Does anybody know what Freddie is singing in the Queen song “Mustapha” (first song on first side of “Jazz”)? At first, I thought he was singing in Arabic–what with the references to Allah and “salaam alekum.” But my husband (who has studied some Arabic) tells me that he’s not. So I figured that it might be Farsi that he’s singing in (since Freddie was Farsi). I have tried to find translations of the lyrics on the web but all I know about the song is that it’s supposed to be a joke (this according to an Iranian Queen fansite).
Any Farsi majors out there that can help me decipher Freddie ???
Since links to sights that contain full lyrics have a way of disappearing, I’ll back up the sight and say that’s about as far as my arabic-speaking roomate in college got: Mustapha Ibrahim is a guy’s name, Salaam Aleikum is a greating in Arabic, Aleikum Salaam the response, and a bunch of stuff about god being great and all that.
Aha. My speciality. I shall endeavor to do my best.
First off: nitpick
“since Freddie was Farsi”
Farsi is not a word used to describe speakers of Farsi. Farsi is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran (the national language) parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
If a person speaking Farsi is from Iran, you could call them Iranian or Persian.
Secondly: nitpick
Someone would probably major in “Modern Persian” rather than Farsi.
“The rest of the song is in the unidentified language. **I assume it is Parsi partly because of Freddie’s family background, and partly because an Iranian friend was able to recognise about one word in ten (!) and of course the Parsis were the original Persians and their language is presumably related to modern Persian (Farsi). **I have recently checked with a cousin who speaks excellent Arabic and he assured me that it is definitely NOT Arabic.”
bolding mine
Farsi (the language) is not the same as as Parsi (what was described in the link provided by the previous poster). It’s not entirely accurate to say that '…Parsis were the original Persians…"
I seem to recall reading an interview with Freddie right after Jazz came out and someone asked him about it. His response was “It is complete gibberish. It isn’t any language at all except in a few spots.”
BTW, the show during the Jazz tour was pretty good, but the show during the NOTW tour was fantastic.
Actually, Azeri is very closely related to Turkish, not to Farsi (although I imagine there is some borrowing of words back and forth, given the geographic proximity of the areas where the languages are spoken). On the early Soviet censuses, the Azeris were referred to as “Turks.”
There are, however, several million ethnic Azeris who live in Iran, mostly in the northern part.
An added point, Anahita doesn’t give enough credit to the Farsi language group. It is also spoken in somewhat divergent forms in Central Asia, above Afghanistan. I’m too lazy to check the detials at present, but as I recall Tadjikstan, Kyrgizstan and Turkmenistan as well. Probably some speakers kicking around in Kazakhstan I would imagine. As I recall farsi dialects were the language of the elite in the region.
Tajik is a Farsi-based language; Kyrgiz and Turkmen are Turkic languages (as is Kazakh). The subject of which Central Asian peoples are of Persian stock and which are of Turkic stock is highly politicized hotly debated these days in the region…and there is much ethnic intermixing and interspersing of peoples in Central Asia, which is one of the reasons why Afghanistan is such a Godawful mess.
Well, this is certainly straying far away from the late Mr. Mercury, but as this touches on the subject of my master’s thesis, if anyone wants to start a related thread, I’ll take a crack at it.
Oops, Uzbek is Turkic too. How dare I forget the Uzbeks!
There are others floating around, but those are the major ones in the FSU. (Tatar and Bashkir are also Turkic, but spoken mainly in the Russian Federation. There are piles of other Turkic languages with less speakers in the FSU, especially in the North Caucasus, but the above are the biggies.)
To be clear, I am aware Uzbek, Kyrgiz, Turkmen are all Turkic lang., however to my understanding on past reading, Farsi dialects were prevalent in the entire region in urban centers as elite languages (obviously pre Sov.). I also understood there remained speakers scattered throughout the region to this day.
I would be interested in knowing if this picture, based on superficial readings, is correct.
Well, Collounsbury, I would make no presumptions what your knowledge level in this area is, but thought it was possible that other readers might be interested in the answer, too. And as I remember from grad school (although I focused far more on contemporary language/ethnicity issues than on the pre-Soviet period), yep, various versions of Farsi were much more common as languages of learning throughout the region in pre-Soviet times than they are now, and were used much more in the intellectual realm than the various Turkic vernaculars.
And yes, speakers of Farsi/Tajik/whatever you want to call it are somewhat interspersed throughout the region, with some pockets rather more concentrated than others. Notably, in border areas between Afghanistan/Tajikistan and such (look on a map at the area where northern Tajikistan, far western Kyrgyzstan, and far eastern Uzbekistan kind of swirl around each other, south of Zhambyl, on the Kazakh/Kyrgyz border on my atlas), things get very messy. Also, Farsi-based languages are spoken in the North Caucasus by the Ossetians, and also by the Tats (sometimes known as Mountain Jews).
If you want to be a really hardcore FSU language geek, I’ll dig around for a link to the CIA’s ethnolinguistic map of the North Caucasus…it’s a bit out of date by now, especially in re: the Chechens, but still the clearest thing I’ve found to date. It’s on the U. of Texas site somewhere, among other places. But it’s getting late, and I’m getting lazy; if anyone’s curious, I’ll poke around for it in the morning.
Not that any of this has much to do with Freddie Mercury, but what the heck…
This reminds me of the attempts by songwriter-musician George Calden, who specializes in international music, to learn the meaning of the the lyrics to the song “Shama Shama”, sung by a restaurant band in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. Calden played a recording of the song to Turks, Arabs, and Greeks, but no one recognized the words. Finally, he wrote to Neil Simon himself, who admitted that the lyrics were gibberish that he made up.
Freddie Mercury was indeed born Farroukh Bulsara. However, while his ancestry may have Azerbaijani (or Farsi, or Iranian) Zoroastrians, his surname indicates that for the last several generations, his family (or at least, his father’s family), had settled in the city of Valsad (old name Bulsar) in Gujarat, India. Hisparents may have immigrated to Zanzibar at some point, and from there to England.