Tag Archives: song

“Silent Night” in Ayeri

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In December 2022 I posted on my Mastodon account a photo from the Berlin State Library’s Unter den Linden branch featuring a pinboard on which were posted festive tags with Christmas greetings in a slew of languages spoken by library patrons. User Scott Hühnerkrisp wondered whether there already exists a translation of Stille Nacht into Ayeri. I replied that it would be a challenge for the Christmas break. Even though it’s past Christmas now and this year’s is still a ways off, I wanted to make good on it. This is Sirutay ternu kaluy, my attempt to translate the Austrian Christmas carol Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht—to English speakers known as Silent Night—into Ayeri.

🔽 Download the PDF file
⚙️ View the LaTeX source

Other than that, I submitted my PhD thesis in May last year and defended it in September, at long last—it’d been over five years since I started working on it formally. Add to this my subsequent relocation halfway across Germany to Berlin, where I’m teaching an Old High German intro class this semester and continue working for my doctoral advisor at least until spring 2024 (see also: academic job insecurity, short-term contracts, “perpetual interim”). That doesn’t mean I’m done PhDing yet, since my alma mater requires theses to be published to award the title. So, I’m also trying to find time to revise my manuscript again. I already have a publisher to offer it to in mind and hope to do so by summer.

They Call Me Guitarplayer

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Or at least, they do so indirectly, because I chose to go by that nickname on some pages I’m still active on years ago. But anyway, I’m playing the guitar, that’s true, and I like translating things into my constructed language. Especially if it’s a little challenging. Like a song, or a poem. Only my singing leaves something to be desired because of my untrained tonal range, alas … See the video on Youtube.

The original song (Oceansize, “Amputee”) as recorded for the album it’s on (Effloresce, 2003) can be found here, the acoustic version I got the chords from is here. In this case there was no actual meter and the number of syllables per line varies a lot in English already as well, so I only had to keep it about equal, but not strictly equal. I made a PDF that contains interlinear glosses of the lyrics, though the text there deviates slightly from the recording because I misread occasionally.

I already did the same for a Foo Fighters song, so you may want to know if there’s more to follow — No, nothing planned. Why I chose these songs? Because I kind of liked them.