The Sing-Along Post–If You Can

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Ashley MacIsaac, Booking Through Thursday, Gaelic, Leahy, memes, Natalie MacMaster, Niyaz, Shooglenifty, songs, Urdu

Booking Through Thursday

What songs … either specific songs, or songs in general by a specific group or writer … have words that you love? Why? And … do the tunes that go with the fantastic lyrics live up to them?

This is an interesting question for me, because I’m not really drawn to songs because of their lyrics.  What attracts me is the way they sound–the way the melody and the harmonies interact. For example, my favorite genre of music is Celtic.  I am all about the fiddles and bagpipes, but I especially like artists who take traditional melodies and do new things with them, such as Natalie MacMaster, Leahy, and Shooglenifty.  Of course, most of their music is instrumental, but when there are lyrics, they’re usually in some form of Gaelic. I still like them because of the way they sound. This is a video of a song called “Sleepy Maggie” by Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac. The woman singing in Scottish Gaelic is Mary Jane Lamond.

I don’t know Scottish Gaelic, so I have no idea what she’s saying, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it? Half of the music I own with lyrics doesn’t have them in English. I have songs in every variety of Gaelic there is, in addition to Welsh, Swedish, German, Russian, Farsi, Urdu, Latin, and Zulu. Here’s another example, a song called “Allahi Allah,” from a group called Niyaz, which takes 14th-century Sufi poems in Farsi and Urdu and sets them to music using traditional Middle Eastern instruments remixed electronically. I think this one is in Urdu. Needless to say, my Urdu is a little rusty.

So I guess I regard the human voice as another musical instrument, albeit an extremely beautiful one with unmatched versatility.  I guess I also have oddball musical tastes.

Tudor Rose

Tags

BLAZONED, England, Middle English, t-shirts, Tudor Rose

As part of my blog revamp, I’m going to start posting some of the designs I’ve created for BLAZONED, my t-shirt company.  Because almost all of my designs incorporate writing as an element, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to post them here.

Tudor Rose

You can see this design on actual products, including skateboards, by clicking here.  It’s based on a Tudor Rose and a poem called “Of a rose, a lovely rose, Of a rose is al myn song,” written circa 1350 by an anonymous author. The language is Middle English.

LESTENYT, lordynges, both elde and yinge,
How this rose began to sprynge;
Swych a rose to myn lykynge
In al this word ne knowe I non.

The Aungil came fro hevene tour,
To grete Marye with gret honour,
And seyde sche xuld bere the flour
That xulde breke the fyndes bond.

The flour sprong in heye Bedlem,
That is bothe bryht and schen:
The rose is Mary hevene qwyn,
Out of here bosum the blosme sprong.

The ferste braunche is ful of myht,
That sprang on Cyrstemesse nyht,
The sterre schon over Bedlem bryht
That is bothe brod and long.

The secunde braunche sprong to helle,
The fendys power doun to felle:
Therein myht non sowle dwelle;
Blyssid be the time the rose sprong!

The thredde braunche is good and swote,
It sprang to hevene crop and rote,
Therein to dwellyn and ben our bote;
Every day it schewit in prystes hond.

Prey we to here with gret honour,
Che that bar the blyssid flowr,
Che be our helpe and our socour
And schyd us fro the fyndes bond.

Parlez Vous?

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Booking Through Thursday, books, Gullah, languages, linguistics, memes, Reading

Here’s a question from Booking Through Thursday:

I had an idea for a BTT question when I was taking a peek at one of my bookcases yesterday and spotted my old copy of the Aeneid in Latin sitting there. Maybe this question has already been done—but if not… Do you have any foreign language books and if so can you (still) read them?

I have several Bibles (or parts thereof) in a few foreign languages: German, French, Russian, and Gullah. I can read the German one after eight years of studying the language. I can’t read the Russian one even after two years of studying the language. I can sort of read the French one because I’ve studied Spanish. That may sound odd, but I minored in linguistics in college, and when you take courses in linguistics, after a while, you develop a sort of sense about how languages work, so even if I don’t know a particular language, I can piece a lot of it together from what I know about other, related languages.

The most interesting one is Gullah, though. It’s spoken in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. It’s a creole, which means that it’s a mix of other languages. It arose among the slaves of the area before the Civil War. The common practice among slaveholders was to put individuals together from different parts of Africa, so they couldn’t readily communicate with one another and revolt, but they had to communicate with each other to work, so they came up with a pidgin, a mixture of the languages they spoke and English. It wasn’t a full-blown language, because it was limited in its vocabulary and grammar, but the children of the first generation of slaves grew up hearing pretty much only this pidgin, so they filled in the blanks and made it a full language–Gullah.

I can read it because most of the vocabulary is taken from English, but some of the grammatical structures are dramatically different. It’s really fascinating to sit and try to figure out the reasoning behind some of them. (Hey, I said I was a dork.)

Someone Does Me Wrong!

In the U.S., if you come home and you find your neighbor about to bulldoze your prize tulips because he thinks they’re on his side of the property line, your only (legal) recourse for stopping him is to find an attorney and have him or her run to the courthouse and get a temporary restraining order, and then, before the TRO runs out, get in front of a judge with a complaint and a motion for a preliminary injunction, and then go to trial with a request for a permanent injunction.

If only things were as simple as they are on the island of Sark.  As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, Sark is one of the Channel Islands and a British Crown dependency.  It is also the last feudal state in Europe.  They have a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages called clameur de haro in Sercquiais, the language of the island, which is descended from Norman French.

There, if you saw your neighbor bulldozing your tulips, all you would have to do is fall on your knees and yell, “Haro, haro, haro! À mon aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!” which means, “To my aid, my Prince, someone does me wrong!”  I’m not sure about the haro part.  You neighbor would have to immediately stop until the matter could be sorted out in court.  There are conflicting accounts about the last time it was actually used.  If only it worked here.

Incidentally, there are many, many aspects of the Norman French legal system still around today.  In English, a tort is a civil wrong for which a person may be sued.

Sarkese

Did you know that there are forty-seven Romance languages according to Wikipedia?  I think my favorite is Sercquiais, which is spoken on the island of Sark, one of the Channel Islands and a British Crown dependency, and also the last feudal state in Europe.  It looks a lot like French, but it’s not.  When the Channel Islands were occupied by the Germans in World War II, the natives spoke Sercquiais as a code because neither the Germans nor their French interpreters could understand them.  The same thing happened on the nearby islands of Jersey and Guernsey with their (also Romance) languages, Jèrriais and Dgèrnésiais, respectively.

Albanian Word of the Day

The Albanian word for Albania is Shqipëria.  I don’t know why I find this fact so fascinating, other than the fact that before I began researching Albania (and Kosovo) for my novel that I knew absolutely nothing about Albania or its people.  It just goes to show how narrow our focus can be when it comes to a topic.  When we think of European history, we (at least in my experience) think of Henry VIII or the French Revolution or World War II, not anything having to do with Albania, and yet, Albania is as much a part of Europe and its history as England, France, and Germany.

The Albanian name, by the way, means “Land of the Eagles.”

My Favorite Dictionary

I have a favorite dictionary, and apparently, this makes me a dork, but it’s true.  When I’m writing, my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is never far from my side.  I’m not sure, I like it for what I guess you would call its depth and the scholarship that goes into it.  No other dictionary comes close to its thoroughness in studying and cataloguing actual American English usage. And the index of Indo-European roots is pretty nifty.

My wife disagrees.  She likes Webster’s, which I find a little too shallow?  I’m not sure that make sense, but it’s as close as I can describe my feelings.   Se prefers its straightforwardness.

We were arguing over the meaning of a word in front of a friend who was visiting.  Finally my wife said, “Okay, go get the dictionary,” to which I responded, “Which one?”  Our friend didn’t know what to do with the fact that we owned more than one dictionary.  (Actually, we own five or six.)  I guess we’re both dorks.  And for the record, if you think that arguing over the definition of a word is bad, we once had an argument over the proper role of the Dative case in Latin. Sad, but again true.