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This is gonna be a short thread. Once I have the answer there's not much to discuss. Couldn't find the answer online, so I'm trying here.
I've been re-reading Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues after many years. The protagonist (or maybe I should say co-protagonist) is one Pierre Aronnax, a French professor who gets picked up by Captain Nemo's sub and taken for a ride. During conversations, as written in the spoken dialogs, Aronnax is addressed thusly:
"I will show you the wonders of the oceans, M. Aronnax," said Nemo.
Now I know the "M." is like "Mr." and stands for "Monsieur" but what I don't know is if in spoken French Nemo would just be saying "M" or pronouncing the entire "monsieur." I mean, in English we don't say "M-R" but pronounce the word "mister," so I suspect the latter. But as I read these dialogs I find myself saying the "M" in my head as I read. Never having studied the French language, I have a hard time replacing "M" with "Monsieur." But that's gotta be right, right?
Since Jules Verne was French, I assume the story was originally published in French and there used the normal conventions for representing abbreviations in speech. The decision to leave the honorific M. untranslated in the English version should really be attributed to the translator.
Mrs stands for "mistress", which, at one time, was a respectful term for a man's wife.
What was the timing and the driving force that led wives to be called "missuz" and led the word "mistress" to be reserved for unmarried "kept women"? Was this a result of the suffragette movement?
A young man is sometimes called "master". Does a master become a mister when he gets married (that is, a mister has a mistress) or when he becomes self-supporting, or when he becomes legally responsible for his obligations? Or is it when he completes his training and moves from apprentice to master of his trade?
Although I remember the coining of the Ms. title, I'd have to do some research to figure out when it happened. Sometimes, it's easier to remember history if you didn't experience it too closely.
There is no equivalent to Ms in French. Madame (“my lady”) is coming to be applied more generally; that is, regardless of marital status, particularly to women who are or appear to be, say, late twenties or older. Those who seem to be younger are more likely to hear Mademoiselle. This is evolving.
Ron Draney said: The decision to leave the honorific M. untranslated in the English version should really be attributed to the translator.
Now that makes total sense. I think that's what confused me and prompted my original question. So I did some more research and found this Bibliography of Jules Verne Translations. If you scroll down, you'll see that 20,000 Leagues has been translated many times by many people. The copy I'm reading is from Google Books. The frontispiece does not credit any translator, but says this English version was published by Butler Brothers, New York and Chicago, 1887.
So I looked at one of the other translations in that bibliography. In the Project Gutenberg version, published online in 2001, the translator is given as one F.P. Walter. In the spirit of "accessibility" that drives Project Gutenberg, Walter chose to use "Professor Aronnax" instead of "M. Aronnax." I read a few passages of dialog from their version, and that honorific just flows more transparently. It seems more "completely" translated w/o that "M."
So, not surprisingly, it appears the conventions used by translators change based on period and personal tastes. I suspect if I checked all the versions, I'd find another translator who chose to use "Prof. Aronnax" as the honorific.
FYI, whereas the Google Books collection is largely scanned and OCRed w/o corrections, the Project Gutenberg collection is all edited to HTML and lacks those annoying "typos" you get when OCRing text in a non-OCR-friendly font.
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