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.

Uvular r in Romanian

Keeping up with various broadcasts from Romania, I have started to notice more and more accents and registers of the language. One pronunciation aspect that has truly stood out lately is a uvular /r/, of the variety commonly identified with the French language, [ʀ] or [ʁ], heard instead of the usual Romanian /r/, [r] or [ɾ].

The first time I heard it from a reporter on the Antena 3 news, I immediately associated the pronunciation with one thing: a speech defect, having come across it in other languages. In this case, the change from [r] to [ʁ] is not limited to any one language. It's simply about being physically unable to pronounce an alveolar /r/, and so the person shifts the pronunciation to the back of the palate, with [r] becoming [ʁ] (or any of various uvular sounds); the speaker could be Italian, Spanish, Romanian, or just about a native speaker of any language in which the usual pronunciation for /r/ is alveolar.

The uvular trill gives Romanian a very distinct sound, one I was certainly unaccustomed to. I figured it was just one reporter on Romanian TV, and I didn't make much of it at the time.

Changing regional accents in singing

Not too long ago, I wrote about a Spanish translation of the US National Anthem, analyzing the translation, but more specifically, my focus was studying how a group of people from different countries come together to work on a media project—the interest being in how their different accents interact to create a single product.
In the comments section of that post, a reader brought up the issue of how, unlike Spanish-speaking singers, English artists almost always adopted an American pronunciation even if the singers were born in England or Australia:

stormboy:
[...] Brits, for example, have tended to adopt American-style accents when singing.

Agreeing with that comment, my response was that "I was surprised to find out that Rick Astley, the singer of the famous Rick Roll song, is actually British."

Muñeca de Cera

Some time ago, I covered a Spanish rendition of the French song Poupée de Cire. That particular version was more of a comedy skit performed by the Andalusian La Terremoto. Recently, I have across some older Spanish versions of the French piece by various Latin American artists.

Like La Terremoto's version, each translation of the song here retains the line poupée de cire, poupée de son in the original French, though sang with a Spanish pronunciation. The translation into Spanish retains much of French essence, with many verses almost identical.