Italian, Spanish, French??????

[Monica]

Does anybody know what language it is? And what does it mean?

"Mai voueli vieure pamens:
La vido es tant bello!"

Thanks in advance :D

[Snukes]

Oooh, puzzle! It looks a bit like archaic french, but just for fun I stuck it into babelfish to see what came up for italian and spanish. Here's the results:

Spanish: "Mai vouéli vièure pamens: The life is tant beautiful"
Italian: "Never vouéli vièure pamens: The vida es tant beautiful"

IF it was some sort of archaic french, here's my best guess (other francophones have an opinion?)

Mai: the month of May, or mais (but)
vouéli: vouloir (to desire), or vouer (to swear)?
vieure: vieux (old), vieillir (to grow old)?
pamens: pâmer (to swoon, hehe)?
vido/vida: vide (void) vie (life)?
es: etre (to be/is)
tant: so, so much
bello: belle/beau

Which could translate, then as...

"May desires to grow old and swoon: life is so beautiful!"

or

"But the desire to grow old swoons: the void is so beautiful!"

hahahaha! Okay, so it's a rather failed attempt. Someone else care to try?

The other possibility is that the guy who said/wrote this was being intentionally noncommital toward any particular language... Where did you find it?

[Monica]

It's a motto to chapter 5 of Alphonse Allais's "Un drama bien parisien". And it was written by Auguste Marin.
Thanks for the repy. It does make sense ;)

[Snukes]

That's where I found it too. I was just wondering if the Marin quote had a more specific origine.

[crisaor]

La vido es tant bello!"
Thanks in advance :D
That's an attempt at spanish. Not a good one, though. Vido means nothing. Vida, on the other hand, is "life". Bello/bella means "beautiful". So, it would read as la vida es tan bella, which means "life is so beautiful".

[subterranean]

Vita e bella, La?

Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giustino Durano ;)

[Tabac]

That's an attempt at spanish. Not a good one, though. Vido means nothing. Vida, on the other hand, is "life". Bello/bella means "beautiful". So, it would read as la vida es tan bella, which means "life is so beautiful".

Could it be Catalan? Perhaps Rumanian.

[crisaor]

Could be. I wouldn't know though.

[Koa]

Infact the 'es tant bello' bit strongly reminds me of Catalan... Or it could also be some language called Interlingua if I'm not wrong that is an invented langauge like Esperanto but based on romance languages...
Or a bad attempt at Spanish or Italian, as crisaor put it (someone remembered La vita è bella...)

I am a quite frequent visitor to a languages forum, I might ask about this there and I'm sure someone will have a sure reply.

[Monica]

When I asked my friend who knows French she told me the qoute is probably in Italian and when I asked a friend who knows Italian she told me it is probably in French :) Confusion all around :D

[Koa]

I got THE answer: it's a french dialect!


Here is the answer :

It's indeed Provençal. Franco-Provençal is spoken in the region of Haute Savoie/ Savoie as a dialect called Savoisien. The sentence here is in Southern Provençal called Provençal (the language spoken by Frédéric Mistral, the only French author who wrote in Provençal).

It means :

"Yet I want to live : life is so beautiful"

[Monica]

Gee, I didn't suspect it was such a complicated language :eek: . Now it makes a lot of sense, it fits to the whole story. Thanks :)

[Maxos]

My fair ladies

How can't you know provençal poetry?

Petrarch studied it very hard, so much that it is regarded as the beginning of modern lyric.

[rashkolnikov]

it's definitly neither spanish nor italian