Ben Jonson and the ground charlatans

Like today’s miserable vendors of pirated CDs, early modern Venetian ambulants are trading on someone else’s stolen content, but at least they’ve had to learn it by heart.

What did the Catalan-speaking seamstress say on arriving in London W11?

“No tinc hil.” See also Sense dormir la noia, which was apparently a magazine programme on the local radio in that 24*7 metropolis, Sant Sadurní d’Anoia. Homophonic punning is easier in muddy languages like Catalan and English. David Deterding has a brain-churning collection of phonetic jokes in the latter. An example: When you’ve seen one…

Peró vs péro

A passing elf just told me that final syllable accentuation was common in early modern northern Spanish, but a couple of verse corpus searches haven’t turned up corroborative scansion. Anyone know any more before I waste the rest of my life on this ;-) ?