A nursery companion

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in einzelnen Begriffsartikeln, z.B. Ackergerat, Wohngebaiude) und 2. alphabet&h geordnet. Die vorgegebenen ‘Raster’ (Matrix) geben die Bedeutung und die inhaltliche Beziehung innerhalb der jeweiligen Begriffsgruppe bekannt ( + /- Anzeige). Insgesamt werden 281 Eintragungen verarbeitet (bei lo Begriffen). Das Buch Kiihns ist von seinem Ansatz her fiir die beschriebenen Zwecke wichtig. Die Ausfiihrungen sind iiber Iangere Teile etwas ‘belehrend’ und zu umfangreich auf schon bekanntem Hintergrund. Die Problematik der Zielgruppen (L1/L2-Erwerb unter besonderen Bedingungen) wurde meiner Meinung nach nicht ausfiihrlich genug dargestellt, zumal die nichtdeutschen Lerner mit ihren speziellen Anforderungen an einen praktikablen Mindestwortschatz bisher nicht hinreichend bedacht worden sind. Fc bleibt aber ein Verdienst, daR in diesem Systematisierungsversuch neue Miiglichkeiten aufgezeigt werden. Auf das vollstgndige Wiirterbuch kann man gespannt sein. Nebenbei bemerkt: Die Druckwiedergabe ist iiber weite Strecken gerade fiir die Absichen des Autors schlecht (Schwachdruck, Kleindruck im Warterbuchteil u.a.). Alfred J. Tumat Lehrstuhl Deutsch als Fremdsprache Padagogische Hochschule Kiel Olshausenstral3e 75 D-2300 Kiel Federal Republic of Germany

Opie, Iona and Opie, Peter (eds), A Nursery Companion. Press, 1980, 128 pp. f8.95.

Oxford:

Oxford University

This is an unusual work to be submitted for review in the uages of an academic journal concerned with educational technology and language learning systems. It is, among other things, a beautiful book, a pleasure to look at-some would say, a coffee-table book. But it is much more than that. Iona and Peter Opie, the well-known collectors of nursery rhymes, gnomic sayings, children’s games and other materials relating to nursery and playground,’ have put together a collection of over 20 children’s books most of which were published between 1805 and 1820, a period which largely coincided with the Regency, “the ‘Age of Elegance’; and the sparkle of the Regency extended even to the trappings of the nursery. The children’s books produced in the first quarter of the nineteenth century have an alertness and grace not achieved in any other period” (7). What made these books special was not so much the originality of their contents; quite a few used traditional nursery favourites such as metrical alphabets (“A-was an Archer/ And shot at a frog./ B-was a Butcher,/And kept a great dog”, etc. (lo)), accumulative rhymes like “The History of the House that Jack Built” (23), game rhymes (“The Gaping, Wide-mouthed, Waddling Frog” (SO), number rhymes (“One, two,/BuckIe my shoe” (36) and metrical tales like “The Remarkable Adventures of an Old Woman and her Pig” (96) (most of these

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can be found in, for example, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes): the main attraction was the fact that they were published with illustrations, in colour, and that these were of outstanding quality and style, appealing to both children and adults. The success of this format was such that publishers exploited it for similar productions written specially for the purpose (and also represented here). Among them are the two earliest known collection of limericks: “The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women” (66) and “Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen” (70), the latter containing the rhyme which later inspired Edward Lear: “There was a sick man of Tobago/Lived long on rice-gruel and sago;/But at last, to his bliss,/The physician said this:/‘To a roast leg of mutton you may go”’ (73). A delight in sometimes grotesque human detail, in nonsense and wit and in sound for sound’s sake is characteristic of the whole collection, with the illustrations carrying a large share of the message. This spirit of general lightheartedness and detachment from the harsher aspects of reality is carried over even into the overtly didactic pieces, quite a few of them “linguistic” (if of doubtful linguistic value), e.g. “The Paths of Learning Strewed with Flowers; or, English Grammar Illustrated” (46), “Punctuation Personified” (54) and “Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation” (75). A number of the items in this collection can be read on more than one level, depending on the age and background of the reader: “Sam Syntax’s Cries of London” (104), “The Dandies’ Rout” (113) and “Mounseer Nongtongpaw” ( = (je) n’entends pas; 118) could well be interpreted as pointed social criticism. How could a book like this be used in language teaching? Its usefulness for young foreign learners is probably limited: their linguistic standard would simply not be good enough, even for so simple a form as the metrical alphabet; words like archer, esquire and oysterwench (10 f.) are hardly priority items. Nevertheless, the idea as such might be worth trying: a class could be shown one of the rhyming alphabets provided in this volume;* they could then try to invent something similar themselves, using vocabulary they know, or feel they want to know, and producing their own illustrations. The principle of the number rhyme, the accumulative rhyme, and even the limerick, could be similarly exploited. The quality of the illustrations is such that they could be used as stimuli for gap-filling exercises: metrical tales like “The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog” (28) should lend themselves well to this kind of treatment. Finally, the phonetic usefulness of entertaining metrical material is obvious: popular poetry of this kind often offers unobtrusive opportunities for work on English speech rhythm generally and on one of its consequences-weak forms/vowel reduction; it can also be used systematically to practise the pronunciation of individual phonemes without this seeming artificial. The Opies define the limerick as “that infectious type of verse which a hearer cannot resist trying to imitate or improve upon” (125). A lot of nursery verse is likely to evoke a similarly desirable response. Not every school audience would react so favourably, of course. There is bound to be a stage when anything reminiscent of the nursery will be regarded as simply “childish”. But for advanced students who see the foreign language as more than merely a potentially useful tool for communication and who can grasp that it in fact embodies a whole culture and its history, a book of this nature becomes extremely valuable, offering the learner the feeling that he is approaching English from inside, as it were, that he is gaining insight

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into structures which are as important to the language as a whole as are the rules of phonology, syntax and semantics which he has been taught and is using to come to grips with the language “from outside”. Over and above the benefit to be derived in this way from contact with nursery and other traditional material, this kind of book can be used for linguistic study, especially with regard to the history of the English vocabulary; it could also form attractive and unusual source material for the study of certain literary genres and of English social history (A Nursery Companion reflects a thoroughly secure, middle-class world).

NOTES ’ Other important collections by Iona and Peter Opie: The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955) The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969) The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (1973). ’ See also Edward

Lear’s “Nonsense

Alphabets”

and Eric Partridge’s

“Comic

Alphabets”

Kaethe Henke Sprachenzentrum der Universitat Bielefeld Universitatsstral3e D-4800 Bielefeld 1 Federal Republic of Germany