Tag: french

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And now: language geeking with De Temps Antan lyrics!

So, De Temps Antan, right? One of the cluster of fine Quebecois bands I’ve been a-swoon over this entire year, in no small part due to the excellent vocals and bouzouki of M. Éric Beaudry. These boys have a very handy PDF of lyrics posted on their site for their first album. There is not, however, an equivalent PDF for their second, current album, Les habits de papier!
Of the songs on this album, three have muscled their way onto my Francophone Favorites playlist: “La turlutte du rotoculteur”, “Pétipétan”, and “Grand amuseur de filles”. The first has no lyrics as it is a double firebomb of turlutte + bouzouki, fiddle, and harmonica action. <3 I found lyrics for the second, for which I am extremely grateful, given that the chorus is a machine-gun spray of syllables and I had to see them transcribed to begin to try to sing it!
You would know, however, that the one where M. Beaudry sings delicious lead, "Grand amuseur de filles", is the one I can't actually find any lyrics for at all! *^_^*;;
So, I told myself, here's a brilliant idea–let's see if I can listen hard to these lyrics and see if I can identify ANY WORDS IN THEM WHATSOEVER. And since I've gotten involved with other local fans of Quebecois music and we have our little Chanson et langue group going, we're seeing if we can transcribe the lyrics ourselves!
I played with this some today with the help of and , who reported to me that the third verse was basically talking about the singer trying to cheer up his sad, sick friend by hauling him off to a strip club, quote, “as you do”. Erin then informed me, and I quote, “I feel this entire song needs to be punctuated with eyebrow waggles, ‘as you do’, or ‘that’s what he said!'” (Which appears to be a very apt description of most of the songs that have gotten onto my aforementioned Francophone Favorites playlist. I keep getting all of the bounciest, stomping-est songs onto this list and then I find out what they mean and I’m all O RLY? >:D )
And I’m amusing myself mightily with the help of Dejah of the Chanson et langue group, who has way more French than I do, though she’s flailing almost as hard as I am on the latter verses of the song.
Here are a random sampling of phrases I was rather stunned I actually heard correctly, based on comparing with Dejah’s much better transcription of at least the initial verses:

  • Chanter la chanson de ma jolie maîtresse (sing the song of my pretty mistress)
  • Deux ou trois amants (two or three lovers) (see previous commentary re: O RLY? >:D )
  • Allons-y donc, allons aux cabaret! (let’s get to the cabaret!)

And I got several scattered other bits of phrases, like “faut la quitter” and “avec un jeune garçon”, and I haven’t yet confirmed but am pretty sure of having heard “je ne fais que pleurer” and “la fleur de la maisson”. Man, trying to transcribe words in a language you barely know is HARD and FUN and Dejah is right–doing this with music is way more entertaining than out of a textbook!

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Language epiphanies ROCK

Here’s one of the biggest reasons I have fallen so passionately in love with Quebecois music: part of me has latched onto it with an unconscious reaction of holy crap! There’s a whole extra LANGUAGE over here for music to be awesome in!

Which is really pretty silly of me, given that I already had some decent representation of non-English-speaking music in my collection–not only my early wave of Quebec trad with La Bottine’s Rock and Reel, but also Angelique Kidjo, Habib Koite, and the huge pile of Celtic music I’ve got that’s sung in both Irish and Scots Gaelic. Spanish shows up periodically in my playlists as well; a couple of the tracks by the Paperboys are sung in that. Norwegian is represented by Morten Harket, and although it hasn’t made it into iTunes yet because I haven’t bought an electronic copy of the album, German is represented by Falco (yes, folks, I do in fact have at least a cassette copy of the album that brought the world “Rock Me Amadeus”) and by the German translations of the Beatles songs “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”. Even Elvis has a couple of non-English or partly non-English songs, with “Santa Lucia” in Italian and the German bridge of “Wooden Heart”.

And all of this, mind you, is music I’ve loved quite well over the years. But something about Quebecois trad–and the music being sung in French–has excited me in a way that other non-Anglophone music hasn’t managed to do yet.

It may simply be the joie de vivre of the music in general, since as you know, O Internets, I respond very ardently to the entire Quebecois trad genre. Podorythmie as a physical expression of music, and the language-transcending, machine-gun fire of a turlutte, seize me in a way that very little other music in my collection does–and yes, this includes even my beloved B’ys and Elvis, an assertion that I do not make lightly.

But part of it is, I think, also just the sheer awesomeness of words. Which, yeah yeah yeah, I’m a writer, words are what we do. I’ve always liked tinkering around with other languages, though, and when I couple this with music that appeals to me so greatly, suddenly French becomes much, much more relevant to my interests! (And man, if I’d known about this music when I was taking French in college, I think I’d have done a lot better on that course!)

I have been thrilled to find and join a mailing list for fans of Quebecois music in the Pacific Northwest to indulge these interests. And starting tomorrow night, in fact, I’ll be participating in a newly forming group to learn French specifically by learning Quebecois songs. Much to my massive delight, the first song we’re going to be working with is “C’est une jeune mariée” by Le Vent du Nord!

This is going to be fun. :D

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Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 1

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
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!

Continue reading “Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 1”

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Thank you, Galant girls!

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*

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And now, a selection of random French sentences

After a bit of judicious flinging of phrases through Google Translate, and cross-checking verbs against my shiny new 501 French Verbs book, I can now say the following things about myself:

Je suis une musicienne amateur. Je joue le piccolo, la flûte, et un peu de guitare et bouzouki. Je parle seulement un peu français. J’ai deux chats. Ils sont nommés Fred et George. J’ai lu un nombre ridicule de livres.

I particularly like that last one, since if I understand it correctly, it’s “I’ve read a ridiculous number of books.” Thank you, compound past tense!

Also, it occurred to me that one phrase right out of my beloved “Trois Navires de Ble” from GBS makes grammatical sense to me, too. I.e., the chorus: “sur le bord de l’eau nous irons jouer dans l’île”, or, “at the edge of the water we will play on the island”. A good chunk of that song still doesn’t parse to me, but that line does. It’s responsible for me being able to parse the title of the Le Vent song “Au bord de la fontaine”, and it’s why I could parse the chorus of La Volée’s “Belle, embarquez!”, too, since “sur l’bord de l’eau” is in that. (Note the smooshing of “le bord” into “l’bord”. I am advised by userinfocow that Quebecois French likes to do that kind of thing!)

So this is all fun! I’ve started slapping lyrics onto the various song files in my iTunes collection, so that I can read along with them as I listen on the bus going to and from work. It is helping LOTS for my ability to comprehend these words as words.