Talk:Occidentali's Karma

Pāli?

I can't find the Pāli words in Gabbani's song:

• panta rhei is Ancient Greek;
• Singing in the rain and sex appeal are English;
• démodé is French;
• karma, mantra, Buddha, nirvana and om are all Sanskrit (some of these could be Pāli as well, but I'm not sure);
• namaste is Hindi.

All the other words are Italian.--Carnby (talk) 23:13, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

There seems to be some unnecessary technicality picking with those selection of words. Perhaps using our sister page Wikitonary would be more insightful.

1. Panta shows as being of many languages, including Latin (which is spoken in Italy).
2. Démodé also shows as being of many languages, including Italian.
3. Karma shows as deriving from 11 languages: English, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, Icelandic, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Turkish. So in short, the word would appear to be universally used and thus cannot be explicitly stated as being Sanskrit. The same applies to "mantra", "Buddha", "nirvana", and "om" - which are also universal words.
4. Namaste is used in the English language and is borrowed from Sanskrit.

So to summarise, you will find many languages borrow words from each other and incorporate them into their own languages. Keep things simple, and try and avoid using complex technicalities that may confused the average reader. Wes Mouse ^Talk 18:00, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Buddha बुद्ध exists in both Sanskrit and Pali, but it's more often associated with Pali because Pali is the main language of early Buddhist texts. Karma कर्म, mantra मन्त्र and nirvana निर्वाण are Sanskrit, as their Pali equivalents are slightly different (kamma कम्म, manta मन्त and nibbana निब्बान). Namaste नमस्ते is originally Sanskrit but also used in Hindi and Nepali. Om ॐ is originally Sanskrit.

However, I agree with Wes Mouse that all of these words have also been borrowed into many languages, including Italian, and have become universal words. Démodé and sex appeal are also used in Italian, borrowed from French and English respectively. There is also alé, which is the Italian spelling of the French word allez. The only parts of the lyrics that really can't be considered Italian are And singing in the rain, which is fully English, and panta rhei πάντα ῥεῖ, which is Ancient Greek (in this case I disagree with Wes Mouse, panta is also a word in other languages but completely unrelated and with different meanings, only in Latin it has the same meaning of "everything", and rhei ῥεῖ only exists in Ancient Greek).

Perhaps namaste नमस्ते and om ॐ could still be counted as Sanskrit because they are used on their own in the lyrics, but the other Sanskrit, Pali or French words are all used within Italian sentences as regular words in Italian. So in my opinion, the song should be considered as in Italian, with a few words in English and Ancient Greek (or Greek in general), and maybe also Sanskrit (or Hindi or even Nepali), but not Pali or French. Another idea would be to say that the lyrics include words borrowed from these languages, instead of saying that the lyrics are in these languages. Heitordp (talk) 07:33, 9 April 2017 (UTC)