I tell you, I'm thisclose to it!

It's alright, I've calmed down now!

Well, I've no way of knowing, of course, but it looks like a pretty close translation to me -- and besides, it's the thought that counts most, isn't it?

Thanks, I'll add it to my devotions! ;-)

I just looked it up -- and your own words stay pretty close to the official Swedish version of the prayer:

Hell dig Maria, full av nåd,
Herren är med dig.
Välsignad är du bland kvinnor,
och välsignad är din livsfrukt Jesus.
Heliga Maria, Guds moder, bed för oss syndare,
nu och i vår dödsstund.
Amen.

Does that look about right to you?

And, just wondering, because I'm a complete language-o-maniac; your word 'sköte'-- does that also have a primary meaning of 'lap', just as our Dutch 'schoot'?

Thanks for clearing that up!

stund means moment, not Stunde

We've got an archaic word, stond, that also means moment, but nowadays is only used in such poetic words as morgenstond for break-of-day, or "avondstond" for early evening. I daresay most of my countrymen wouldn't even recognise it', and might take it to be the past tense of the verb "staan", "to stand".

I am going to amuse myself with some home-made version of Comparative Germanic Languages Studies someday.

Good for you! I've already seen some excellent sites on the web.

Languages...I'll tell you a story about my first experience with the differences between them...actually, I'll tell you two:

1) When I was a wee tiny baby, my parents were living with my maternal grandmother. Both of them worked, so during the day, my grandmother took care of me. She used to always sing me to sleep with a song called O My Darling Clementine, and I was just learning to talk when I decided she was singing about herself. You see, O my sounds almost exactly like oma, the Dutch for nanna. And so, my first words were neither mamma nor pappa, but oma Darling; that's what I called her for the rest of her life, and she glowed with pride everytime I said it.

2) We moved to Denmark for a time when I was between the ages of 4 and 5. Within a day or two, I had made friends with two other girls who lived just a little way down the road, Heidi and Jeanette. We played all day and had the most wonderful time, and I took them home and explained to my mother what it was my companions were saying. Mum was completely baffled. "How can you understand them at all?", she asked me, after she'd dutifully provided us with the paper, the crayons and the blunt scissors we had come in for. "But Mum, they speak Dutch like us; only, their pronunciation is a bit different", is what my mother swears I said to her, and went on my merry way.

Mum never mastered any Danish at all, even though she tried, but she just never got it -- and there was I, not even in the country a week, and already on speaking terms with most of the neighbours...she just couldn't understand it.

"vi vill ha regn" = "we want rain", which more or less sounds like "Vive la reine"

That's a funny story; and it reminds me of another, which plays out at roughly the same time, early 19th century.

When the French first invaded, in 1795, that was the end of the old Republic of the United Netherlands. They put in a puppet government and for a time, we were the Batavian Republic; but in 1806, Napoleon decided that we should be made into a kingdom for his younger brother, Louis. Who as it turned out, wasn't a bad fellow; in fact, he truly meant well. He changed his name to Lodewijk, and enthusiastically embarked on a crash course in Dutch. Unfortunately for him, his French accent played havoc with his pronunciation, and his very first speech to his new subjects ended up with people snickering into their handkerchiefs. Because instead of saying Ik ben uw koning ("I am your king"), what he seemed to have said was, Ik ben uw konijn, or "I am your rabbit". His brother dethroned him in 1810, and the French 'kingdom of Holland' ceased to exist.

Gracias.

Go break some bottles at the glass collection station?

Is that what you do, go to the bottlebank and smash some glass? Actually, that might help...and I love the sound of breaking glass, anyway! ;-)

::hugs you back::

must say seeing hebrew on lj is like a culture shock, lol.

I certainly hadn't noticed there isn't a lot of it about, but now that you've come to mention it...Don't expect to see much more of it here, either; besides this and Hawa Nagila, all I know are just a few more words and phrases. It's been a long time since I was in Israel...;-)