Doxology

When Catholics and Protestants pray the Our Father together, there's usually an awkward moment at the end when the Catholics stop praying and the Protestants carry on. That's because we treat the doxology separately from the prayer itself. I recall seeing a footnote in one bible of mine that said that the doxology wasn't found in the earliest texts, which probably explains it in part. In a mass, they're both said quite close together anyhow. I don't intend to do a proper analysis of the doxology here, but I'll give a Young's Literal Translation style treatment.

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

Tuo è il regno, tua la potenza
e la gloria nei secoli.

'Yours is the reign, yours the power and the glory in the ages.'

e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male. #2

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

in

I'm not sure if there's even a corresponding Italian word for 'into', here they use 'in', meaning 'into', in any case.

liberaci

The imperative of 'liberare' ('liberate', 'free') and the same pronoun as last time, meaning 'us' - 'liberaci'

(il) male

Now, I haven't really checked this, but it often happens that in Italian, if you stick the definite article before an adjective, it works thusly:

bello - il bello
beautiful - the beautiful one

In the biblical Greek, I seem to recall, you can legitimately translate into English as 'deliver us from evil' and 'deliver us from the evil one', so I wouldn't be surprised (even though 'male' means 'badly' and consequently is an adverb rather than an adjective) if the Italian gives the same pleasing ambiguity.

Amen.

e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,
e non ci indurre in tentazione, ma liberaci dal male.

non indurre

The negative form of the imperative using the 'tu' form (that is, 'you' - familiar) is spectacularly easy: you put 'non', which usually means 'not', in front of the infinitive (usually the -are, -ere, and -ire forms of the verb) and you're done.

'indurre' means 'induce' or 'lead', so 'non indurre' means 'don't lead'.

ci

It seems I can't get away with not running through the direct object pronouns. We looked at 'lo', 'la', 'li' and 'le' last time. I shall have to fill in the gaps. Here's the table again:

Subject Pronouns	Unstressed Direct Object Pronouns	Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns	Stressed Indirect Object Pronouns
io	mi	mi	a me
tu	ti	ti	a te
lui	lo	gli	a lui
lei	la	le	a lei
Lei	La	Le	a Lei
noi	ci	ci	a noi
voi	vi	vi	a voi
loro	li, le	gli	a loro

So the 'ci' we have here is the one in bold above, and means 'us'.

The News from Lake Wobegon...

...where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

I was introduced to Garrison Keillor through BBC 7 radio, who started broadcasting his shows, a mix of music, storytelling, sketches and other shenanigans a little while ago in England. He is an American with a very soothing voice, and one of my favourite sections of his shows was The News from Lake Wobegon, where he talks about the goings on in his hometown.

Now it's available as a podcast. Hooray!

come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti
come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori,

noi

We've come across 'noi' before, with the first verb conjugation. I won't check, but I will have said that even though 'noi rimettiamo' means 'we remit', the 'noi' part meaning 'we', usually the 'noi' would be omitted.

In this case it isn't left out. Our forgiveness is dependent on the fact that we "forgive [our] brother from [our] heart", and consequently the 'noi' emphasises that we have to forgive before we can expect any forgiveness from God.

li

More pronouns for you:

lo, la, li, le

Those are some unstressed direct object pronouns. There are more, but these ones can be looked at together quite independently, so I will.

You remember I hope that direct objects are the ones directly affected by the verb? That is, in the following example, the word 'it' is the direct object.

He gave it to me.

'lo' and 'la' can both be translated as it, but 'lo' can also mean 'him', and 'la' can also mean 'her'. Of course, you use 'lo' where the pronoun stands for something masculine, and 'la' for something feminine.

More simply, 'li' and 'le' can both be translated as 'them', referring to both people and things. 'li' for masculine (in the plural), and 'le' for feminine (in the plural.

So 'li' means 'them'. 'li' here stands for the 'debiti' that we forgive our debtors.

Sunday: Autism

Just a little note to say that there's an item on autism in Sunday this week, involving a minister with an autistic son, on the issue of pre-natal screening. I don't know if I'm recommending it as such, but I thought perhaps Neil or someone else might like to know.

St. Anthony

A little while ago, James blogged about a tradition of marking homes with blessed chalk for Epiphany, and that, being Catholics in (post-post-modern?) England, they had no idea about it until it was too late for this year. (I imagine that further google-based research resulted in him finding this.)

I think it was Ella who then asked me via e-mail (I imagine a hopeful tone in her voice) whether we at least did it here in Catholic-land. (We didn't.)

Rather, in England, you've (presumably) all missed out on the St. Anthony celebrations!

The Italians seem to like St. Anthony, and celebrate his feast in various ways, none of which is on English wikipedia, so maybe I'll put something there.

The first thing, chronologically, would be that many hundreds, and thousands, and other units of number, of bread rolls are made, by hand if I understand correctly, by volunteers for the occasion, blessed in the churches and distributed door to door. It's customary to give an offering to the parish, and you then get a number in the raffle (I know, I know) with such solidly Italian prizes as meat and wine.

The rolls are basically eaten just like any other bread rolls would be at dinner, with the cold meats, and used as a means for recovering residual olive oil from one's plate. I was told this, but the idea that blessed bread would probably have some kind of low-key ceremony was quite fixed in my mind, so I waited to see what everybody else did with theirs before I committed myself. If I had any sense I would have taken some photos of all this, but it seems that I don't.

It was good bread.

You also get fried sweets around this time, a bit like doughnuts. Castagnole, they're called, and Monica and her Mum made some. The closest thing I can think of is ring-doughnuts, but perhaps they're a little more dense, and the dough is flavoured somehow.

Next thing would be that, after the 11:00 mass, people come to the piazza to have their stuff blessed. I use the word "stuff" for exactitude. St. Anthony would seem to be a patron of quite a lot of things. People bring their pets to be blessed (with those holy water sprinkly things) because he's the patron of all animals. Some of the dogs didn't seem to want to bless each other though. Children bring their toys to be blessed - I don't know why. People also bring their tractors. Until the moment I actually saw them I thought I had perhaps misunderstood, for I had been advised of this also, but no, there were proper agricultural tractors parked up by the piazza for the holy water treatment. Again, no photos - silly me. Because this is Italy, while a hardcore group of people tried to listen to the blessing and the prayers and work out when they were meant to cross themselves, the rest got down to the serious business of having a chat.

Later on in the same day was a little, um, event, in the youth club. There was more than one apprently. We went to the one that was not marked out as being for youth. There were many older Italian ladies there. I was certainly bucking the trend. There were some drinks and slices of pizza and cake and stuff, and a man performing Italian folk music for people to dance to. He had a squeezebox. From what I hear of Italian folk music, it's mostly more cheery and cheesy than ours, and I daresay it's identical to the kind of thing they play in the tourist traps.

And that's the way we roll around here.

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e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,
e rimetti a noi i nostri debiti

e

'e' means 'and'

rimetti

'rimettere' is a verb that means lots of things. One of the things it means is relatively similar to the English, 'remit' This clearly isn't the most quotidian verb in this sense, but the verb it's formed from, 'mettere' is, and apparently it's regular, so I'll give you the conjugation.

Now, there's something I ommitted to mention previously, when I said that 'santificare' was a regular verb. The thing is that there is more than one regular verb form. There are 3 (or 4, or even more depending on how you look at it). For the sake of clarity I'll put three examples side by side:
<>

santificare	(ri)mettere	dormire
santifico	(ri)metto	dormo
santifichi	(ri)metti	dormi
santifica	(ri)mette	dorme
santifichiamo	(ri)mettiamo	dormiamo
santificate	(ri)mettete	dormite
santificano	(ri)mettono	dormono

You can see that in the 'I', 'you' and 'we' form, regular verbs conjugate in the same way, but in the other forms there are variations depending on whether the infinitive form ends in '-are', '-ere' or '-ire'.

This 'rimetti' is, again, the imperative form.

a noi

Do you remember when I said that you didn't have to worry about the 'Unstressed' in "Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns"? Well you don't really have to worry about the 'Stressed' in "Stressed Indirect Object Pronouns" either. I'll just add something to the table I gave earlier:
<>

Subject Pronouns	Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns	Stressed Indirect Object Pronouns
io	mi	a me
tu	ti	a te
lui	gli	a lui
lei	le	a lei
Lei	Le	a Lei
noi	ci	a noi
voi	vi	a voi
loro	gli	a loro

All you have to know, for practical purposes, is that 'a noi' means the same thing as the 'ci' to its left: that is '(to) us'.

iBreviary & Praybook

Mark: Apropos of nothing, I just found this rather elaborate comment by a priest with an Italian-looking name wishing to publicise a prayer application he made.

I'm down with that, so I cleaned up the English a bit and gave it its own entry.
-

Dear Sirs,
Editing and Friends of iBreviary,

iBreviary, as you know, is a new application for the iPhone, available immediately in Spanish, French, English, Latin and Italian. iBreviary offers the possibility, simply and in perfect "Apple style", to pray on the go with the prayers of the Breviary.

It also offers the readings of the Mass of the day, as well as the principal Catholic prayers. The application, created by me together with the technician and developer Dimitri Giani, has received the praise and the encouragement of the Vatican.

iBreviary has now reached its third update. This update brings important changes:
- application available in Italian and English versions
- available readings in English, French, Spanish, Latin and in the Ambrosian Rite
- possibility to pray the Compieta of the previous day

The application is available from the app store for the price of 79 cents (Euro) which will go to charity. (www.dimix.it/ibreviary)

Also, Facebook will have its own "digital Breviary". Its name is "Praybook" and it's available as an application on the most important social networking site in the world. The application allows online prayer with the same prayers as iBreviary.

Thanks for everything.
father Paolo Padrini
www.dimix.it/ibreviary

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Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.
Dacci oggi il nostro pane quotidiano,

Dacci

'Dacci' is actually two words contracted. The first comes from 'dare', yet another common irregular verb:

dare	(to) give, giving
(io) do	I give
(tu) dai	you give
(lui/lei/Lei) dà	he/she/it gives (you give)
(noi) diamo	we give
(voi) date	you give (plural)
(loro) danno	they give

'da'!' or 'dai!' is the imperative form for 'dare' in 'tu' (the familiar you). That is to say, it's how you tell, or ask, someone you're on familiar terms with to give something. 'dai' is pronounced fairly similarly to 'die' in English, and can be used to mean 'come on!', so during the world cup, when it sounded like Monica was urging death upon the Italian team, she was really egging them on.

You may have noticed I put the personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, it) back on the Italian side above. There's a reason for that:
<>

Subject Pronouns	Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns
io	mi
tu	ti
lui	gli
lei	le
Lei	Le
noi	ci
voi	vi
loro	gli

"Unstressed Indirect Object Pronouns" just spells "fun", right? I'm honestly trying to make this as painless as possible. Don't worry about the "Unstressed" part anyway. And for what it's worth, German, Koine Greek and (if I'm not mistaken) Latin are far worse when it comes to this part of grammar.

It's called case. Italian here is a bit like English in that you don't usually have to worry about case, but you do when it comes to pronouns. Have another table:

I	me
you	you
he	him
she	her
it	it
we	us
they	them

That's essentially the English equivalent of the above. With any luck it'll make what I'm about to say make a little more sense. Take a look at this:

'He threw it to us.'

Who's doing the throwing? - He is.
What's being thrown? - It is.
Who's it being thrown to? - To us.

The first is called the subject - it's the thing or person that performs the action of the verb.
The second is a direct object - it's the thing that the verb is acting on.
The third is an indirect object - there isn't a direct connection to the action of the verb itself.

Each takes into account the function of the word within the sentence, and if you get it wrong you sound like a caveman:

'Him threw it to we.'

It's the same deal with Italian. 'we' would be translated 'noi', and 'to us' would be translated 'ci'

So, you put 'da'!' and 'ci' together, and you (finally) get 'dacci' - 'give us'

oggi

'oggi' means 'today'.

quotidiano

'quotidiano' means 'quotidian'.

The Befana

Well, it's nearly Epiphany, which means the Befana will be setting out shortly:

The Befana comes by night
With her shoes all tattered and torn
She comes dressed in the Roman way
Long life to the Befana!

Here comes, here comes the Befana
she comes from the mountains in the deep of the night
snow and frost surround her
snow and frost and the West wind
here comes, here comes the Befana!

"And just who the hell is the Befana?" you might well ask. Well, wikipedia exists so that I don't have to exert myself too much: La Befana.

Now that's what I call the interpenetration of pagan worship with the cult of the Great Whore of Babylon^TM - woohah!

When I was talking about her with Monica and said that the Befana was a witch, she strenuously denied this, saying that she didn't do magic. When I pointed out that she flies on a broomstick she retorted that Santa Claus has a flying sleigh - which is a fair point.

come in cielo così in terra.

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,
come in cielo così in terra.

come

'come' means 'like' or 'as'.

così

'così' is a very handy word which means 'like this', 'like that', 'thus', 'so' or 'like so'.

in terra

As I've said before, prepositions are rather unpredictable. Whereas it looks as though this means 'in earth', obviously it means 'on earth'. Best not to worry about it too much.

Origami & Biscuits

Mum and Dad got me an origami kit for Christmas, and I made the first one. I haven't managed to make any of the others, the instructions being quite, quite bewildering. Monica said the other day that it doesn't look much like what it's meant to look like. I don't think it's that bad, it looks about as much like it as paper can. I'd be interested to know what you thought this, quite blurry, photo represents.
Jaffa Cakes! Quite pleased with that. Italians have different biscuits to us, and they tend to come in fairly large bags, so you don't like to take the plunge and buy a large bag of unknown biscuits in case they're rotten. Neither do they seem to want to make a Teatime Selection type deal. So, German-made Jaffa Cake clones it is.

venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,

Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome,
venga il tuo regno, sia fatta la tua volontà,

venga

'venga' comes from the verb 'venire', which is quite a handy verb, though irregular:

venire	(to) come, coming
vengo	I come
vieni	you come
viene	he/she/it comes (you come)
veniamo	we come
venite	you come (plural)
vengono	they come

'venga' is a subjunctive form of 'venire', like 'sia', so here it means '(may it) come'.

fatta

'fatta' comes from the verb 'fare', which is an even handier irregular verb:

fare	(to) do/make, doing/making
faccio	I do/make
fai	you do/make
fa	he/she/it does/makes (you do/make)
facciamo	we do/make
fate	you do/make (plural)
fanno	they do/make

'fatto' is the past participle of 'fare', like 'santificato'. That is, it means 'done' or 'made'. Here it's used as an adjective, so it's 'fatta' to agree with 'volontà'.