So I was watching the movie “Gladiator”. MMM… mindless violence, men in short shorts and lotsa blood. Yummy.
But I really liked the music. Especially this one. And I want to know what the words are. I tried doing the whole yiddish-english translator thing, but these are all in english letters, and the translators only work in the actual hebrew letters. But I knew shalom was yiddish, so… yeah. Anyone willing to help me out? The lyrics are here…
Anol shalom
Anol sheh lay konnud de ne um {shaddai}
Flavum
Nom de leesh
Ham de nam um das
La um de
Flavne…
We de ze zu bu
We de sooo a ru
Un va-a pesh a lay
Un vi-I bee
Un da la pech ni sa
(Aaahh)
Un di-I lay na day
Un ma la pech a nay
Mee di nu ku
(Fast tempo, 4 times)
La la da pa da le na da na
Ve va da pa da le na la dumda
Anol shalom
Anol sheh ley kon-nud de ne um.
Flavum.
Flavum.
M-ai shondol-lee
Flavu… {Live on…}
Lof flesh lay
Nof ne
Nom de lis
Ham de num um dass
La um de
Flavne…
Flay
Shom de nomm
Ma-lun des
Dwondi.
Dwwoondi
Alas sharum du koos
Shaley koot-tum.
I figured if you like, sound it out, and speak it, you would know what it meant…
The consensus of this thread (represented by this post) is that while the lyrics contain words from Hebrew & various Latinate languages, it has no coherent meaning as the singer Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance was kinda making them up as she went along.
Right. I don’t know how Yiddish speakers would feel about my saying this, but Yiddish is essentially a dialect of German transcribed using Hebrew letters. I speak German a bit and can understand some Yiddish, but not Hebrew because it’s completely different.
I figure Yiddish is more of a creole than it is a dialect, much like the French spoken in Haiti. Ladino is another example of the phenomenon - it was the language spoken by the Sephardic Jews both before and after their expulsion from Spain in 1492.
I was also going to say it was quite a bit of a howler for a film set in the era of the Roman Empire to use Yiddish at all, since the language didn’t make an appearance until a thousand years later.
Well, don’t I feel like an idiot… Well, I figured that Shalom was hebrew, and I didn’t know that Yiddish and hebrew were 2 different languages. But yeah thanks. I’m kinda dissapointed that there aren’t any you know, Deep meanins to the words. Its a damned good song though.