Read "The Two Parrots and the Magpie" by Tomás de Iriarte online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
A dame from St. Domingo / Brought with her Parrots twain.
Now this island is half Gallic, / Half owns the flag of Spain; / Thus, in two different languages, / The Parrots talked amain, / Till the gallery where their cages hung / Discordant was as Babylon.
Soon the French and the Castilian / They mixed up in such a bother / That, in the end, no soul could tell / If it were one or 't other.
The French Parrot from the Spaniard / Took a contribution small; / While the Spanish bird changed nigh each word / For the idiom of Gaul.
Their mistress parts the babblers -- / And the Frenchman kept not long / The phrases he had borrowed / From less fashionable tongue.
The other still refuses / His jargon to give over; / But new merit rather chooses / In this hotchpotch to discover -- / Exulting that he thus can vary / The range of his vocabulary.
In mongrel French, one day, / He eagerly begged after / The scrapings of the pot; / With hearty roar of laughter, / From balcony across the way, / A Magpie shouted out / At the folly of the lout.
The Parrot answered pertly, / As with argument conclusive, -- / "You are nothing but a Purist, / Of taste foolishly exclusive. " -- ?
"Thanks for the compliment," quoth Magpie, curtly.
Many men, in sooth, there are, / Like the Parrots, everywhere; / With their own language not content, / Would a mongrel tongue invent.