off topic: Finnish Taiz� chant

In the (church) news this week in Finland is the singing of a Finnish song by the Taiz� community at Evening Prayer on Saturday. Many Taiz� chants have been translated into Finnish, and sung by Finnish speakers at Taiz�, but this is the first time they have used a chant which was composed in Finnish from the start.

The words of the song are from Psalm 119:105: Sanasi on lamppu, valo askeleillani. The literal translation into English is "Your word is a lamp, a light to my feet". Yep, English takes twice as many words to say this as Finnish does. 

Taiz� evening prayers are broadcast weekly by the Cathedral in Cologne / K�ln (scroll down the left sidebar and click on the service for the date 14/07 - or I think this link might take you straight there). The song comes about six minutes into the broadcast (06.25, if you want to jump straight to it). 

photo of Taiz� prayers by "sasa1976"

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If you'd like to take this opportunity to learn a verse of Finnish then the double letters should be pronounced as longer than single letters, and every word has first-syllable stress. (That's when speaking; it's usually less clear - at least to me - in songs.) So that's SA-na-si (neither s should sound like a z) on LAMP-pu (hold your lips shut for a silent microsecond in between lamp and pu); VA-lo ASK-el-eil-la-ni. Again, you ought to hold that double-l for a beat before ending the word with ani. I believe that that little syncopation in the second repetition of the song would sound more Finnish if the sound the international Taiz� worshipers lengthened were not the vowel "ei" but the "ll".