Why, your Italian looks too much like Spanish

Oh, wait.

From a French tourism brochure:

On another occasion, I encountered some Romanian mislabeled as Italian. I owe you all the picture on that one.

How NOT to Speak Latin - A PSA

I'm often displeased by the way Latin is pronounced not only by students of the language, but especially by Latin teachers, scholars, and Classicists. It's one thing to make an effort and come up short on certain sounds; it's another thing to butcher up the language, and read it as if it were [insert your native language here].

I will let the video I created make the point — a  public service announcement by yours truly, followed by a performance, reading Catullus 3 in authentic Latin, along with an English translation.

What's different about this particular reading is my inclusion of the Latin pitch accent. The Roman grammarians in the Classical period wrote about the pitch accent, and their testimony is the evidence we have that it existed during that time. Its introduction is theorized to have been influenced by the pitch accent in Ancient Greek, and was used exclusive by the educated classes when speaking publicly; the popular speech retained the normal stress accent.

Just listen to the musicality of Latin when read properly — respecting meter, vowel quality and quantity, stress, and pitch — its connection to modern Italian is even more apparent.

Pater Noster Remade

As my first Pater Noster recording in Latin is gaining popularity on Youtube, I wanted to upload a new one of much higher quality.



Of interest for Latinists out there, see the original's video comments for an interesting exchange started by people who are expecting an Ecclesiastical pronunciation when they land on the video. Thankfully, other knowledgeable folk  have been quick to point out this is actually a Classical pronunciation.

Pater Noster in Latin and the Romance Languages

This is a project I had been wanting to work on for sometime.

It finally saw the light of day.

Here is the Pater Noster prayer recorded simultaneously, line by line, in Latin and in 7 Romance Languages: Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, and Romanian.

It is a creation with a focus comparative linguistics, showcasing pronunciation and morphological similarities and differences among these languages through this religious chant.

The translations used are documented versions for each language. If a single translator had worked on all the languages presented, we would perhaps have translations that mirror each other word for word. As it is, the existing translations sometimes result in different word orders (i.e. Fr. que ton regne vienne vs. Sp. venga tu reino), or diverging roots in each language —  such as Latin DEBITA being maintained in all the Western Romance languages (dívidas, deudas, deutes, dettes, debiti), but Galician opting for ofensas. The Galician equivalent to DEBITA, débeda, is not attested in any Pater Noster translation that I could find, so ofensas was kept.

Memes from Romania

Those memes known world-wide that spread like a virus on social media like Youtube and Facebook captivate our friends in that Eastern European (and very Latin) country just as much. These viral videos are made in a variety of languages, but not often do we find one in a language like Romanian.

Here are two of these memes in their Romanian translations.

The first one is a Romanian remake of Loituma Girl performance, made famous on Youtube throughout the world by the voices of a group of Finnish vocalists. Because the original video showed the animation of a girl spinning a leek, ultimately the song became known as the "Leekspin".

The Romanian version has nothing to do with leeks or spins. While the catchy melody has been kept intact, the song talks about a a Romanian girl who won't give up the rița, rița until she is married. The guy insists, but the girls claims that she's "not one of those girls" and keeps demanding marriage before giving it up.

Pentru cei care spun că-mi plac doar manelele...

Nu.
Nu-i așa.

Amu îmi place și muzica moldovenească.

Din Republica Moldova.

Romanian-speaking world

Whenever we hear the word "Romanian", we think of a little country in Eastern Europe. If you've never delved into foreign languages or linguistics, that's probably all that comes into your mind.

If you do have a language or linguistics background, then you know that "Romanian" refers to a Romance language spoken in the Balkans — a Romance language with influences from Slavic — cue in the inhabitants of the nation Romania.

Unconsciously, everytime I refer to Romanian myself, a picture of Romania comes up in my mind. With the attention given recently to the Moldovan accent, I'm on a mission to change that.

Everytime I say "Romanian" now, I will imply the term "Romanian-speaking world", modeled after the colonial Romance languages spoken in many countries — Spanish-speaking world, synonymous with Latin America and Spain, also including the various nations with a significant number of Spanish speakers where Spanish is not an official language, though certainly an influential one.

Accent moldovenesc

I'm being exposed more and more to the accent from the Moldova region in Romania. A recent example is the performance of Jaga Jaga I wrote about last time—a song originally sang in Hebrew remade in Romanian with a Moldovan accent.

I came across two other Jaga Jaga performances by different Romanian singers. The first one is sang with a standard Romanian pronunciation, which is based on the speech of Southeastern Romania, or more precisely, the Bucharest area. The second performance is one more great example of the Moldovan accent, from the Northeast, just like one described on my recent coverage of the original Romanian Jaga Jaga.

You know you're digesting too much Romanian...

when you start putting the definite article after the noun . . . in English.

The screenshot above is part of a comment I wrote as a response to a reader on the topic of the Romanian /r/. It was an unconscious and sincere mistake, and I could not help it but to chuckle as I discovered it days later.

There is no doubt that being a polyglot impacts the way you express yourself in speech and in writing, with influences from the various languages you know popping up here and there when you least expect it. Knowing many languages certainly helps you communicate better in your native language; as a side effect, this may cause you to mix grammar or expressions inadvertently from different languages: interference. From my experience, this is not a bad thing: this makes you second-guess yourself and forces you to double check what you're saying. Ultimately, you end up improving not only your native language, but also all the languages you know.

What was going on at a subconscious level when I typed that, I wouldn't venture guessing. As for the probable cause, though: I was wanting to write the comment in Romanian (about Romanian), reading the visitor's message in Portuguese, while making a reference about Spanish. Writing it all in English. You be the judge of whether the typo is justified.

The corrected version of this would of course read "the regions", though I'm leaving this one uncorrected for posterity.

Thus, the typo would translate directly into Romanian as regiunile—regions-the, placing the definite article after the noun (contrast Italian with the article before it, le regioni).

Jaga Jaga

And this is why I'm in love with the Romanian language—because of masterpieces like this:

Songs are undoubtedly excellent tools for learning the vernacular. This particular piece has taught me a regional variation of a common Romanian word—a variant of the word "now", according to the DEX, used in the North of Romania:

AMÚ adv. (Pop.) Acum. – Lat. ad-modo.