Picking up where I left off in Chapter 2 of The Hobbit, the award for “next idiom found” goes to the German edition!
Browsing Tag
french
As every Tolkien fan on the Net knows, we’ve just had ourselves the first glorious new Hobbit trailer! Between this and getting the beautiful, beautiful Blu-Rays of the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, I am very, very much in a Tolkien mood now.
Those of you who have been with me since 2004 or so (on LJ) may remember that I’ve had this German edition of The Hobbit for some time. Now that I also have a French edition, not to mention the shiny new enhanced ebook edition of the book on my iPad, I decided that it’s high time to enjoy a re-read of the story. And because I’m feeling ambitious, I’m doing it in three languages at once! With these editions!
Editions of The Hobbit
Mind you, it ain’t like I expect to really understand much of either the French or the German–that’s why I’ve got the English text handy. I want to go through the translated editions mostly to just get a sense of the rhythm of the language in each, and to see what things I do actually comprehend at first glance, or with judicious consultation of my French or German verb books or dictionaries.
Here are things I’ve observed going through Chapter 1: An Unexpected Party!
I was going to do another French sentence post tonight about Fred and George and the lively discussion I’ve had on Facebook about better words to use for describing cats as ‘fuzzy’. But this just got trumped by my picking out an entire understandable sentence in a song I don’t even have written lyrics for!
The song is “Faites-moi un homme sans tête” by Galant Tu Perds Ton Temps. The Galant girls have no lyrics posted on their website, which gives me a Sad, so I have to just keep listening to them and hope I get lucky picking out a word or three here and there. Tonight, that actually happened! On the way home I heard, in this particular song, a phrase that sounded like “je ne vas pas marier”. Which means, “I will not marry!”
I already knew ‘je’, the ‘ne … pas’ construction, ‘va’ being part of the conjugation of aller, and I got ‘marier’ from various other songs in my collection. So WOW, I picked out an entire sentence in French with my very own ears. Go me!
I just doublechecked the song and discovered that the line is actually ‘je ne va pas me marier’; I hadn’t caught the ‘me’ just before ‘marier’ the first time through. Now, Francophones, sanity check me on this–if I’m understanding my shiny new verb book correctly, the presence of the “me” in there indicates that the verb being used here is “se marier”, not just “marier”, which is the difference between “getting married to someone” vs. “causing an act of marriage”. So that makes the sentence more “I will not get married.”
Am I reading that right?
Either way, HOLY CRAP I just understood an entire French sentence in a song! *does a little dance*
It’s probably not an academically approved way to learn a language, and the ultimate result will probably not be a working vocabulary I can use in everyday conversation, but I gotta say: it’s great fun trying to translate Quebecois trad lyrics word by word and phrase by phrase. It’s like the songs are in CODE, and I have to break the code!
And so far I have learned the following things:
One, like most Celtic music, Quebecois trad falls into the three general categories of Whiskey, Sex, and Death. And many songs will fall into all of these categories at once.
Two, there are a surprisingly large number of ducks in these songs. This is not so strange in a song about hunting, but in a song about a wedding night?! I pointed 
eeyorerin
Three, French makes even not-work-safe phrases like ‘va te faire’ sound awesome in front of a 69-piece orchestra. Look it up, Internets! And then just imagine the English equivalent in front of an orchestra!
Four, some tiny bits of vocabulary I haven’t hung out with since college are suddenly trying to get back in touch. Why hello there, pronouns! How’s it going, conjugation of être? And you guys have brought me a few more verbs, too! How nice of you!
And now, Internets, I give you a sampling of critical verbs I am picking up from my study of the lyrics of Le Vent du Nord, Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, and La Volée de Castors!
- être: to be
- avoir: to have
- tuer: to kill (useful for all songs in the Death category)
- aimer: to love (category Sex)
- boire: to drink (category Whiskey)
- jouer: to play
- chanter: to sing
- danser: to dance
So yeah. I’m still at the point of most of these lyrics parsing in my brain as ‘blah blah blah’ (only prettier than that, because, y’know, French), but comprehendible phrases are starting to pop out at me. Like ‘rejoindre mon bataillon’, or ‘ouvrez, ouvrez la porte, mon père, si vous m’aimez’.
(Which is also in a fun song about a girl who apparently thinks nothing of freeloading off a young captain who takes her to a fancy hotel in Paris and wines and dines her. And she fakes her own death, and after three days begs her father to let her out of the tomb.
Either that, or else she’s a zombie. I’m not sure which!)
So yeah. Maybe not a working vocabulary, but if you need somebody to sing about what an asshole the son of the king is for shooting a shepherdess’ white ducks? I’ll be your girl!