Re: OT: Looking for Dutch children's song
| From: | Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, June 1, 2008, 18:24 |
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I'll send it to a good friend of mine who lives in Friesland. He 'll probably know
the song, or can understand it from what you wrote...
Ingmar
On Sun, 1 Jun 2008 12:35:59 -0500, Chris Peters
<beta_leonis@...> wrote:
>Sorry for the bad formatting in my previous email. Let's try this again so
maybe it reads better!
>
>
>
>Greetings to all! I'm looking for assistance from any Dutch or Frisian speakers
on the list. Because it's off-topic to the list, I'd like to invite anyone to
respond to my personal email instead of the entire list ...
>I'm not a fluent Dutch speaker (in fact, I know very little Dutch at all beyond
the basics). But my grandmother is the daughter of a Dutch immigrant, and
she was raised as an "American Dutch girl" in Iowa. She just celebrated her
94th birthday, and we've seen a decline in her mental faculties over the last
decade or so. But one thing she still remembers -- are the old children's songs
that she heard as a girl from her father. She remembered one song well
enough that she could even sing it to my two-month-old daughter when we
came to visit recently -- both in Dutch and English!
>Unfortunately, because of her mental condition, she wasn't able to write the
song down. But she dictated the original words (along with what I think is a
non-literal English translation) to my mother, who did her best to write down
the Dutch sounds phonetically. We have no idea if her phonetic guesses are
even close to the original Dutch words. Another complication: the language
might not actually be Dutch, but Frisian, since her father came to Iowa from
Ternaard, in Friesland. But whichever language it is, I'd like to find the original
words to the song, as well as a more literal English translation.
>Here goes our best attempt at writing down the song. (I'm mostly going with
the phonetic spelling from my mother's transcription, rather than guessing
what the true words were. I have a basic clue about Dutch spelling, but I
don't know a wit about Frisian, so I'd rather not even try.)
>
>Original Dutch(?):
>Suza nona Popkin -- (popkje?)Kelta lyin gropka -- (gropkje?)Mam in huis
Sofear van hoosSee caneet verrupke(Zij kan niet?)
>
>English gloss:
>Just a little calf,thereLying in the straw thereMother and father so far from
the houseThey can't hear him crying
GoodCause