Today in 1965, the premiere of “The Sound of Music.”
Generations of fans around the world have been singing along with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and all those kids.
But those fans can be singing very different songs depending on which language they’re singing in.
This is particularly true with the song known as “Do-Re-Mi.”
It’s where Andrews’ character, Maria the governess, teaches the Von Trapp children about how musical scales work and how to remember each of the notes in the major scale.
Maria sings the syllables in the musical Solfège system – do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do – and gives the kids an easy reference for each one.
The “Do” sound can remind them of a female deer, or a doe, the “Re” sound is like a ray of sunshine, and so on.
Now here’s where it gets interesting.
Those Solfège syllables are used across languages, but Maria’s easy references would not be the same in each language.
So a German music student might know “re” as in “do-re-mi,” but not a “ray of golden sun,” which in that language is something like “Sonnenstrahl.”
Which means the German version of the song has a completely different set of references.
“Re” doesn’t refer to sunshine, it points toward the heights of a German forest.
In Japanese, “re” points toward the word for “lemon,” and in Arabic it’s a reference to a spring… not of water, but of music.
And on they go through the different sounds.
Now in some cases the versions in different languages do match up: there’s a French version in which the line about “re” is about golden sunshine.
But others are different.
Maybe my favorite is “Fa,” where the French line is simply that the sound “Fa” is really easy to sing!
Today in 2024, animal lovers in England were calling the local animal rescue office.
They had seen a dog that looked to be completely stuck in the mud at a holiday resort and something needed to be done quickly!
The rescue team mobilized right away, but that dog hadn’t been hopelessly stuck.
In fact it hadn’t been a dog at all, just a statue of a dog.
But good on those people for calling, right?
“The Sound of Music” across three languages (Jabal al-Lughat)
Animal rescue team race to save ‘dog’ stuck in ditch – only to find it’s a statue (The Express)
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