Sunt Eu, Un Haiduc

Yesterday evening Nathan Gilder and I were headed to get some of the Strangeways honeyed brew so that we could properly celebrate St. Martin Luther King Jr.'s high holy day. As we drove along, this computer animation geek extraordinaire asked if I would like to hear some of his Romanian techno; I confessed to a certain curiosity. We had fun listening to the CD in his car, but best of all was what he unveiled when we returned to the maison Swait. He had a video of a chubby man dancing to the song (let us call it "Numa Numa"), which is apparently a big hit in much of Europe (the song, not the chubby man). He agreed to host it here, so that all may enjoy it. Wait for the eyebrows, which, in my opinion, make for the climax of the video, but it's all good. If you're on dial-up, you might want to skip the viewing (alas!); oh, yes...you'll probably not want to view the "original version."

It's much better to watch it, initially at least, without subtitles: you want the pure art of the video. However, you Latin lovers will probably want to turn on the subtitles and view it again. Romanian is, of course, the only Eastern European romance language. Having seen book titles in Romanian, I recognized much of what I saw, but listening to this video confounded me. It sounded Slavic more than anything else. But following along with the subtitles I was able to see that the letter "c" and the dipthongs were very Latin in an ecclesiatical kind of way. Plus, if you read the subtitles you can see that the song talks about linden trees, which makes it much more romantic (or should I say "celtic"?).



"Diphthong..." Will you think less of me if I tell you that I love that word?