choral languagey facepalms

[ysobel]

1) One of the UCD chorus songs this quarter is in Finnish (woo!) and I have practice singing Finnish so I'm mostly okay with the pronunciation except for one word: rajoilla.

Now, Finnish pronunciation dictates that j is a 'y' sound, and doubled consonants are longer, so this ought to be rah - yoy - lllllah (very crude approximation).

But I keep parsing it as Spanish, and doing rah - hoy - ya.

Whoops.

2) Another piece is in Russian (also woo), and there is one word that I don't sing but would consistently want to parse wrong if I did.

In Cyrillic, which I can read, it's непщевати -- and I'd be fine reading it from the Cyrillic. It's the transliteration that gets me. Transliterated, it's nepshchevati. Syllabified in the music as nep - shche - va - ti.

I look at "nep" (latin alphabet) in a Russian mindset and see it as "пер" (cyrillic alphabet), which transliterates to "per".

Which is why I'm glad it's not a word I sing, because nepshchevati and pershchevati are not close.

Comments

[shoaling_souls]

I wonder if transliterating it as раёилла would help or make it worse? :)

[shoaling_souls]

I look at "nep" (latin alphabet) in a Russian mindset and see it as "пер" (cyrillic alphabet), which transliterates to "per".

And I totally do this all the time