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Thread: Italian, Spanish, French??????

  1. #1
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    Italian, Spanish, French??????

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

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

    Thanks in advance
    In dreams begin responsibilities.

  2. #2
    Expert Waffler Snukes's Avatar
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    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?
    100,000 lemmings can't be wrong. ~heard from a friend
    Life is the first gift, love is the second, understanding the third. ~ Marge Piercy
    Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God;
    but only he who sees takes of his shoes. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  3. #3
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    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
    In dreams begin responsibilities.

  4. #4
    Expert Waffler Snukes's Avatar
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    That's where I found it too. I was just wondering if the Marin quote had a more specific origine.
    100,000 lemmings can't be wrong. ~heard from a friend
    Life is the first gift, love is the second, understanding the third. ~ Marge Piercy
    Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God;
    but only he who sees takes of his shoes. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  5. #5
    L'artiste est morte crisaor's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Monica
    La vido es tant bello!"
    Thanks in advance
    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".
    Ningún hombre llega a ser lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que lee.
    - Jorge Luis Borges

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    Vita e bella, La?

    Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giustino Durano

  7. #7
    Registered User Tabac's Avatar
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    Possibility

    Quote Originally Posted by crisaor
    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.

  8. #8
    L'artiste est morte crisaor's Avatar
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    Could be. I wouldn't know though.
    Ningún hombre llega a ser lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que lee.
    - Jorge Luis Borges

  9. #9
    Drama Queen Koa's Avatar
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    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.
    dead on the inside, i've got nothing to prove
    keep me alive and give me something to lose

  10. #10
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    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
    In dreams begin responsibilities.

  11. #11
    Drama Queen Koa's Avatar
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    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"
    dead on the inside, i've got nothing to prove
    keep me alive and give me something to lose

  12. #12
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    Gee, I didn't suspect it was such a complicated language . Now it makes a lot of sense, it fits to the whole story. Thanks
    In dreams begin responsibilities.

  13. #13
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    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.

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    it,s definitly not...

    it's definitly neither spanish nor italian

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