Monday 4 February 2013

Angelus: Adjectives + Imperative – Ave, o Maria…



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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