Artisans Abroad by Fabrice Bensimon

Author:Fabrice Bensimon [Bensimon, Fabrice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192572776
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Perhaps the category about whom the language question was most discussed was that of the railway navvies. In Normandy, large numbers of them worked in gangs, as we have seen. They mostly worked with fellow-Britons, but also had to interact with French workers and other foreign navvies. In a biography of railway entrepreneur Thomas Brassey which partly relied on first-hand evidence, Victorian writer Arthur Helps reported that on the construction sites

no fewer than eleven languages were spoken on the works. The British spoke English; the Irish, Erse; the Highlanders, Gaelic; and the Welshmen, Welsh. Then there were French, Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Piedmontese, Spaniards and Poles—all speaking their own languages. There was also one Portuguese, but he was a linguist in his way, and could speak some broken French.36

How did these workers interact? An article was published in the Journal de Rouen and then translated in The Times:

A NEW ‘TONGUE’—The Journal de Rouen of the 22d inst states that the best understanding exists between the numerous English and French workmen employed at the Paris and Rouen Railroad. They have organised a kind of language which is neither English nor French, but by means of which they are enabled to converse with each other.37

Helps discussed the language question at length:

There was much difficulty for the English in a strange country, which their employer could not provide against.…among the navvies there grew up a language which could hardly be said to be either French or English and which in fact must have resembled that strange compound language (Pigeon English) spoken at Hong Kong by the Chinese in their converse with British sailors and merchants. It must have had at least as much French in it as English, for it is stated in evidence that ‘the English learnt twice as much French as the Frenchmen learnt English’. This composite language had its own forms and grammar; and it seems to have been made use of in other countries besides France; for afterwards there were young Savoyards who became quite skilled in the use of this particular language, and who were employed as cheap interpreters between the sub-contractors and the native workmen. One of Mr Brassey’s agents speaking on this subject, says:—

‘It was not necessary to understand a word of English, but to understand the Englishman’s Italian or French. That I found in many cases. A sharp youth, for example, would be always going about with a ganger, to listen to what he was saying, and to interpret to his (the youth’s) countrymen’.

It is pleasing to find that, after all, we have some power in the acquisition of languages, for several navvies did eventually acquire a considerable knowledge of French, not, of course, speaking it very grammatically, but still having acquired a greater knowledge of it, and a greater command of it than they had of their native tongue.38

Since then, the development of a new language on the building site has become a historical commonplace.39 However, this is not unsubstantiated. Since the eighteenth century at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.