Monday, April 26, 2010

Immaculate Conception Errata

In my previous post, I had erroneously asserted that Bernadette's purported revelation was in French ("Je suis l'Immaculée conception"). Although that formula can be found on dozens of French-language pages at the Vatican site, it appears that I had overlooked the fact that "Je suis l'Immaculée conception" is itself a translation of Bernadette's Basque Bigourdan dialect: "Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou." It was my mistake, and I've fixed it on the original page with an "Update" but wanted to give credit to Paul Hoffer for pointing this out to me (link to Mr. Hoffer's post). Mr. Hoffer adds an acute accent to the e in que, for reasons unknown to me. The point of the post remains (the original language involved wasn't really a significant aspect of the post), but this inaccuracy of mine needed to be, and now has been, corrected.

There are some other issues in Mr. Hoffer's post that may need to be addressed from a more critical standpoint, but I wanted to take the opportunity separately and promptly to thank him for his correction and to note that I am making the necessary correction to my prior post. If he can point me to some sort of authoritative source that acutely accents the e in que, I'll be happy to make that change as well. Neither the accent nor even the original language of the quotation from Bernadette should be thought to be considered significant, however.

-TurretinFan

Further update: At least one website calls her tongue a "Bigourdan dialect" rather than Basque, although many seem to call it Basque. Thanks to Michael Gray for pointing this out to me. Based on some samples of Basque, I would agree that the sentence above doesn't sound like Basque link to examples.

4 comments:

steve said...

In any event, the BVM is quite the linguist! How many foreign languages does she know?

Paul Hoffer said...

Hi Mr. Fan, here is hte link to the official website of Lourdes

http://www.lourdes-france.org/index.php?goto_centre=ru&contexte=en&id=417&id_rubrique=417

The quote is made sans accent. My error is not due to an erroneous source but my patchy computer skills. When I went to italicize the foreign words in my post I noticed that I had not inserted the accent in the word Aquéro. I not only substituted there, I somehow substituted it in the "Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou" as well. I compounded my error when I copied the phrase into my title. I will correct my errors shortly!

BTW I needed the gift of a little humbleness today. Thank you for allowing me to live up to my name!

Steve, the Blessed Mother is quite the linguist, isn't she. No doubt one of the innumerable gifts of grace she received from Our Lord and God.

God bless!

Michael Gray said...

I don't believe that is Basque, which is not a Romance or latin language. It is possibly another regional Romance language very similar to Spanish, as suggested in the page Mr Hoffer links to.

Turretinfan said...

Michael Gray:

You're right. I've made a further update.

Mr. Hoffer:

Or more likely, she's not a linguist at all and this is just Bernadette's vivid imagination.

-TurretinFan