hajoseszter wrote:I'm unsure about "päivä/päevä", how should I decide which one is "better"?
Päivä is Kuusalu dialect, päevä is closer to Standard Estonian. (Modern standard Estonian actually would be "päev(a)" though).
It's the same with õe; ue is Kuusalu dialect, õe is Standard Estonian.
So you can decide for yourself which one is "better" for you.
I would recommend that if you use päivä also use ue, as both are the "stronger" dialect forms; if you use päevä also use õe, as both are closer to Standard Estonian.
Changing it completely to Standard Estonian is not an option because the syllable count would be wrong.
hajoseszter wrote:In "pardi" and "kõrge" I hear something between "r" and "d"/"g" (also little bit in "harju"), like a schwa or anything - why is that? What's the name of this phenomenon? I've heard this in many other songs in many languages.
I think that here it is just the way /r/ sounds before a consonant. I don't really hear it as a schwa. I think I know the phenomenon you are talking about, though (I think I've heard it more often in Northern Saami?). It is just a feature of the phonology when certain consonants occur next to each other. I don't know what it is called, or whether what I've heard with Northern Saami is the same phenomenon you are hearing here.
hajoseszter wrote:Could you add punctuation marks to the lyrics?
I did above at the top of this post, but this is another thing there may easily be disagreement about. I just added commas where the parallelism continued and a period where it moved to a different idea. Often lyrics to songs like this are written without pronunciation (and probably with good reason!) You can hear from the song that intonation is no help in determining punctuation here, and each line is its own independent unit; technically I think you could put a period after just about every line. The only exception might be the last three lines, where the negator "ei" of the line that starts with "Et see tee...." carries over into the next three lines as well so it's useful to mark them as one sentence.
hajoseszter wrote:It might be an old and/or dialectical song so I understand it's not easy to find the right words and to translate it...
BTW do you know which dialect is this?
Kuusalu
hajoseszter wrote:Please-please add a revised translation of how now it is. I've checked all the discussion about it and really appreciate all the nice footnotes, but a bit confused, too.
So here's my attempt - if I haven't missed something as well:
Let's make joy in the evening,
Joyful noise as the sun goes down / day goes [away].
The joy is heard all the way to Hiiumaa,
The sound to the edges of our land,
Hiiumaa fir trees glow,
Our land's birches echo,
Our alders resound widely,
Harju's aspens turn green,
Muhu's pines roar.
For the joy of our girls,
From sister's gentle shouts,
From brother's turning of verse.
Our two poor children,
A couple sons like ducklings.
We make joy along the road,
Joy along the road, pleasure in the land,
Make the forest's tall trees rumble,
Make the wide fields into song,
So that this road will not harm us,
The wide fields will not disparage us,
The forest's tall tree will not speak ill.
hajoseszter wrote:"kõmada": 'thunder' or 'muffled or distant rumble' would be better?
It's been my experience that Estonian words for sound do not "map" precisely with English equivalents. Anyway, to me thunder often [i]can[/b] be heard as a "distant rumble" so they do not seem all that different to me, although "thunder" is sometimes the word used for a much louder noise. So I've changed it to "rumble" in the translation.
hajoseszter wrote:As I see these kind of songs mostly performed by soloist and choir, or at least by two person. When this is sung by one person, some syllables are missing, as Linguaphile have mentioned, too - I thought it is in the style of their singing. I'm not sure if it is because of breathing, or not in all cases. Mari Kalkun and Maarja Nuut also do this, and it seemed to me that they have enough air to sing the missing parts also but they did this on a reason which I don't know. Could it be a tradition to sing like this if you're singing it alone? /Should I follow this?/ (Or a performance of these kind of songs could not be traditional with one person at all? )
I have heard it done both ways. It's traditional for there to be more than one singer, and I think sometimes when there was only one singer they did not sing the repetition, just the single line. I've heard it done that way too. So, I think you can do it either way.
If you want to hear an entirely different way of singing this song, here you go - it has most of the lines from the first stanza, but not the second stanza:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1Y7lMiDOG8