Cockaigne or Cockayne ( / k ɒ ˈ k eɪ n / ) is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of luxury and ease, comfort and pleasure, opposite to the harshness of medieval peasant life. In poems like The Land of Cockaigne , it is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheese). Cockaigne appeared frequently in Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at scarcity and Christian asceticism .
36-525: Cockaigne was a "medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labor and the daily struggle for meager food." While the first recorded uses of the word are the Latin Cucaniensis and the Middle English Cokaygne , one line of reasoning has the name tracing to Middle French (pays de) cocaigne "(land of) plenty", ultimately from a word for a small sweet cake sold to children at
72-410: A word , generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection . Declensions may apply to nouns , pronouns , adjectives , adverbs , and determiners to indicate number (e.g. singular, dual, plural), case (e.g. nominative , accusative , genitive , dative ), gender (e.g. masculine, neuter, feminine), and a number of other grammatical categories . Meanwhile,
108-722: A fair. In Ireland , it was mentioned in the Kildare Poems , composed c. 1350. In Italian , the same place is called Paese della Cuccagna ; the Dutch equivalent is Luilekkerland ("lazy, delicious land"), translated from the Middle Dutch word Cockaengen , and the German equivalent is Schlaraffenland . In Spanish, an equivalent place is named Jauja , after a rich mining region of the Andes, and País de Cucaña ("fools' paradise") may also signify such
144-612: A far more complicated set of declensions, where the suffixes (or prefixes, or infixes ) change depending on the gender of the noun , the quantity of the noun , and other possible factors. This complexity and the possible lengthening of words is one of the disadvantages of inflected languages. Notably, many of these languages lack articles . There may also be irregular nouns where the declensions are unique for each word (like irregular verbs with conjugation ). In inflected languages, other parts of speech such as numerals , demonstratives , adjectives, and articles are also declined. It
180-477: A festival. Then, daring people try to climb the slippery pole to get the prize. The crowd laughs at the often failed attempts to hold on to the pole. Middle French Middle French ( French : moyen français ) is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from the mid-14th to the early 17th centuries. It is a period of transition during which: It is the first version of French that
216-532: A more complex example, the sentence: becomes nonsensical in English if the words are rearranged (because there are no cases): But if English were a highly inflected language, like Latin or some Slavic languages such as Croatian , both sentences could mean the same thing. They would both contain five nouns in five different cases: mum – vocative (hey!), dog – nominative (who?), boy – genitive (of whom?), cat – accusative (whom?), street – locative (where?);
252-412: A place. From Swedish dialect lubber ("fat lazy fellow") comes Lubberland , popularized in the ballad An Invitation to Lubberland . In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London as the land of Cockneys ("Cockney" from a "cock's egg", an implausible creature; see also basilisk ), though the two are not linguistically connected otherwise. The composer Edward Elgar used
288-508: Is agreed that Ancient Greeks had a "vague" idea of the forms of a noun in their language. A fragment of Anacreon seems to confirm this idea. Nevertheless, it cannot be concluded that the Ancient Greeks actually knew what the cases were. The Stoics developed many basic notions that today are the rudiments of linguistics . The idea of grammatical cases is also traced back to the Stoics, but it
324-488: Is largely intelligible to Modern French, contrary to Old French . The most important change found in Middle French is the complete disappearance of the noun declension system, which had been underway for centuries. There was no longer a distinction between nominative and oblique forms of nouns , and plurals became indicated by simply an s . The transformations necessitated an increased reliance on word order in
360-667: Is never regarded as declined in Modern English, although formally, the words that and possibly she correspond to forms of the predecessor of the ( sē m., þæt n., sēo f.) as it was declined in Old English. Just as verbs in Latin are conjugated to indicate grammatical information, Latin nouns and adjectives that modify them are declined to signal their roles in sentences. There are five important cases for Latin nouns: nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and ablative . Since
396-819: Is not declined in Modern English. There are isolated situations where certain nouns may be modified to reflect gender, though not in a systematic fashion. Loan words from other languages, particularly Latin and the Romance languages, often preserve their gender-specific forms in English, e.g. alumnus (masculine singular) and alumna (feminine singular). Similarly, names borrowed from other languages show comparable distinctions: Andrew and Andrea , Paul and Paula , etc. Additionally, suffixes such as -ess , -ette , and -er are sometimes applied to create overtly gendered versions of nouns, with marking for feminine being much more common than marking for masculine. Many nouns can actually function as members of two genders or even all three, and
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#1732851759418432-631: Is often restricted to specific contexts, depending on the dialect or the speaker. It is most typically used to refer to a single person of unknown gender (e.g. "someone left their jacket behind") or a hypothetical person where gender is insignificant (e.g. "If someone wants to, then they should"). Its use has expanded in recent years due to increasing social recognition of persons who do not identify themselves as male or female (see gender-nonbinary ). The singular they still uses plural verb forms, reflecting its origins. Some English adjectives and adverbs are declined for degree of comparison . The unmarked form
468-402: Is still not completely clear what the Stoics exactly meant with their notion of cases. In Modern English , the system of declensions is so simple compared to some other languages that the term declension is rarely used. Most nouns in English have distinct singular and plural forms. Nouns and most noun phrases can form a possessive construction. Plurality is most commonly shown by
504-417: Is subjective, and the objective whom (although it is increasingly common to use who for both). The one situation where gender is still clearly part of the English language is in the pronouns for the third person singular. Consider the following: The distinguishing of neuter for persons and non-persons is peculiar to English. This has existed since the 14th century. However, the use of singular they
540-623: Is the positive form, such as quick . Comparative forms are formed with the ending -er ( quicker ), while superlative forms are formed with -est ( quickest ). Some are uncomparable; the remainder are usually periphrastic constructions with more ( more beautiful ) and most ( most modestly ). See degree of comparison for more. Adjectives are not declined for case in Modern English (though they were in Old English), nor number nor gender. The demonstrative determiners this and that are declined for number, as these and those . The article
576-464: The Kingdom of France : in the south of France, Occitan languages dominated; in east-central France, Franco-Provençal languages were predominant; and in the north of France, Oïl languages other than Francien continued to be spoken. The fascination with classical texts led to numerous borrowings from Latin and Greek . Numerous neologisms based on Latin roots were introduced, and some scholars modified
612-488: The ending -s (or -es ), whereas possession is always shown by the en clitic -'s or, for plural forms ending in s , by just an apostrophe. Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl . Most speakers pronounce all forms other than the singular plain form ( girl ) exactly the same. By contrast, a few irregular nouns (like man /men) are slightly more complex in their forms. In this example, all four forms are pronounced distinctly. For nouns, in general, gender
648-495: The locative , the instrumental form of "down our street" could also be used: Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language, while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility. This is one of the advantages of an inflected language. The English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing. These contrived examples are relatively simple, whereas actual inflected languages have
684-501: The same word , and thus are not declensions. Pronouns in English have more complex declensions. For example, the first person " I ": Whereas nouns do not distinguish between the subjective (nominative) and objective (oblique) cases, some pronouns do; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition , or case . Consider the difference between he (subjective) and him (objective), as in "He saw it" and "It saw him"; similarly, consider who , which
720-453: The vocative case usually takes the same form as the nominative, it is seldom spelt out in grammar books. Yet another case, the locative , is limited to a small number of words. The usual basic functions of these cases are as follows: The genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative also have important functions to indicate the object of a preposition. Given below is the declension paradigm of Latin puer 'boy' and puella 'girl': From
756-599: The Americas ( cacao , hamac , maïs ). The influence of the Anglo-Norman language on English had left words of French and Norman origin in England. Some words of Romance origin now found their way back into French as doublets through war and trade. Also, the meaning and usage of many words from Old French transformed. Spelling and punctuation were extremely variable. The introduction of printing in 1470 highlighted
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#1732851759418792-515: The French Language ) (1549) by the poet Joachim du Bellay , which maintained that French, like the Tuscan of Petrarch and Dante Alighieri , was a worthy language for literary expression and promulgated a program of linguistic production and purification, including the imitation of Latin genres. Declension In linguistics , declension (verb: to decline ) is the changing of the form of
828-442: The adjective little would be in the same case as the noun it modifies ( boy ), and the case of the determiner our would agree with the case of the noun it determines ( street ). Using the case suffixes invented for this example, the original sentence would read: And like other inflected languages, the sentence rearranged in the following ways would mean virtually the same thing, but with different expressiveness: Instead of
864-572: The continued unification of French, the suppression of certain forms, and the prescription of rules, leading to Classical French. Middle French is the language found in the writings of Charles, Duke of Orléans , François Villon , Clément Marot , François Rabelais , Michel de Montaigne , Pierre de Ronsard , and the poets of La Pléiade . The affirmation and glorification of French finds its greatest manifestation in La Défense et illustration de la langue française ( The Defense and Illustration of
900-469: The gender classes of English nouns are usually determined by their agreement with pronouns, rather than marking on the nouns themselves. There can be other derivations from nouns that are not considered declensions. For example, the proper noun Britain has the associated descriptive adjective British and the demonym Briton . Though these words are clearly related, and are generally considered cognates , they are not specifically treated as forms of
936-669: The inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation . Declension occurs in many of the world's languages. It is an important aspect of language families like Quechuan (i.e., languages native to the Andes ), Indo-European (e.g. German , Icelandic , Irish , Lithuanian and Latvian , Slavic , Sanskrit , Latin , Ancient and Modern Greek , Albanian , Romanian , Kurdish , Classical and Modern Armenian ), Bantu (e.g. Swahili , Zulu , Kikuyu ), Semitic (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic ), Finno-Ugric (e.g. Hungarian , Finnish , Estonian ), and Turkic (e.g. Turkish ). Old English
972-469: The need for reform in spelling . One proposed reform came from Jacques Peletier du Mans , who developed a phonetic spelling system and introduced new typographic signs (1550), but his attempt at spelling reform was not followed. The period saw the publication of the first French grammars and of the French-Latin dictionary of Robert Estienne (1539). At the beginning of the 17th century, French would see
1008-706: The next word. The French wars in Italy and the presence of Italians in the French court brought the French into contact with Italian humanism . Many words dealing with the military ( alarme , cavalier , espion , infanterie , camp , canon , soldat ) and artistic (especially architectural: arcade , architrave , balcon , corridor ; also literary: sonnet ) practices were borrowed from Italian. Those tendencies would continue through Classical French . There were also some borrowings from Spanish ( casque ) and German ( reître ) and from
1044-530: The sentence, which becomes more or less the syntax of Modern but with a continued reliance on the verb in the second position of a sentence, or " verb-second structure ", until the 16th century. Among the elites, Latin was still the language of education, administration, and bureaucracy. That changed in 1539, with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts , in which Francis I made French the sole language for legal acts. Regional differences were still extreme throughout
1080-425: The spelling of French words to bring them into conformity with their Latin roots, sometimes erroneously. That often produced a radical difference between a word's spelling and pronunciation. Nevertheless, Middle French spelling was overall fairly close to the pronunciation; unlike Modern French, word-final consonants were still pronounced though they were optionally lost when they preceded another consonant that started
1116-456: The streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing". According to Herman Pleij , Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (2003): roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one's mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one's feet. The weather is always mild,
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1152-406: The subject and object. As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: Hypothetically speaking, suppose English were a language with a more complex declension system in which cases were formed by adding the suffixes: The first sentence above could be formed with any of the following word orders and would have the same meaning: As
1188-465: The wine flows freely, sex is readily available, and all people enjoy eternal youth. A Neapolitan and Southern Italian tradition, extended to Southern Italian diaspora communities and other Latin culture countries, is the Cockaigne pole (Italian: cuccagna; Spanish: cucaña), a horizontal or vertical pole with a prize (like a ham ) at one end. The pole is covered with grease or soap and planted during
1224-405: The word "Cockaigne" for his concert overture and suite evoking the people of London, Cockaigne (In London Town) , Op. 40 (1901). The Dutch villages of Kockengen and Koekange may be named after Cockaigne, though this has been disputed. The surname Cockayne also derives from the mythical land, and was originally a nickname for an idle dreamer. The name of the drug cocaine is unrelated: it
1260-452: Was an inflectional language , but largely abandoned inflectional changes as it evolved into Modern English . Though traditionally classified as synthetic , Modern English has moved towards a mostly analytic language . Unlike English, many languages use suffixes to specify subjects and objects and word cases in general. Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies
1296-497: Was named in 1860 by Albert Niemann from the plant coca ( Quechua kúka ) and the suffix -ine used to form chemical terms. Like Atlantis and El Dorado , the land of Cockaigne was a utopia . It was a fictional place where, in a parody of paradise, idleness and gluttony were the principal occupations. In Specimens of Early English Poets (1790), George Ellis printed a 13th-century French poem called "The Land of Cockaigne" where "the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes,
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