Omniglot - the blog

Here’s a recording of part of a song in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess the language?

Recently while looking for songs in various languages I came across the following sites:

Spanish Songs Translations - a blog featuring songs in Spanish from Spain and Latin America with English translations. There are also videos of the songs being sung.

Russian songs - a collection of traditional Russian, Cossack and Ukrainian songs with videos and background information.

I’ll try and learn some of these and add them to my collection of songs on Omniglot.

Do you know of any similar collections of songs in other languages?

Here’s a recording of a song in a mystery language. Any ideas which language it is and where it’s spoken?

[Update] Here are the lyrics of the song:

Ferðist eg í millum landa
Síggi gleði sorg og stríð
Men ein myndin bjørt man standa
Minnir meg um bestu tíð
Ja har heima í tí dali
Har alt grønt og vakurt er
Eg í huga kátur spæli
Meðan skip um sjógvin fer

and here’s a translation:

??? in the midst of bright stars
In the midst of the sound of waves and lambs
Where harsh storms blow
Where no strings tie
Where I’m always free
Where the ocean is a friend
Where I’m free to go somewhere distant
Where fresh ???

Here’s a recording of part of song in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess what language it’s in and where it’s spoken?

This is a song that I learnt this week at one of the choirs I go to. Does anyone know what language it’s in and what it means? We were told that it’s a “gypsy song from Czechoslovakia” and that it’s a counting song. The words look like a mixture of Romany and Spanish - possibly Caló.

Dui, duj, duj, dui desu duj,
Te comida, te comida,
Par no muj

O kalo muj na kamar,
Dere kostat kikana,
Saj Iago, say Iago,
Romnake

I don’t know the answers this time. All I’ve been able to find out is that there are recordings of the song on some albums of Hungarian gypsy songs, or at least a song with the same first line, and that the final word, Romnake, appears to be associated with the Hungarian-Carpathian gypsies.

A luthier is someone who makes or repairs stringed instruments. The word comes from the French luth (lute). Luthiers are often divided into two categories: those who deal with plucked or strummed instruments, such as guitars, banjos, mandolins, etc, and those who devote themselves to bowed instruments, such as violin, violas and cellos. The latter are also known as archetiers, from the French arch (bow).

Do you know if there are special names for makers or repairers of others kinds of musical instruments?

Brain scans have found that the corpus callosum, the contection but the two halves of musicians’ brains tends to be significant enlarged in comparison the corpus callosum found in the brains of the non-musicans. A number of other differences between the brains of musicians and non-musicians have been found, including enlargements to the cortex, auditory and motor parts of the brain. Another finding was that music tends to be processed in the left hemisphere of musician’s brains in the same areas as language, whereas the right hemisphere tends to be responsible for this task in the brains of non-musicians.

Oliver Sacks’ book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain discusses these findings, and other music and language-related cases, including one of a man who after being struck by lightening, developed an overwhelming urge to play the piano and to compose music, and felt that he was actually tuning in to the music of heaven.

Today’s word, uśmiechnięta, means ’smiling’ in Polish, and appears in the Polish version of Silent Night:

Cicha noc, święta noc,
pokój niesie ludziom wszem,
A u żłóbka Matka święta
czuwa sama uśmiechnięta,
Nad Dzieciątka snem.
Nad Dzieciątka snem.

The singing group I go to at the Hammersmith Irish Centre in London will be performing (for charity) at Hammersmith tube station a week next Monday. One of the things we’ll be singing will be Silent Night and we’ve decided to try to sing it in Polish and Irish, as well as in English.

We can cope with the Irish version as there are at least five Irish speakers, including myself, in the group, but the Polish version is proving more of a challenge. This week a Polish friend of one of the group members came along to help us with the pronunciation, so we now have a rough idea of what it sounds like. I also found a recording of the Polish version on YouTube.

We’ll probably just sing the first and last lines of the Polish and the rest in English as we’re not sufficiently confident to sing the whole of it.

I found translations of Silent Night in many different languages here, and plan to put some of them on Omniglot in my songs section. Do you have any suggestions for other multilingual songs I could include?

Here are recordings of the first verse of a famous Christmas carol in four different languages. I’m sure you’ll be able to recognise the carol, but can you work out which languages they are, and which of them is the odd one out?

• Language 1
• Language 2
• Language 3
• Language 4

Here’s a recording of a song (2.7MB) in a mystery language. Do you know or can you guess which language it is and where it’s spoken?