May Street Tapes - Good Night Prayers. Ojcze nasz, Our Father

Marty converted family audiotape to .mp3 sound files for us. This one is JPZ's recording of Johnny saying his prayers.

First up, from 0:00 to 0:54, is the Our Father. Towards the end we hear his mother's, Eleanor's, voice, as she helps him read, or perhaps recall from memory, ale, meaning "but" - as in "but deliver us from evil."

from the blog of Nikki Prša

The Gospel writers describe, in Matthew 6 and in Luke 11, Christ teaching his followers to pray with him to their mutual divine Father. Hence the name "The Lord's Prayer".

This prayer has been translated into quite a few languages; here we take a look at the Polish.

niebo, neuter noun, "the sky", "heaven";

w niebie, locative case, "in heaven";

niebieski, adjective, "blue", "heavenly", "celestial";   etymology niebo + ski, hence "from or of the sky or the heavens";

król, masculine noun, "crown";

królestwo, neuter noun, "kingdom";

naszym winowajcom, from masculine noun winowajca, "culprit", "wrongdoer", the dative case, hence "forgive of us the wrongdoer-ness".  I suppose. How do normal people spend their time? I spend a lot of time puzzling over little mysteries of this kind.

zły, masculine noun, "evil", "badness", "anger";
złego, the genitive singular, "of or from evil".

So, John, have you any memories of this recording session? Were you reading or reciting?

Which was your first language, English or Polish? Usually there is a very first language in a person's life.

Some years ago we heard a story from friends about a clinical psychology case in which a child did not speak. Clinical detective work revealed that the parents wanted to help their firstborn learn languages, so Mom spoke to the child always in one language, and Dad always in another. Well! The child became convinced that each person had to invent his own language. The project was understandably taking him some time.

Next post, I don't know what to do, so I'll just make a Hail Mary Pass.  Har! Har!

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At the website, you can go to the right sidebar and find a long alphabetic list of search terms, called in Blogger "labels". You can search, for example, on "Eleanor" or "Johnny" to retrieve all posts bearing those labels.

This is the second "May Street Tapes" post. The first one is here.