Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Bunǎ Dimineaţa



The song title means "Good Morning."  It is a family joke, as Jonathan uses it as his universal Romanian phrase - not only a greeting, but ordering from a menu, giving directions, telling people his name...mostly because it annoys me, or used to.

The name of the band means Hospital Emergency (you can see that if you take it apart), or idiomatically, The Emergency Room.  Language note:  The ul at the end of the first word is the definite article in Romanian, comparable to el, la, or le in other Romance languages.  Getting stuffed at the end, instead of preceding the word, is how they do it in Slavic languages.  When something is common to diverse languages in an area, it is called Sprachbund, and the postposition of the definite article is a Sprachbund in the Balkans.

2 comments:

Texan99 said...

Ha! So I looked up "Dracula" and found that "drac" is dragon, and you add "ul" for "the." Cool. Or maybe "ulea" means "son of."

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Dracula is a small post of its own.