What about manele makes them so terrible to the ears of many Romanians?
Manea (plural: manele) is a music style from Romania, generally associated with the Romani (Gypsy) minority, though not exclusively.
The answer: it is a type of music linked to a minority group - the Romi, the țigani, or Gypsies.
What I tell Romanians is that if the lyrics are in Romanian, for me, that's sufficient to consider the songs Romanian. Their opinion, however, is that manele are not Romanian; that this is muzică țigănească, Gypsy music. Non-Romi Romanians dislike the fact that foreigners tend to associate Romania with the Gypsies, and in turn, are not appreciative of the stereotype that all Gypsies come from Romania. Indeed, what many people outside of Romania don't realize is that the Gypsies themselves are a minority within Romania. Without going into a political and social discussion about the reasons why the Romi are marginalized, suffice it to say that they live through the same adverse effects of living in a country as a minority.
If I could make an analogy between manele and a music genre popular in the USA, it would be rap: music associated with a particular minority, and generally dismissed by anyone who is not part of such ethnic group. Undoubtedly, there are also those who, regardless of their ethnicity, enjoy the music genre, and appreciate the piece for what it is: music.
Viața mea e o cafea amară
After that brief explanation about my experience with manele, we shall review an actual manea by Nicolae Guță.
Examples of similarities between the Romance tongues and Latin are accessible and easily found. Discussions about Romanian and Latin, however, are less abundant. For this reason, the title of this manea caught my attention when I compared it to the equivalent in Latin.
Following are the corresponding translations of the song title into various Romance languages and Latin. The word order has been adjusted in the case of the possessive in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese to match more closely with the Romanian; the wording here, unusual otherwise colloquially, is felt as rather poetic or archaic. One major difference, as we will see, is that the word for "coffee" is feminine in Latin and Romanian, but masculine in the rest of Romance. The word for "coffee" in English and in Romance ultimately derives from the Turkish kahve; the word used in the case of Latin is neo-Latin.
| Latin | VITA MEA EST CAFEA AMARA |
| Romanian | Viața mea e o cafea amară |
| Italian | La vita mia è un caffè amaro |
| Spanish | La vida mía es un café amargo |
| Portuguese | A vida minha é um café amargo |
We can see from this example that the Romanian matches almost exactly with the Latin, and, also very closely with the rest of the Romance languages. It is worth noting that the word for "life" in Romanian doesn't come directly from the Latin VITA, but from Vulgar Latin *VIVITIA (coincidentally, I came across a discussion on Wikipedia about the origin of this word in Romanian).
Finally, the song itself, accompanied by a translation by me. Notice in the video that the vowel qualities in Romanian are exceedingly open and back; of particular interest is /a/, which is pronounced [ɑ]. Thanks to this pronunciation, the contrast between /a/ and /ə/ is amplified. The alternation of these two phonemes is frequent and very important in Romanian since it indicates the inclusion or the lack of the feminine definite article, i.e. casă /'kasə/ ['kɑsə], house vs. casa /'kasa/ ['kɑsɑ], the house.
| Nicolae: Viața mea e o cafea amară Ce rea e lumea care ne înconjoară Chinuite sunt zilele mele Și părinții îmi fac numai rele. Nicoleta: Și mama ta, și tatăl tău Și sora, și fratele tău Toți sunt împrotivă mea Nu știu de ce, iubirea mea. Nu-s săracă, nici bogată Sunt la fel ca orice fată Te iubesc cu inima curată. Nicolae: Câteodată îmi vine să mă duc În mare să mă arunc Decât pradă suparării Mai bine pe fundul mării. Câteodată îmi vine să mă duc Și în mare să mă arunc Lângă mine dacă tu nu ești Mai bine ajung hrană la pești. |
Nicolae: My life is bitter coffee How wicked are the people around us My days are painful And my parents cause only trouble. Nicoleta: Your mother, and your father Also your sister, and your brother They're all against me I don't know why, my love I'm not poor, nor rich I'm like any other girl I love you with a pure heart. Nicolae: At times, I feel like going To the sea to throw myself in Rather than falling victim to sadness I'm better off in the depths of the sea. At times, I feel like going To the sea to throw myself in If you are not near me, I'd rather become food for the fish. |
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14 comments:
Analyzing the phonetics of the Romanian language as done here by a gypsy and with a gypsy accent is exactly like analyzing the phonetics of the English language as done by a Jamaican and with a Jamaican accent and presenting it as correct and representative for the respective language.One of the reasons we don"t like this kind of "music" is exactly the way how they mess up our language .If you are interested in Romanian language study the real phonetics and traditional regional accents (graiuri)and specific vocabulary in order to see the evolution from vulgar Latin to old Romanian with its Slavonic add stratum up to modern literary Romanian.
In order for you to understand what I mean,go on you tube and check few of the genuine Romanian folk songs from three different regions:TUDOR GHEORHE,ROBERT TARNAVEANU,NICOLAE FURDUI IANCU,ANCUTA ANGHEL,SOFIA VICOVEANCA,MARIA TANASE...etc.etc....
Clau2002: In the English language, no specific accent is normative. In Jamaica it is correct to speak Standard English with a Jamaican accent (unless you are a foreigner). Similarly, cultivated Houstonians (in Texas) don't speak like cultivated Bostonians (in Massachusetts), nor do they wish to, and vice versa.
@Clau2002: In a perfect world, I would go to Romania, and do a survey of all regional accents, including those heard in Republica Moldova. The phonetic features I described in this post (i.e. the vowel qualities), I can confidently say apply to Romanians in general. I have heard the accents, for example, from the countryside in the Moldova region. There, the vowels are different than what I describe here, but even mentioning or hinting at that is already out of scope for this entry.
If you notice my posts with other languages, I usually pick a topic and focus on that for the given entry. So, who knows, it's probable I will eventually get to discuss more accents from Romania in more detail.
To continue with the example of rap music in English, imagine I'm taking a rap song and discussing the accent heard in the song. Certainly, you can argue that the singer's accent is African-American, and that they use "non-standard" vocabulary and constructions; nonetheless, that does not stop you from making observations about their American accent.
Maybe it's simply a kind of music they don't relate to at all. I personally like flamenco and I don't have a problem with it being considered as the epitome of Spanish identity (nor anybody I know) but I can't really relate culturally to the lyrics nor with the language used, not to mention that there are many singers whose music is directly associated with lifestyles that are anything but "healthy". Those are my two cents in this discussion.
I found the tune catchy though ;).
John Cowan:It seems you didn"t get my point.When you study french(as a foreigner) you don"t study creole french and you don"t learn to speak it as is spoken by other foreigners.You study the language as spoken by natives.I have learned in school standard English grammar and pronunciation and not the English as spoken by an Italian a German or Texan for that matter.So I believe it is only fair that Filius Lunae should discuss the Romanian language as spoken by Romanians and not as spoken by gypsies,Hungarians,Germans or any other minorities that live in Romania.
Filius Lunae:I am Romanian myself and I am pretty sure that the way the gypsies pronounce Romanian language is nowhere close to any regional genuine pronunciation of natives.According to your logic if a tango is sung in English it stops being an Argentinian song and becomes an American song hence as long as the words are in Romanian it must be Romanian music not gypsy music.Are you aware that all these"manele" are sung all over central Europe and Balkans in local languages by local gypsies?
Dear Clau, there are nationalities, and then there are ethnic groups. You seem to be confusing the two. By what you're saying, then I should never make observations about the speech of Jennifer Lopez in English, for instance, because she's Puerto Rican and speaks Spanish, or of Nelly Furtado in the case of Canadian English because her whole family is from the Açores, Portugal, and speaks Portuguese with her parents. While it is true that, in the US to continue with the example, each ethnic group may develop certain unique pronunciation characteristics, that doesn't make them any less American. They were born here, they speak the languages like natives, even if their parents do not, period; they're American. Nicolae Guță was born in Romania, and that makes him Romanian, regardless of his ethnicity; Romi-Romanian, if you wish, but Romanian nonetheless. Again, this being a blog concerned with linguistics, I am leaving out the socio-political aspects relating to this, like I say in my post, but I am aware of how the Romi's way of living is portrayed.
If you were to suggest that same argument for an ethnic group in the US, it would be considered border-line racist. If they're born in your country, regardless of any social problems linked to them, they're still your compatrioți; and even if their accent has its own quirks here and there, they are as much of a native speaker as you are (for those who were born and raised in the country, of course).
Cred că am explicat tot ce trebuie explicat, dar dacă dorești să continuăm discuția, să știi că poți să scrii și în română.
Clau, your teachers may have told you, or implied to you, that they were teaching you "standard pronunciation", but there is simply no such thing when it comes to English. There is standard syntax and morphology and all the other elements, but Standard English can be pronounced in any of dozens of ways, all of which are equally valid.
Filius Lunae:You seem to remember that the gypsies speak their own language(romani)only when is convenient to political correctness.What you don"t seem to accept is that they speak "romani" among themselves and on average they do not have a good command of the ROMANIAN language since very few of them bother to go to school and study it at least at basic level.Your examples about American pop stars are irrelevant here.The point is that whoever wants to analyse english phonetics does not take as reference the Pakistani English but English spoken as first language or mother tongue .Bottom line is exactly that as English is the second language for Pakistanis as well as Nelly Furtado or Jenifer Lopez,Romanian is second language for gypsies too.
John Cowan:Why do you presume that only because some rule is true and applies to English language,it must apply to all other languages?At a closer look the English speaking world is quite limited.It does not apply to French or Italian and definItely does not apply to Romanian as far as I know.Could it apply to Russian or Chinese?...I don"t know, do you?
Clau: It was you who introduced the comparison to Jamaican English, and I have thus far confined my remarks to English. Certainly French, Italian, Russian, and Chinese have normative accents (although hexagonal French is not normative in Quebec).
Pluricentric standard languages are not rare or exceptional. Romansh has a single standard written form, and Norwegian has two, but no one speaks them. Instead, people speak their local dialects, with differences in syntax and vocabulary as well as pronunciation. (The Romansh dialects are written, mostly for poetry.) Finland-Swedish is one of the official languages of Finland; it shares a written form with the Swedish of Sweden, but otherwise differs greatly.
German has a single written form, and a standard spoken variety within most of Germany, but the spoken standard does not extend to Bavaria (for the most part) or Austria, still less to Switzerland, where people speak local varieties so different from standard German as to be separate languages. Portuguese has not only separate spoken languages in Portugal and Brazil, but separate written forms (not merely in spelling, like American English vs. British English) as well.
Another Romanian point of view:
Gipsies are Romanians, they speak Romanian, and their level depends, like for the Romanians, on their studies and social level. There are Gipsies (and Romanians) who speak very good Romanian, there are Gipsies (and Romanians) who speak it badly. Most of the Romanians speak a very bad Romanian, with a lot of errors (Gipsies also, but let's not forget about the Romanians who don't speak&write correctly their own native language!).
About the accent: there is no "Romanian accent". As there is no "French accent", or Italian accent. There is a way to speak Romanian in Dobrogea a way to speak Romanian in Oltenia. Every person has its own Romanian and its own accent.
I am not a Romanian teacher, but I gave some Romanian lessons to foreigners and, I have to admit, I didn't (and wouldn't) use Guţă & his manele to teach it, but if you like it, it's ok. I see no major linguistic problem in it. (Yes, sometimes there might be some grammar errors, but it's the same kind that you would hear in the street, in Romania.)
The advantage is that it's a very simple language, easy to understand for a beginner - which is not the case with Tudor Gheorghe, for example.
Sorry for my English. :)
Diacritica:Gypsies.Hungarians,Germans and all other minorities living in Romania are Romanian citizens but they are not Romanians,otherwise they would not be minorities.They all have their mother tongue which is different from Romanian and basically they learn to speak Romanian as a second language.This is the reason why the way they speak it is greatly influenced by their mother tongue regardless of their educational level.Herta Muller"s Romanian is influenced by her German mother tongue(the dialect spoken in Banat).In his posts Filius Lunae is analysing Romanian in relation to the other Romance languages.He is not analysing Gypsy(Roma)language nor the specific way they blend Romanian features in their language and the way the Gypsies pronounce Romanian words.Mistakes made by Romanians are due to poor education,but most mistakes made by Hungarians,Gypsies,Ukrainians and others when they speak Romanian are due to the differences between Romanian and their respective languages.These posts have nothing to do with teaching Romanian to foreigners nor with musical tastes but with the evolution of romance languages from Latin.
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