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I'm not a Latin scholar by any means, but I've read quite a lot of older Latin, and I've never seen an apostrophe. Old scribes had a lot of abbreviation tricks, but an apostrophe in this position wasn't among them.
Google doesn't yield any explanations. It just gives an endless repetition of someone saying "don't forget the apostrophe!" which is completely unhelpful.
I'd think the verb would be sit, the 3rd person subjunctive present of esse. As in let it be praised, may it be praised. If that's right, the apostrophe isn't saving any keystrokes.
Is this Franciscan Newspeak? Attempting to be gender-neutral? If so, it still doesn't make any sense, because sit doesn't contain any gender.
First of all, it isn't Latin, it's Umbrian, a mpdern dialect of Italiiam.
Second of all, it's short for Laudato si’ mi’ Signore. which was written by Francis of Assisi, rather than Francis of Vatican City.
Or are they apostrophes at all? Maybe accento chiuso instead?
In any case, I'm glad to see a controversy over punctuation, rather than over abortion, or Jeb Bush's indignation that as a Roman Catholic, he might be expected to embrace the faith he embraced.
I don't know anything about Umbrian, but from what I can find, this diacritic is called an apex. It is sometimes used when Umbrian was written with the Latin alphabet. It indicates that the vowel is long, rather than, say that a letter is missing. Notation for vowel length in Umbrian, it seems, varied, including doubling of the vowel, making it taller, or adding an apex mark. Often it only appeared when both long and short vowel length made sense, and indicating the long vowel was significant to meaning.
The modern linguistic standard for vowel length is to use a macron (or long mark, a horizontal line over the vowel), but where that is not part of the available font, an apostrophe will do the job.
I too was struck by the fact that perhaps for the first time (as a church historian I would have to check that!) an encyclical opens with (and hence bears the title, or incipit) a vernacular phrase.
Not only is Pope Francis paying tribute to Francis of Assisi, but is in a playful way, it seems to me, breaking slightly with tradition in the direction of greater openness to the ordinary faithful (much as he began his first annoucement to St Peter's Square and the world from the balcony after his election with a "Buona sera").
It is not that Pope Francis is anti-Latin, but he is not as much a friend of the Latin Mass club as his predecssor was. And then what does he quote from? One of the vernacular "'laudi" or songs for which St Francis and his time (and then his followers) were known for. The Franciscans were (and to some extent still are) an order of resolutely lay men, Francis and his circle did not seek to be priests, so they would have preached and interacted in the vernacular tongues rather than the scholarly and liturgical Latin. And then which of the songs does he choose? The Canticle of the Creatures (or Canticle of the Sun as it's also known), a hymn in praise of all creation, suitable for his encyclical on the environment and climate.
As for the apostrophe in si', I think Glenn is right on both counts. The words of the canticle can sometimes be found spelled "sii" with two letter i's, to indicate that it is a long i. In place of that second i, there is sometimes an apostrophe (technically a suspension point) to indicate the missing letter. I don't know for sure, but it may be that is what later became the diacritical mark (acute accent) over the vowel itself to indicate the same thing. This dates back well before printing so there is no issue of 'availability' of a font, but scribes often put these suspension marks right above the word or just at the end of the word that has been abbreviated. That I know is how the umlaut began - instead of writing out ae or oe in German, they put a little squiggled e above the a to indicate it should be 'ae' for example, and in print that squiggled e became two points (some older German names never did resolve oe into ö, so we have the poet Goethe and never Göthe.)
It's actually “Buona sera”? That makes sense. I'd always heard that as "bonus eros", and it struck me as odd the casual way the term was used, but different customs for different cultures....
And thanks for the intentional lesson as well. I am constantly impressed by the depth and breadth of knowledge found here.
Hehe, that's a good 'mondegreen'!
I bet people didn't expect the new pope to start his first speech as pontiff with "good evening" in Italian (or to end with a request that the assembled faithful pray _for_ him!).
Monica
PS it also occurred to me that the accent on the si may not even necessarily indicate the "i" being pronounced differently (longer) than if it were written with a single letter "i", but that it is distinguishing this "si" (subjunctive of the verb "to be", thus here = "be praised") from the word "si" for yes. I don't know how Umbrian was pronounced, but even si for yes could have a longish i if pronounced with emphasis, but the use of the diacritic (or the original double 'i') should ensure people didn't read the first line of the canticle as "praised, yes!".
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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