Macaronic language
The following sentence mixes late Old Dutch and Latin: Tesi samanunga was edele unde scona et omnium virtutum pleniter plena Translated: This community was noble and pure, and completely full of all virtues.
Another well-known example is the first stanza of the famous carol In Dulci Jubilo, whose original version (written around 1328) had Latin mixed with German, with a hint of Greek.
yt had ful hard hansell, dans causam fine dolorum; vengeaunce nedes most fall, propter peccata malorum (etc) Several anthems also contain both Latin and English.
The Scottish Chaucerian William Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris uses as a refrain for every four-line stanza the phrase from the Office of the Dead "Timor mortis conturbat me" ["The fear of death disturbs me"].
The term macaronic is believed to have originated in Padua in the late 15th century, apparently from maccarona, a kind of pasta or dumpling eaten by peasants at that time.
While this "macaronic Latin" (macaronica verba) could be due to ignorance or carelessness, it could also be the result of its speakers trying to make themselves understood by the vulgar folk without resorting to their speech.
[4] An important and unusual example of mixed-language text is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna (1499), which was basically written using Italian syntax and morphology, but using a made-up vocabulary based on roots from Latin, Greek, and occasionally others.
However, while the Hypnerotomachia is contemporary with Tifi's Macaronea, its mixed language is not used for plain humor, but rather as an aesthetic device to underscore the fantastic but refined nature of the book.
Tifi's Macaronea was a popular success, and the writing of humorous texts in macaronic Latin became a fad in the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in Italian, but also in many other European languages.
An important Italian example was Baldo by Teofilo Folengo, who described his own verses as "a gross, rude, and rustic mixture of flour, cheese, and butter".
In Scotland, macaronic songs have been popular among Highland immigrants to Glasgow, using English and Scottish Gaelic as a device to express the alien nature of the anglophone environment.
[11] Macaronic verse was also common in medieval India, where the influence of the Muslim rulers led to poems being written in alternating indigenous Hindi and the Persian language.
The 2001 novel The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt[14] includes portions of Japanese, Classical Greek, and Inuktitut, although the reader is not expected to understand the passages that are not in English.
Macaronisms figure prominently in The Trilogy by the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, and are one of the major compositional principles for James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.
An example of modern humorous macaronic verse is the anonymous English/Latin poem Carmen Possum ("The Opossum's Song"), which is sometimes used as a teaching and motivational aid in elementary Latin language classes.
makes use of macaronic verse, as do other poems in his book Rainbow Soup: Adventures in Poetry: My auntie Michelle is big in the BON (As well as the hip and the thigh).
A whole body of comic verse exists created by John O'Mill, pseudonym of Johan van der Meulen, a teacher of English at the Rijks HBS (State Grammar School), Breda, the Netherlands.
In Charlie Chaplin's anti-war comedy The Great Dictator, the title character speaks English mixed with a parody of German (e.g. "Cheese-und-cracken").
