Or why the English don’t speak foreign.
As is well documented, the inhabitants of these fair isles stubbornly resist the learning of other languages. As a languages teacher, I am still regularly exposed to what is for me, an incomprehensible lack of interest in, and very often a resentment of acquiring a degree of proficiency in another language.
A while back, I did some online research into the reasons for the average English person’s language-learning phobia. I made the startling discovery that this rejection of speaking in anything but their own tongue may well date back to Roman times and actually has its roots in my home city!
The conquerors insisted on Latin being the lingua franca and much to their frustration, locals bluntly refused to speak it or even try to pronounce “Ratae Corieltauvorum” correctly.
They just couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get it.
This so annoyed Jools Caesar’s finest, they eventually got fed up trying to educate the local ignoramuses, and once they had found something better to do, they just gave up the ghost and fucked off.
Emboldened by their success at ousting their Roman colonisers, the liberated denizens immediately held a competition to find a new name for their community. The winner, a wheelwright and cart customiser known as Daz, came up with the much less complicated two syllable “Les-tah” for his community’s new name.
They then, somewhat ironically decided give it a fanciful spelling in a spiteful bid to baffle future generations of “Johnny Foreigners” as to its correct pronunciation. The community’s nine elders each drew a random letter from a scrabble letter pouch, and the former Roman settlement duly rebranded itself as Leicester.
To really drive their point home, several mischievous locals then took a brisk chariot ride up the A6, and established a new two syllable settlement called Luv-bruh. They let their orthographical skills run wild and fashioned the outrageously non-sensical spelling of Loughborough.
Mardy Romans leaving what is now known as Leicester in a bit of a huff.
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