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Whatever will be will be

 

An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not readily apparent based on the individual words in the expression. This forum is dedicated to discussing idioms and other sayings.


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  #1  
Old October 11, 2011, 06:28 PM
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Whatever will be will be

This is a line in one of my favorite old songs. I wonder if the translation "que sera, sera" in the same song of this phrase in Spanish is correct.

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  #2  
Old October 11, 2011, 08:37 PM
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The title of the song contains no written accents, and is ungrammatical.
The grammatically-correct phrase is 'lo que será, será', the translation of which is 'what will be, will be'.
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  #3  
Old October 12, 2011, 07:00 AM
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I thought, may be wrongly, that was a question:

¿Qué será, será?

The second "será" would be just a repetition, and the sentence would mean "What will be?" or "What will happen?".

I've seen in Google both "what will be/happen?" and "what will it be/happen?".
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  #4  
Old October 12, 2011, 08:20 AM
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I agree with Rusty. The right expression is "lo que será, será", which means that one cannot decide what the future will bring.
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  #5  
Old October 12, 2011, 08:37 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Don José View Post
I thought, may be wrongly, that was a question:
In context, it is the answer to a question:
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  #6  
Old October 12, 2011, 11:17 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rusty View Post
The title of the song contains no written accents, and is ungrammatical.
The grammatically-correct phrase is 'lo que será, será', the translation of which is 'what will be, will be'.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Don José View Post
I thought, may be wrongly, that was a question:

¿Qué será, será?

The second "será" would be just a repetition, and the sentence would mean "What will be?" or "What will happen?".

I've seen in Google both "what will be/happen?" and "what will it be/happen?".
I agree with Rusty's clarification: "lo que será, será" = "what will be, will be" understood as: if something is meant to happen, it will happen.

Quote:
Originally Posted by AngelicaDeAlquezar View Post
I agree with Rusty. The right expression is "lo que será, será", which means that one cannot decide what the future will bring.
Thank you, Rusty, for clarifying the correct Spanish grammar.




Quote:
Originally Posted by Perikles View Post
In context, it is the answer to a question:
Thank you for your comment and providing the link for the song.
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Last edited by AngelicaDeAlquezar; October 12, 2011 at 12:10 PM.
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  #7  
Old October 12, 2011, 02:06 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AngelicaDeAlquezar View Post
I agree with Rusty. The right expression is "lo que será, será", which means that one cannot decide what the future will bring.
Será lo que sea o lo que debe ser.
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  #8  
Old October 12, 2011, 02:09 PM
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También.
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  #9  
Old October 13, 2011, 03:00 PM
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I have remembered a film (The barefoot Contessa) about an Italian family that used that expression in Italian, and have looked in Google. According to the Wikipidedia, the origin of this mistake was an Italian grammar mistake in that film (modern standard Italian, they say):
Quote:
There has been some confusion about the identity of the language in the song's title and lyrics. The words are Spanish, but the phrase is ungrammatical in Spanish. (In grammatical Spanish a roughly equivalent idea can be expressed as "Lo que sea será."[5]) Composer Jay Livingston had seen the 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa, in which an Italian family has the motto "Che sarà sarà" carved in stone at their ancestral castle. He immediately wrote it down as a possible song title, and he and lyricist Ray Evans later respelled it in Spanish "because there are so many Spanish-speaking people in the world." [6][7] Early in their career, Evans and Livingston had worked together as musicians on cruise ships to the Caribbean and South America. No other language was involved in their coining of the phrase.
"Que sera sera" (with this evidently Spanish-based spelling, but no accent marks) appears as the motto on an English family coat of arms described in William Bartlett's 1865 history of the parish of Wimbledon.[8] But no variant of "Que será será" appears in any of the books in Spanish scanned by the Google Books project, with publication dates from 1500 to 2008.
Although "Che sarà sarà" is also ungrammatical in modern standard Italian (where the idea could be rendered "Quel che sarà sarà"), it does appear in an English context over 400 years ago, in Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus (Act 1, Scene 1), whose text contains the line "Che sera, sera / What will be, shall be"). The Italian version of the saying (spelled "Che sara sara") also has served as the heraldic motto of the Dukes of Bedford (England) since at least as early as 1749.[9] It is not known whether Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter and director of The Barefoot Contessa, was aware of this use of the slogan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Que_Ser...Be,_Will_Be%29
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  #10  
Old October 14, 2011, 03:37 AM
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good info Don José
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