One reason it is so important to get English-language liturgical materials right is because English has become, for better or worse, the world’s vernacular language. It’s not just about us, important as our English-language liturgies are in themselves.
This global reality hit home this morning when the Vatican issued this following official notice having to do with technological improvements, no doubt at the instigation of Jeffrey Tucker:
The announcement was made in Italian; however, the thing itself, the Master Control Room, has an English name. The sign is in Italian; the signified in English. The sacramentum is in the language of the place; the res in the language of the world.
Magister Imperium amet, or the most holy, venerable, constubstantial and ineffable master control room!
🙂
Not to mention this amazing sentence: « Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo ».
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buff…
What foreigners do with this lingua franca is another matter. A Roman trattoria I visited had the following admonition: "It is prayed not to leave the monies on the table and to pay to the case" (Si prega di non lasciare i soldi sul tavolo e di pagare alla cassa) . Never ask for an English menu when abroad; in Paris last summer a restaurant was offering "lawyer with shrimps" and "plate of crudenesses".
A lot of UK companies, including banks, outsource their call-centres to India. It's not that the operators don't speak English (one of the country's official languages) but that it's 60-odd years since independence and they no longer hear English spoken by Englishmen – as a result their accent renders them more-or-less unintelligible.
The sign is in English, embedded in an Italian matrix sentence. (The signified is the control room itself.)
Haha, fair enough, good point!