99 Luftballons

"99 Luftballons" (German: Neunundneunzig Luftballons, "99 balloons") is an anti-war protest song by the German band Nena from their 1983 self-titled album. An English version titled "99 Red Balloons", with lyrics by Kevin McAlea, was also released after widespread success of the original in Europe and Japan. The English version is not a direct translation of the German and contains somewhat different lyrics.

Background and writing

While at a June 1982 concert by the Rolling Stones in West Berlin, Nena's guitarist Carlo Karges noticed that balloons were being released. As he watched them move toward the horizon, he noticed them shifting and changing shapes, where they looked like strange spacecraft (referred to in the German lyrics as a "UFO"). He thought about what might happen if they floated over the Berlin Wall to the Soviet sector.

Etymology

A direct translation of the title is sometimes given as "Ninety-Nine Air Balloons"; however, the song became known as "Ninety-Nine Red Balloons" in English. The title "99 Red Balloons" almost scans correctly with the syllables falling in the right places within the rhythm of the first line of lyrics: "red" partially replacing a flourish of the singer before "Luft". Neunundneunzig (99) has one syllable more than "ninety-nine", so the last syllable and "luft" are blended in the English translation and become "red".

Tristan

Tristan (Latin & Brythonic: Drustanus; Welsh: Trystan), also known as Tristram, is the male hero of the Arthurian Tristan and Iseult story. He was a Cornish knight of the Round Table. He is the son of Blancheflor and Rivalen (in later versions Isabelle and Meliodas), and the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, sent to fetch Iseult back from Ireland to wed the king. However, he and Iseult accidentally consume a love potion while en route and fall helplessly in love. The pair undergo numerous trials that test their secret affair.

Tristan legend cycle

Tristan made his first medieval appearance in the twelfth century in Celtic mythology circulating in the north of France and the Kingdom of Brittany, which had close ancestral and cultural links with Cornwall by way of the ancient British kingdom of Dumnonia, as made clear in the story itself, and the closely related Cornish and Breton languages. Although the oldest stories concerning Tristan are lost, some of the derivatives still exist. Most early versions fall into one of two branches, the "courtly" branch represented in the retellings of the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas of Britain and his German successor Gottfried von Strassburg, and in the Folie Tristan d'Oxford; and the "common" branch, including the works of the French. The name Tristan is also known as "Trischin" in the Maltese culture.

Red Balloon

Red Balloon or Red Balloons may refer to:

In cinema:

In music:

Other uses:

German language

German (Deutsch [ˈdɔʏtʃ]) is a West Germanic language that derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. A portion of German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. Languages which are most similar to German include Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, the continental Scandinavian languages and Luxembourgish. A Germanophone is a speaker of the German language either natively or by preference.

German is the most widely spoken (and official) language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Italian province of South Tyrol (Italian: Alto Adige) and Liechtenstein; it is also an official, but not majority language of Belgium and Luxembourg. With slightly different standardized variants (German, Austrian, and Swiss Standard German), German is a pluricentric language. German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and also other parts of the world. Due to the limited intelligibility between certain varieties and Standard German, as well as the lack of an undisputed, scientific difference between a "dialect" and a "language", some German varieties or dialect groups (e.g. Low German/Plautdietsch) are alternatively referred to as "languages" and "dialects".