ABC Wednesday, T for Tales

With thanks to Denise Nesbitt, who created ABC.For more interesting ABC posts click on the logo in the sidebar . This week we are looking for words beginning with T.

 

 

 

 I was looking for an appropriate word beginning with "T", when my eye caught a series of books for children written by Beatrix Potter, all of them containing the word "Tale"or "Tales" in the title. Then I also saw a novel written by Charles Dickens:"A Tale of Two Cities".

First we should find out what the word "tale" means.

Well here are a few meanings:

 

noun

1.a narrative that relates the details of some real or imaginary event, incident, or case; story:

a tale of two Cities.

2.a literary composition having the form of such a narrative.

3.a falsehood; lie.

4.a rumor or piece of gossip, often malicious or untrue.

5.the full number or amount.

6.Archaic. enumeration; count.

7.Obsolete. talk; discourse.

Origin of tale

Middle English

Old English

900

before 900; Middle English; Old English talu (series, list, narrative, story); cognate with Dutch taal ( speech, language), German Zahl ( number), Old Norse tala (number, speech). See tell

" The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer.  Between 1386 and 1389 Chaucer began working on his most famous text, The Canterbury Tales. The tales (mostly written in verse, although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from London to Canterbury in order to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral."

Tales are very old sometimes, even before 900 there were tales to be found. Very difficult to read,but the modern tales are very popular especially if they are written as fairy tales and for children, like those of Beatrix Potter, who illustrated her books herself. These books have nothing to do with history, like the Canterbury Tales.

 

 

One of the many novels of Charles Dickens is a historical novel called "A Tale of Two Cities". 

   "A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same period. It follows the lives of several characters through these events."

These are the first sentences of the book