Re: OT: What language is this?

On Oct 21, 2008, at 2:52 PM, Philip Newton wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 21:41, Jörg Rhiemeier
> <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>> Hallo!
>>
>> Does anyone know which language this song:
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BLBkepCL4c
>>
>> is in? The title says it was Sanskrit, but I am pretty sure
>> it isn't. After all, Sanskrit has predominantly polysyllabic
>> words and is recognizably similar to Greek and Latin.
>
> Segmenting an unknown spoken language into words is notoriously
> difficult, so number of syllables is hard to determine.
>
> Judging by the info at the right, the subtitles, and what I heard in
> the first half, I wouldn't be surprised if it was Sanskrit rendered in
> Chinese phonology and then sung by a Chinese speaker who had no idea
> what real Sanskrit sounds like.
One of the comments says it's the 100-syllable Sanskrit Vajrasattva
mantra. I believe it is, as you say, the mantra pronounced as Chinese
(quite possibly put through a Tibetan filter first!).

There's a page about the mantra here <http://www.visiblemantra.org/
vajrasattva.html>. The first line transliterated in subtitles in the
video is:

weng ban za sa duo sa ma ya ma nu ba la ya

-- which matches the beginning of the mantra according to the webpage --

oṃ va jra sa ttva sa ma yam a nu pā la ya

-- closely.

It's quote a pretty song too, and I noticed that Ding Ding seems to
pronounce a lot of the <a>s as /ar`/ or something like that. Why
would that be?

Reply