poetry interacts with life: Poetry's living connection with the real world and its occurrences in public and private affairs is revealed most amply in the so-called pièces d'occasion . If this description were given

5244-414: The choice effusively, adding, Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d'etre sage . His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute took place between the academy and one of its members, Antoine Furetière , on the subject of the latter's French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the academy's corporate privileges. Furetière,

5336-580: The collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English , Welsh English , and Northern Irish English . Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with] the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within

5428-622: The country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio". When discussing

5520-599: The end of his school days he entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of Saint-Magloire in October of the same year; but a very short sojourn proved to him that he had mistaken his vocation. He then apparently studied law, and is said to have been admitted as avocat /lawyer. He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favor, and arranged

5612-471: The foremost men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné , one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Académie française , and, though

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5704-458: The idea of two different morphemes, one that causes the double negation, and one that is used for the point or the verb. Standard English in the United Kingdom, as in other English-speaking nations, is widely enforced in schools and by social norms for formal contexts but not by any singular authority; for instance, there is no institution equivalent to the Académie française with French or

5796-499: The impropriety of the Contes and it is said that the destruction of a new play was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance. La Fontaine received the Viaticum , and the following years he continued to write poems and fables. A story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fénelon 's pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But, though La Fontaine recovered for

5888-640: The ironical fabulist figures as the King of Spades. He was no less popular at the Bourbon Restoration , as is evidenced by the royal commission of his statue. Besides that, there was the 1816 bronze commemorative medal depicting the poet's head, designed by Jacques-Édouard Gatteaux , in the Great Men of France series. More recently there has been a sideways seated view of him in the Histoire de France series . The head of La Fontaine also appeared on

5980-464: The last appeared posthumously. They were particularly marked by their archly licentious tone. While the Fables have an international reputation, celebration of their author has largely been confined to France. Even in his own lifetime, such was his renown, he was painted by three leading portraitists. It was at the age of 63, on the occasion of his reception into the Académie française in 1684, that he

6072-523: The last southern Midlands accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath or grass (i.e. barth or grarss ). Conversely crass or plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby , five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite which, unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by

6164-518: The later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary . Dialects and accents vary amongst the four countries of

6256-457: The mass internal migration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and given its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands and East Anglian . It is

6348-510: The most part from Aesop and Horace and are pithily told in free verse. Those in the later editions are often taken from more recent sources or from translations of Eastern stories and are told at greater length. The deceptively simple verses are easily memorised, yet display deep insights into human nature. Many of the lines have entered the French language as standard phrases, often proverbial. The fables are also distinguished by their occasionally ironical ambivalence. The fable of "The Sculptor and

6440-600: The poet is leaning thoughtfully against a rock, hat in hand. Also in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre is the 1857 standing stone statue by Jean-Louis Jaley . Another commemorative monument to La Fontaine was set up at the head of the Parisian Jardin du Ranelagh in 1891. The bronze bust designed by Achille Dumilâtre was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle (1889) before being placed on

6532-418: The poet's relation to subject matter. It is not a genre , but several genres originate as occasional poetry, including epithalamia (wedding songs), dirges or funerary poems, paeans , and victory odes . Occasional poems may also be composed exclusive of or within any given set of genre conventions to commemorate single events or anniversaries, such as birthdays, foundings, or dedications. Occasional poetry

6624-471: The subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the Duchess of Bouillon , his feudal superiors at Château-Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine. Some of La Fontaine's liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess Marie Anne Mancini , the youngest of Mazarin 's nieces, and it

6716-424: The subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends. He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Marquis de Dangeau . The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau

6808-603: The theft of work tools worth £500 from a van at the Sprucefield park and ride car park in Lisburn. A football team can be treated likewise: Arsenal have lost just one of 20 home Premier League matches against Manchester City. This tendency can be observed in texts produced already in the 19th century. For example, Jane Austen , a British author, writes in Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice , published in 1813: All

6900-665: The time, he was broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on 13 April 1695 in Paris, at the age of seventy-three. When the Père Lachaise Cemetery opened in Paris, La Fontaine's remains were moved there. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years. The curious personality of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in

6992-403: The traditional accent of Newcastle upon Tyne , 'out' will sound as 'oot', and in parts of Scotland and North-West England, 'my' will be pronounced as 'me'. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are diphthongised to [ɪi] and [ʊu] respectively (or, more technically, [ʏʉ], with a raised tongue), so that ee and oo in feed and food are pronounced with a movement. The diphthong [oʊ] is also pronounced with

7084-568: The world are good and agreeable in your eyes. However, in Chapter 16, the grammatical number is used. The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence. Some dialects of British English use negative concords, also known as double negatives . Rather than changing a word or using a positive, words like nobody, not, nothing, and never would be used in the same sentence. While this does not occur in Standard English, it does occur in non-standard dialects. The double negation follows

7176-617: The worse. The duchess of Orléans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière , a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; and could devote himself to his two different lines of poetry, as well as to that of theatrical composition. In 1682 he was, at more than sixty years of age, recognized as one of

7268-526: Was notably limited . However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon , eventually came to dominate. The original Old English

7360-569: Was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the patron of French writing was the Superintendent Fouquet , to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connection of his wife's. Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarters receipt. He also began

7452-488: Was about this time that the quartet of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine , Boileau and Molière , the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelain was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic

7544-411: Was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not merely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve

7636-484: Was born at Château-Thierry in France. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, maître des eaux et forêts – a kind of deputy-ranger – of the Duchy of Château-Thierry ; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. Both sides of his family were of the highest provincial middle class; though they were not noble, his father was fairly wealthy. Jean, the eldest child, was educated at the collège (grammar school) of Château-Thierry, and at

7728-431: Was brought to a peak. Although these earlier works refer to Aesop in their title, they collected many fables from more recent sources. Among the foremost were Marie de France's Ysopet (1190) and Gilles Corrozet ’s Les Fables du très ancien Esope, mises en rithme françoise (1542). The publication of the twelve books of La Fontaine's Fables extended from 1668 to 1694. The stories in the first six of these derive for

7820-522: Was familiarly known), remarked to a bystander, Nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n'effaceront pas le bonhomme . They have not. The numerous works of La Fontaine fall into three traditional divisions: the Fables, the Tales and the miscellaneous (including dramatic) works. He is best known for the first of these, in which a tradition of fable collecting in French verse reaching back to the Middle Ages

7912-480: Was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards. Fouquet fell out of favour with the king and was arrested. La Fontaine, like most of Fouquet's literary protégés, showed some fidelity to him by writing the elegy Pleurez, Nymphes de Vaux . Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and he had assumed the title of esquire , to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on

8004-422: Was never a truly mixed language in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication). The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and abstract English is, the more it contains Latin and French influences, e.g. swine (like

8096-458: Was not until about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence. It was not until he was past thirty that his literary career began. The reading of Malherbe , it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time – epigrams , ballades , rondeaux , etc. His first serious work

8188-652: Was ordered by command of Louis XVIII as a gift to the town. It was officially set in place in a square overlooking the Marne in 1824. During the Second Battle of the Marne it was damaged and was then moved about the town. Repaired now, its present position is in the square fronting the poet's former house. At his feet the race between the Tortoise and the Hare is taking place. The house itself has now been converted into

8280-553: Was portrayed by Hyacinthe Rigaud . Nicolas de Largillière painted him at the age of 73, and a third portrait is attributed to François de Troy (see below). Two contemporary sculptors made head and shoulders busts of La Fontaine. Jean-Jacques Caffieri ’s was exhibited at the 1779 Salon and then given to the Comédie Française ; Jean-Antoine Houdon ’s dates from 1782. There are in fact two versions by Houdon, one now at

8372-473: Was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orléans, and was installed in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Château-Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes , and in 1668 the first six books of

8464-532: Was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman . These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it

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