in search of a translation

[cellio]

Last night at choir practice a member asked me to sing in a subgroup that she'll be directing. Naturally, much medieval and renaissance music is religious (particularly Catholic), which poses problems for me, so when I was handed music without a translation I knew I'd have to do a quick check. The process went something like this:

Language: Latin or Italian. I don't recognize most of these words and I don't see any of the markers that would tell me it's Italian. (That doesn't mean it's not; I only know either language to sing, really.) Skim skim skim... aha, there's an "aleiluia" [1] at the end; suspicion is Latin and sacred. Nope, still don't see any obvious problems like references to Jesus or the trinity or Mary. Still don't know Latin. Ok, off to Google.

Oh! Yes, sacred, but it would never have occurred to me that John Dunstable would set this popular passage from Song of Songs. Ok, I can work with that. :-) (But wherever did they get that translation? Here, try this one. Are we seeing the effects of two other languages between the Hebrew and English? Does the Latin really say what CPDL says it does?)

The performances I've heard of this song are somewhat ponderous and somber, not at all matching the text (either version :-) ). I'm not sure how much of that is driven by the music itself and how much by performance decisions. (I haven't started to learn it yet, but I did download the Encore source so I can play with it.) I wonder what we'll do with it. It should be fun.

[1] In Latin texts we sometimes see "Alleluia" and sometimes "Hallelujah". I can see how a listener could get the former from the latter, since a leading 'h' is pretty weak, but this is not an oral tradition. Is there some semantic difference between the two?

Comments

[dsrtao]

Alleluia/hallelujah is largely a matter of whether the transliterator's native language was Greek or Germanic. I don't think Greek accommodates a leading h. (E.g. "hellenic" vs "ellenika" for the name of the language itself.

A modern transliteration to an English speaker would be halihlu-yah
הַלְלוּ-יָהּ
appears at the beginning and end of http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt26e8.htm and is immediately followed by halelu et Adonai.

[cellio]

If I'm being pedantic I transliterate the Hebrew as hal'lu-Yah. Usually I'm not that pedantic.

Thanks for the information; I didn't know that Greek doesn't tend toward the leading h.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Modern Greek doesn't accommodate a leading "h" sound (or an "h" sound anywhere, actually, though chi is often a pretty soft guttural). Ancient Greek, however, did. A rough breathing diacritic over an initial vowel signalled that the vowel should be preceded by a "h"-type sound. But WRT spelling, the word still started with a vowel, and that made a difference when Greek words were transliterated into Latin. At least, it did sometimes. Example: The Hebrew name Yochanan was adapted into Greek as "Ioannes" (-es being a common ending for a masculine name). But since there was a rough breathing mark over the alpha, in Latin it morphed into "Johannes".

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

And to follow on to that: From what I've seen, "Hallelujah" would be used where the word was taken from a Latin text that spelled it that way, whereas most of the *spoken* language variants had dropped most of the H's by 1200, so someone writing down the word as they heard it might easily write "Alleluia" instead.