Angelus: Adjectives + Imperative – Ave, o Maria…

●¹ Ave, o Maria, piena di grazia, il Signore è con te. #twitterangelus #it
— Mark Dobson (@MarkTSoaPM) 31 gennaio 2013

@marktsoapm 1 Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori, adesso e nell'ora della nostra morte. Amen. #twitterangelus #it
— Mark Lambert (@sitsio) 31 gennaio 2013

The (Twitter-friendly) text of the Angelus in Italian.
A (hasty) recording of the Angelus in Italian.

ave

Well, no mystery here: it's ave in much the same way as the Latin, "hail". I looked it up in Treccani just to be sure that it didn't have some kind of hidden significance, but apparently not: "used [...] as a form of greeting and well-wishing"

o

Again, nothing complicated here, except for the fact that it's a homograph for the Italian word for "or". The same as "O" before a name in English; an archaic way of signalling the vocative, O reader.

piena

These are the adjectives in the Angelus:

pieno - full
santo - holy (saint)
degno - worthy (dignity)
eterno - eternal
perpetuo - perpetual

(mio - my)
tuo - your
suo - his/her/its
nostro - our
(vostro - your [plural])
(loro - their)

benedetto - blessed (benediction)
fatto - done, made

I didn't write specifically on adjectives last time, but this mostly covers it. This time I added in the remaining possessive forms.

The last two adjectives are based on verbs, as with santificato here. From the Latin benedicere (bene 'well' + dicere 'say'), to bless, comes benedire in Italian. Dire remains the Italian verb meaning 'to say', and its irregular past participle is detto. The irregular past participle of fare (to do/make) is fatto.

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Mnemosyne

I suppose there’s an outside possibility that you won’t find this very interesting, but I’ve found some new spaced repetition software! Woo!

I was using MemoryLifter for a long time, and I like knowing the methodology involved, but the software had a couple of disadvantages: I could only use it at home (difficult with toddler), and there was no way of using it to learn various things together or apart e.g. you either lump Greek and Italian vocab together or manually switch between different ‘learning modules’ – way too clunky.

With Mnemosyne, on the other hand, you can install it on a USB stick and use it wherever the hell you want, and though you would put everything in one ‘module’, it lets you tag your subjects, so when I’m working I can use it only for work-related things, and on breaks or between jobs whatever I like.

Not sure how I feel about the algorithm, but I shall see how it goes. I feel another attempt at learning New Testament Greek coming on! I believe I shall also use the services of TypeGreek.com, which I wish I’d known existed before.