Napoleon Bonaparte. The man who did not need a translator?
The name is familiar to all of us. More or less we have all heard of it for one reason or another. For the vast majority it is a person that carries a lot of negativity and a lot of hate. For others it is a person of ultimate genius and fervor. For the French themselves is a person who shaped their country.
What we are going to do in this article, is not occupy ourselves with his exploits or his ambiguities. Tons on ink have been shed on those and a lot of heated discussions have taken up millions of hours. Napoleon is also the father of famous quotations that we still use today. To mention but a few of them:
“A leader is a dealer of hope.”
“Four hostile newspapers are to be feared more than a thousand bayonets.”
“The only part of the state that does not know what they want is the people.”
“I am France and France is me!”
“The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.”
“The French complain of everything, and always.”
“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.”
“The human race is governed by its imagination.”
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. That’s bad manners!”
However, this blog is about languages and translations. Let’s take a look at what he said on the issue:
“I speak Latin to God, Italian to women, Hungarian to my wife, French to my men, and German to my horse.”
The phrase does not actually belong to him as it is a derivative of a similar phrase attributed to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, first king of Spain. The idea behind the phrase is that the official language of the Catholic church is Latin, Italian carry a tone of familiarity and art, his men would not understand his orders if he spoke in another language, his second wife (Marie Louise) was a descendant of the Hapsburgs (Austro-Hungarian empire) and in his view German is the ultimate language to use when you want to threaten someone.
Reading about all this, it is only natural to ask a few pertinent questions. Did he ever get mixed up and write love letters to his horse, or prayed to God in German? Diplomats and high ranking officials speak of a person who could mesmerize his listener when he spoke. Could he do that in all these languages?
A further read of the phrase reveals one significant omission. Where is English? After all his greatest enemy was Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, whom he was never able to defeat in combat… Perhaps that is because he did not speak English….