And Since It Wouldn't be Pascha Without .........

[RobNJ]

Knowing how to exchange the Paschal in Klingon:

Pascha polyglotta - Paschal Greeting in 250 Languages

 

[FenderTL5]

Very useful. Maybe not Klingon, but the greeting is usually exchanged in at least seven, eight, more? languages in our parish.

 

[ArmyMatt]

was waiting for that to be posted, hahaha, thanks Rob

 

[dzheremi]

I've seen that website before. It's neat, but I'm not sure I'd trust it for any of the lesser-known languages, unless you happen to know them or use them yourself in your parish. I only looked at the Boharic Coptic and the Arabic and they're both wrong, and at least one of those is a very well-known language spoken natively by millions, none of whom pronounce المسيح as Al'Masiah.

Don't mean to be a wet blanket, just fair warning before you go trying any of those out on your nearest Klingon warrior this Pascha.

 

[ArmyMatt]

I've seen that website before. It's neat, but I'm not sure I'd trust it for any of the lesser-known languages, unless you happen to know them or use them yourself in your parish. I only looked at the Boharic Coptic and the Arabic and they're both wrong, and at least one of those is a very well-known language spoken natively by millions, none of whom pronounce المسيح as Al'Masiah.

Don't mean to be a wet blanket, just fair warning before you go trying any of those out on your nearest Klingon warrior this Pascha.

maybe it's a dialect thing? I know the Our Father is slightly different the more the Latin influence.

 

[dzheremi]

Hmm. I don't know every Arabic dialect in the world, but I don't think that's very likely in this case, for a bunch of reasons I actually did just type out before realizing that they are super boring to read. Basically, masih/maseeh is a measure II verbal noun (intensive, rather than reciprocal, reflexive, etc.), of the fa'eel (فعيل) type, so it has this particular pattern that would put a long "e" vowel (ي) in the ultimate syllable -- CVC (where V is a long vowel): ma-seeh. I'm sure you could conceivably get dialects that eliminate short vowel in the first syllable (North African dialects do this a lot, e.g., sgheer for sagheer 'small'), but I can't think of why they'd put a different short vowel in between the long vowel and the consonant in the last syllable (and putting a long vowel in there would change the meaning of the word). The short vowel would go after the final consonant, particularly in a phrase like this one (rather than a word in isolation): in spoken Arabic it would be al-masihu qam. That final -u marks it as being in the nominative case, since Christ is obviously the subject.

You can hear that in Arabic below:

Notice how the very first line is "al-masihu qam...", not al-masiah. That's pretty much how you'll hear it anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world, though of course the dialectical forms can eliminate the case endings (Egyptian does), and they're usually left unwritten anyway, so it's possible to get al-masih qam in fast, colloquial speech, but al-masiah...eh...I don't know why that would happen, and I've never heard it from any Arabic-speaking person (and I've worshiped not just with Egyptians, but also Sudanese, Jordanians, Iraqis, etc).

The Bohairic is wrong in a much more obvious way: a fairly egregious typo and the insertion of a vowel that isn't there in the original (and unlike Arabic, Coptic writes out all of its vowels, so this one is not ambiguous at all).

 

[ArmyMatt]

hmmm, you learn something everyday. if I can remember, one of my brother seminarians is Syrian and one is Jordanian, so I will try to run it by them

 

[dzheremi]

Yeah, they'd know best. Just to be transparent about it, I'm relying on a PDF of the 10 measures from Arabic courses that I took in college...gosh...10 years ago now. I wouldn't even call myself an Arabic speaker, since I have nobody to speak it with now that I'm away from my parish, more of an Arabic observer and user (because sometimes I have to, to get by with people from church when they call me). But from what I have been able to find in a quick Google search, it seems that I'm at least right about the form (it is an intensive of the fa'eel type):

The Meaning of al-Masih

I don't particularly like the above website, but that taught me more about the word masih than I knew when I wrote my reply, so there ya go.

The stuff about the short vowels marking case (masihu, masiha, etc.) is here, just in case you're interested or want to impress your Syrian friends:

http://arabic.desert-sky.net/g_cases.html

This is a good refresher, since I'm not used to hearing case endings anymore, so it sounds formal and weird and it's hard to remember even though it's not a particularly hard system to learn (compared to, say, Estonian with its 14 cases or whatever). When I went to the monastery of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite in New York several years ago, I was worried about embarrassing myself with my horrible preschooler's Arabic, so I tried to follow those rules and use proper (artificial/Modern Standard Arabic) pronunciation, since that's what they teach you in school anyway, and that got me laughed at so much more than just winging it would have. "You sound so formal! Say it again!" "Uh...ustath?" "Hahahaha! Ustath! It's ustazzzz!" Egyptians don't really do "th" sounds. I hear a lot of "Seotokos" or even "Teotokos" in place of "Theotokos", depending on how close they can get to that voiceless dental fricative "th" [θ]. It's been a while since I've been around Syrians, but it wouldn't surprise me if they also change it to t/s/z, depending.

Sorry...off topic post...my Klingon is even worse than my Arabic, though, so...

 

[dzheremi]

I just had a thought: There is another form of the word for Messiah that I have heard in some Coptic popular songs in Arabic, where it is common to drop Coptic/Greek words into otherwise Arabic texts (to fit the rhyme scheme better, or to make absolutely clear that this is a Coptic song, I suppose). I have seen in that context the form المسيا (al-massiya), which does also mean "Messiah", but appears to refer more to the expected messiah that the Jews still await in vain (apparently this is a whole thing...I had no idea, since I know a total of one Arabic-speaking Jew and we never talk religion, but there's a page on Arabic wikipedia about it), while Jesus in Christianity and for that matter Islam is more regularly referred to as al-Masih (المسيح), because we accept that He is the Messiah (though Muslims, like Jews, obviously have a different idea of what that means; so Islam manages to be out of step with both religions...surprise, surprise). Arabic has a lot of confessional dialect stuff like that (e.g., Yasou' for Christians, 'Isa for Muslims; Yuhanna for Christians, Yahya for Muslims...except when Christians use it...), but this one I was unaware of until now.

I dunno...that's a little closer, maybe? It has that <a> in the final syllable, at least. I don't know when a Christian would use it other than to explicitly validate that to Jews that Jesus is the Messiah and they can stop waiting. In the Coptic popular song I was thinking of (below), the word comes in a couplet after a whole verse about how our fathers the monks did not deny their faith before barbarians who attacked them. I had assumed that referred to the Berbers (al-barbar) who attacked the monasteries and martyred St. Moses the Black and his companions, but maybe it was making that connection on purpose between 'Barbarians' and Jews as both being unbelievers. Or maybe it just fits better since the line before ends with a word that ends in an [a], not an [ħ], abadiya. Hmm. Probably overthinking this! At any rate, that's not the form that is used in the standard Paschal greeting in any Arabic-speaking church that I know of. I'd be very interested to hear otherwise from your Syrian friends, if I'm wrong on this.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

But does the site offer the paschal greeting in the tongue of Malastaire, Sulust, or Bacchi?

 

[ArmyMatt]

ah linguistics. yeah, I will snoop around if I can find what is proper. sorta like how my buddy from Lebanon told me the Arabic word of affection for a woman is habibiti, whereas my fellow student from Jordan said it is habib-ti.

and my Klingon is atrocious

 

[dzheremi]

That's easier to explain, though, because it's a short vowel that's being deleted or realized in this or that way. حبيبتي, the word you mentioned, would be very literally transliterated ħbibti or hbybty (most vowels in Arabic can also function as consonants, just like how <y> in English is sometimes a consonant and sometimes a vowel), with the i/y being long vowels, leaving the short vowels to be filled in with the short vowels that are characteristic of a particular dialect (or deleted, as in the case of your Jordanian friend's pronunciation). So habibiti, habibti, habibati, etc. are all 'correct', depending on where you are, but you wouldn't expect a form that would delete the long vowels, as those are explicit to the form itself (*habbt, *hbbt are not valid realizations of حبيبتي).

 

[ArmyMatt]

gotcha, gotta love language

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Dee Wanna Wanga

 

[ArmyMatt]

Dee Wanna Wanga

Dee Wanna Wagoh

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

You serve your master well, Matt, and you'll be rewarded!

Dee Wanna Wagoh

 

[ArmyMatt]

You serve your master well, Matt, and you'll be rewarded!

I sorto mah Lorcha, neya bong chuwait.

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Zee kato oh motee? No ja!!

I sorto mah Lorcha, neya bong chuwait.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Zee kato oh motee? No ja!!

Nay Jabba no badda

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Myuhdee-hadda Myuhdee-hadda bdeh he he ---Nien Nunb

Nay Jabba no badda