Presented by the Forverts:
The subtitles should help. The accents are excellent. I was especially delighted by this line: "Fun di groyse ozeres/biz di breyte yamen." It means "from the Great Lakes to the wide seas." As a Chicagoan, I appreciate adding the Great Lakes to the song, but the line is also etymologically fascinating. Some of the words -- groyse, breyte -- are Yiddish/germanic. "Ozeres," however, comes from Russian (Озеро/Oziero), and "Yamen" is from the Hebrew "Yam." Both words, however, have Yiddish plurals tacked on. Anyhow, Yiddish is indeed a cosmopolitan language, with three unrelated source languages found in a single phrase.
While Woody Guthrie's lyrics basically go from California to the East Coast twice (the Gulf Stream is in the Atlantic Ocean, though perhaps he meant the Gulf Coast), the Canadian lyrics are more evenly geographically distributed: "From Bonavista/to Vancouver Island/From the Arctic Circle/to the Great Lakes waters."
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