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Aesop in Words of One Syllable

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35 pointssohkamyung24 comments

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Fascinating: the author cheats!

E.g., "butch-ers" appears*, as if hyphenation makes it not a two-syllable word!

* https://archive.org/details/aesopsfablesinwo00aeso/page/12/m...

No but it might help a younger reader and it avoids an absurd consistency

I don't disagree, but I still think it's funny that, not six pages in, they compromise the central conceit...

I don’t know what’s going on, but that doesn’t match https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/76243/pg76243-images.ht....

Your source has “the dog and the shadow” (which subsequently uses “sha-dow”) and “the oxen and the butchers” (and note that “oxen” is not hyphenated). The Gutenberg edition instead has “the child and the brook” in their stead, and “the bear in the wood” inserted after the next one.

I know a couple people who are exactly this brand of weird. One of them owns the domain onepartwords.com.

The other wrote a one-syllable dictionary. It has about 2500 one-syllable words, defined using only other one-syllable words. Here's a few excerpts:

- Bake - To cook meat or cake with heat from all sides

- Flask - a glass jug with a small top and big low part

- Mouse - a small beast that hides in the house and is chased by cats

- Spring - (1) a coil of wire (2) a warm but not hot part of the year

Sadly, I don't think it's online anywhere.

Why "meat or cake" rather than "food"? I guess if they've defined cake in a much broader way in their entry it might make sense, but it seems kind of strange to limit it in this way when the most obvious generic word for what gets baked is also one syllable.

If you look at the back of that book, there was a whole series of "in Words of One Syllable" books. Their revamp of Robinson Crusoe required some hyphenation to meet the criteria. All were published by the Henry Altemus Company of Philadelphia around the year 1900. https://henryaltemus.com/series/series137.htm

Even this one required hyphenation as pointed out by another commenter (search "butch-er").

I feel like it wouldn't be that hard to convey the same meaning of "butcher" with one syllable words. If it's the noun, you could say something like "one who cuts meat for their job", and if it's the verb, you could say something like "cut in the same way as meat".

Neat. I wonder if this was an inspiration for Guy Steele's famous "Growing a Language" talk, or if he came up with the same idea independently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE

Fantastic link. Does anyone know how he produced his animated slides and how they were controlled during the talk?

You made my day with this link

I can see the advantage of using common words, but isn't it pretty silly to insist on them all being one syllable? The very first words (most people) learn are tow syllables (albeit the same one repeated), right?

This is a good idea. I am working through the 1912 translation of this by V. S. Vernon Jones with my child, and I was taken aback by how dense its Victorian English is. This is the translation that is currently distributed by Simon & Schuster. Consider THE GOODS AND THE ILLS:

"There was a time in the youth of the world when Goods and Ills entered equally into the concerns of men, so that the Goods did not prevail to make them altogether blessed, nor the Ills to make them wholly miserable. But owing to the foolishness of mankind the Ills multiplied greatly in number and increased in strength, until it seemed as though they would deprive the Goods of all share in human affairs, and banish them from the earth. The latter, therefore, betook themselves to heaven and complained to Jupiter of the treatment they had received, at the same time praying him to grant them protection from the Ills, and to advise them concerning the manner of their intercourse with men. Jupiter granted their request for protection, and decreed that for the future they should not go among men openly in a body, and so be liable to attack from the hostile Ills, but singly and unobserved, and at infrequent and unexpected intervals. Hence it is that the earth is full of Ills, for they come and go as they please and are never far away; while Goods, alas! come one by one only, and have to travel all the way from heaven, so that they are very seldom seen."

If Victorian children were really able to parse that, we have regressed! I have to rephrase each fable in simpler terms before mine understands it. Alice in Wonderland was a similar affair, and that was with the abridged version!

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%86sop%27s_Fables_(V._S._V...

Hypotactic sentences! I love them, and feel they're quite elegant. I read sentences like this as kid :)

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/parataxis-vs-hypotaxis-...

There's a big gap in the market for someone to do for Aesop's Fables what was done for the "New Revised Standard Version" of the bible. They went back as far as they could to the source material and did a high quality modern translation.

Reminds me of Randall Monroe’s obsession with Simple English

https://xkcd.com/547/

I prefer viewing the referenced book on Archive.org than Project Gutenberg: https://archive.org/details/aesopsfablesinwo00aeso/page/6/mo...

(Personally, I always hated "the moral" being spelled out at the end of each story. Oh well.)

I used to make a game out of that. Use words with just one word sound, and see how long it takes them to catch on.

As a tool for kids, I don't buy it. If you slip and use a word with two or more word sounds, that won't make it hard. So it's not a rule you need to use.

I had not heard of A. L.'s books, though. As word game, it's fun (though she cheats!). As school tool, as I said I don't buy it.

  "..a word with two or more word soun-ds"

> ..a word with more than one sound

Did I win? :)

Most all words have more than one sound. There are big sounds and small sounds though. The big parts - "word sounds" — that we don't want, the word "sounds" has just one. It needs no break. You might say that the word "school" has two but that word has just one as well.

Well said. And same with “schools” and then even more with “schooled”. But just for those who word it in a way that mind the rule.

Why not just "a word with no break" then, just like you described?

There's a party game called "Poetry for Neanderthals" that's exactly that (use only monosyllabic words to describe something when prompted). I really like it.

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