Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
Johannes Patruus
Lânigerne es?
Sîc, vir; nôn, vir:
Sunt mî saccî três.
Principem patrônô,
Alterum ancillae,
Tertium repônô
Pûsiônî vîllae.
(Latin version by C W Brodribb)
Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
One for the master, one for the maid.
And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.
(As with Jack Sprat, the English text is found with several
variae lectiones.)
The Latin comes from Book 2 of the UK four-volume edition of
"Latin for Today" (http://tinyurl.com/5lmy) - one of those erstwhile
school textbooks too "brained up" to have survived into a climate of
dumbing down.
From the same book came:
Jack Sprat - http://tinyurl.com/5lm8
The Motor Bus - http://tinyurl.com/5lm3
The BBC inscription - http://tinyurl.com/5lm6
It also provides a whole pageful of the macaronic "Bankolidaid" from
Frank Sidgwick's "Some Verse" (http://tinyurl.com/5lnf), part of which
is to be found at the foot of this page:
http://www.ldc.usb.ve/~berry/maca.html
I don't know anything about C W Brodribb apart from his authorship of
a hexametric translation of the Georgics and of a volume of his own
poetry (http://tinyurl.com/5lmv).
An extract from his Georgics III is half-way down this page:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/nov96/virgil.htm
Johannes