Re: CHAT: Ave Maria

From: "BP Jonsson"

> At 13:59 01.7.2000 -0700, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
> >My German one offers: "Gegrüßet seist du, Holdselige! Der Herr ist mit
dir,
> >du Gebenedeiete unter den Weibern." I don't know all of the connotative
>       ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> A typo for "gebegnaedigte", I take it.
Nope (I didn't think my Fraktur was *that* bad :)). Two separate dictionary
sources give "benedeien" as "bless" and "begnadigen" (no umlaut) as "pardon,
have mercy on" ("Gnade" translates as "mercy, favor, or grace").

> >My Swedish one seems to parallel the Vulgate the closest (and perhaps the
> >Greek; I can't comment), giving (in Fraktur and antiquated spellings):
> >"Hell, full med nåd; Herren är med dig; wälsignad du ibland qwinnor."
"Full
> >of grace" and lack of copula in the "Blessed art thou among women" part.
>
> Wow, that must be the Karl XII Bible!  It has been doubly superceded, in
fact!

I'm quite sure I don't know. It proclaims to be a "Sjelf-förklarande Svensk
Bibel", published in 1889 in Philadelphia (illuminated to the nines). How
that fits in to contemporary Swedish Bible history, I don't know. My
step-mother's ancestry is Swedish on her father's side, good Lutherans all.
When my step-mother's parents went into eldercare and sold their house last
year, as the only one in the family who could even *feign* to understand the
texts, I scoffed, with permission, boxes of old Swedish texts (Sunday school
books, bibles, Bible stories, dictionaries, Sigurds Kaleidoskop, Konung
Oskar II: Hans Lif och Verksamhet, and even a copy of Onkel Toms Stuga) out
of the basement, published here in the States around the turn of the
century, presumably for newly arrived Swedish Americans. I had started
studying Swedish on my own before this little coup, out of deference to the
ancestry and the fact that I'm a linguophile, but doubting that perusing
Swedish archaisms is a springboard into linguistic competency, I try to
balance it by reading stuff that's been published in, say, the last thirty
years.

Kou