Talk:Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)/Archives/2015

Lyrics

people...we can't have lyrics to songs in articles...it's a copyright violation. --FuriousFreddy 01:26, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

so???? Richardkselby 16:55, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Charlie Kosei

I'm not certain Charlie Kosei is the composer of the Katamari Damacy song; I've seen him listed as vocalist while Asuka Sakai is noted as composer. --The Dane 00:43, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Here are the people who worked on it:

• Music by: Taku Agamatsu
• Arranged by: Taku Agamatsu
• Lyrics by: Natsuki Izaki, Taku Agamatsu
• Performed by: Charlie Kosei

--Sinnic 20:04, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Flanders

Hey, Didn't Ned Flanders sing this while all the people were waiting for Springfield to blow up?? Tvaughn05 01:36, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Accents

The sheet music for "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" (larger image) shows that the song was and is published without accent marks in the title. Many images and sources found online (including this album cover and this book cover) support it. I've corrected this in the article, also verifying sources for re-recordings/covers/trivia/etc., including the Johnny Thunders album, the video game soundtrack Katamari Fortissimo Damacy, and the House television series episode (the wiki article about the House episode has the same problem).

Accent remarks have been repeatedly added to and removed from this article in the past (I'm sure I missed some):

• 22:43, 1 March 2006 (accent marks removed from four instances of the word "Sera")
• 20:56, 27 June 2006 (accent marks added to six instances of the word "Sera")
• 22:35, 28 November 2006 (accent marks added to two instances of the word "Que")

Correcting the name of the article is a separate problem. The article can be renamed (see Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page) but it won't be easy to do it properly because more than sixty pages (more than ten of which are redirects) link to it: click "What links here" in the toolbox in the left margin of the article to see those. Some of the previous moves and merges (I probably missed some of these, too) from its history are:

• 19:02, 28 June 2005: Whatever Will Be, Will Be moved to Whatever Will Be, Will Be (song)
• 20:57, 26 July 2005: Whatever Will Be, Will Be (song) moved to Whatever Will Be (Que Será, Será)
• 01:20, 31 July 2005: Merged from Que sera, sera
• 18:04, 11 August 2006: Whatever Will Be (Que Será, Será) moved to Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Qué Será, Será)

For encyclopedic accuracy, the article name really should be consistent with the song title. Athænara ✉ 00:13, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

[Hilarious (to me) footnote: the edit summary for the revision of Talk:Que Será Será (House episode) as of 04:28, 13 November 2006 (UTC) reads: "moved Talk:Que Sera Sera (House episode) to Talk:Que Será Será (House episode): proper title uses spanish future tense, which contains an accent over the 'A'"—hilarious to me because I spent half the afternoon getting the scoop on the wrongness of the addition of spurious accents to this title.] –Æ. ✉ 02:49, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

The name of the article

The full song title exists in two official forms, neither with accent marks: no é, no á. The title of the song as composed and written by Livingston & Evans is in much wider use than the alternate title under which it won the 1956 Academy Award for Best Song:

• Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)   [google hits: ~ 43,000]

→ examples: the sheet music, many album covers, at least one book cover.

• Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)   [google hits: ~ 28,000]

→ examples: in the Oscars database and The Envelope.com Awards database.

Searches for portions of the title (with and without specifying song) lead to the same conclusion:

"Que Sera, Sera"	~ 931,000		"Whatever Will Be, Will Be"	~ 187,000
"Que Sera, Sera" song	~ 388,000		"Whatever Will Be, Will Be" song	~ 116,000

Perhaps the most obvious and useful article name is simply Que Sera, Sera.

As the article's What links here list is quite lengthy, I'm not taking that on just yet. If there are rational arguments supporting the premise that the article name should not match the song title, I'd like to see them. Athænara ✉ 03:50, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

The article name should match the song title, end of discussion. Also, I see you've been changing links with pipes where there doesn't seem to be any rational argument for simply correcting the page name and not piping the link at all.

A page can be moved without regard for incoming links - a redirect will be automatically created. The only caveat is that any existing redirects must be altered. It's a 5 minute job, which I will do now (taking you at your word that the title shouldn't contain accents). --kingboyk 08:02, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Pipes: My intention was to cause as little disturbance as possible to any of the many articles which linked the song (e.g. Stockwell Day may well have been widely quoted with accent marks, regardless of copyright, etc. in Canadian newsmedia).

Title: The original Livingston & Evans title has over 50% more response online than the altered title used in the AMPAS awards, and "Que Sera, Sera" between three and five times more than "Whatever Will Be, Will Be." In the absence of a clear consensus here, why choose a title with so much less traffic? –Æ. ✉ 21:10, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikification

This article doesn't look like a stub any more.

• Sorted the sections/lists chronologically as much as possible.
• Could not confirm the Columbia catalog number;
  • commented it out; it's still in the edit box if someone else can confirm it & wants it back in. °

    I don't know why you could not confirm the catalog number. Do a Google search on Columbia 40704; you'll find loads of people offering the record for sale and such. I think that's about as reliable as can be found! -- BRG 16:15, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

→ Thanks. I don't know why I couldn't find it then. Æ. ✉ 20:09, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

• Moved Tommy Steele medley from trivia to covers;
  • could not learn the year of or otherwise confirm the recording;
  • commented it out but, like the catalog number, it's still in the edit box waiting to be confirmed. °
• Photo of the plane named Que Sera Sera (first to land in Antarctica) would be a nice touch
  • There is a link in that line to a page with such a photo - the host ("Puckered Pete") might be willing to let it be wikiused.
• Fixed the Charlie Kosei citation - Sinnic is right, Kosei was the singer, not the composer.
• Added a brief section, with links, about the language of the song title. Athaenara talk 06:31, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I removed the markup that commented out two ° items because keeping them hidden reduced the likelihood that other editors will see them and find confirmation of them. I should have done this sooner, sorry! –Æ. ✉ 00:50, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Dead like me

This song is also found on the very end of the first episode of Showtimes Dead Like Me. Angela —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.98.108.48 (talk • contribs) 01:36, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 10:52, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Did Doris speak Puccini? or Chabrier?

Mme Butterfly (Puccini's): "Que sera? que sera?" I imagine this is where Ms Day got her "generic Hollywood Romance language" from. PiCo (talk) 13:21, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Livingston and and Evans, not Day, wrote the song. In re Puccini's Madama Butterfly, I suppose you mean "Viene la Sera" ("Night Has Come") in Act 1. — Athaenara ✉ 20:00, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I do indeed. Heart-meltingly beautiful. Puccini conquers all, let us therefore surrender to Puccini (even while suppressing the ungracious thought he might be, at bottom, a sentimentalist). Whereas L&E's song is simply catchy and sunny. May it live a thousand years. (And I think you'll find that Mahmud Han is actually Mahmud Khan). PiCo (talk) 01:33, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

The tune also sounds remarkably similar to the melodic line in Chabrier's Habanera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqWPe6z4nuE)

Cover vs. Cultural Reference

Missing from one of these lists or the other is Julian Clary's rendition from the British game show Sticky Moments. This is currently viewable on YouTube ([1]) and presumably aired in 1989 or 1990. As in some of the listed covers (compare the Chipmunks), the lyrics are altered for comic effect. Presumably this counts as a "cover", since it is an end-to-end rendition, and was on a national broadcast. Monomoit (talk) 14:07, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Straight from Ray Evans

I corresponded briefly with Ray Evans in 1995 about precisely this topic: the origin and language of "Que Será Será". He was a cordial gentleman and answered frankly about his imperfect knowledge of Spanish and how the song was named. I guess this constitutes "original research", which, according to the policies of Wikipedia, is not appropriate for its articles. In other words, Wiki prefers to cite verifiable _published_ sources, rather than things like "personal communication".

Evans's letter was written in what I as a professor would call "B-minus" Spanish (he humbly suggested "D"). In quoting from it, I will give my English translation. The source was indeed the Italian slogan from "The Barefoot Contessa", as stated in the Wiki article. Evans says "My colleague, Mr. Livingston, was very impressed with the film and noted this phrase as a possible song title; only he [!] translated [it] into Spanish because this language seemed better for a hit song." When they were assigned to write a song for "The Man Who Knew Too Much", Hitchcock suggested it be a song with a title in a foreign language, and of a sort that a mother might sing to her child. "We immediately [thought of] the title 'Que Será Será' and wrote the song that won us an Oscar...."

With all due respect, there's no reason to talk about French, Portuguese, Catalan, or "generic Hollywood Romance" in relation to the song's origin.

I understand that in modern standard Italian the future of "essere" is "sarà", not "serà", and that the "relative pronoun with internal antecedent" would require a two-word expression such as "quel che" or "ciò che", not simply "che". But this doesn't stop "Che sera sera" from occurring in one or more archaic or dialectal forms of the language, as documented in Marlowe and the Duke of Bedford slogan -- so the form in the Contessa film is not purely fictional, but has some historical basis. Can an Italian expert tell us what epoch and/or geographical variety "Che serà serà" might belong to?

For what it's worth, Evans consistently puts an accent on "Será" but not on "Que". The sheet-music cover that I've seen on line has the title in ALL-CAPS. This can't be taken as a guide for use or omission of accents, since accents on uppercase letters are optional for many typesetters in Spanish.

It is correct to say that "Qué será será" is ungrammatical in Spanish, at least as an expression of "what will be will be". Native-speakers have told me they hear the line as the question "¿Qué será?" ("What will it be?" or "What's gonna happen?"), with the verb simply echoed to fit the music (compare "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb,...").Kotabatubara (talk) 23:17, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Let me repeat: There is no reason to talk about French, Portuguese, etc. in this article. As the article says, there has been some confusion about the language of the phrase. One service that the article can perform is to dispel that confusion, which I think it can do, based on Ray Evans's testimony. Please, no more French or Portuguese comparisons -- they are irrelevant and only tend to move us back toward the confusion. Kotabatubara (talk) 02:46, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Cover versions

I wish to mention two things: first, that Holly Cole recorded a studio version of the song on her album Don't Smoke In Bed, which I own, but don't have with me right now; second, that I just listened to the Hannah Montana song "Que Sera" and it is not a cover of the Livingston and Evans song, nor of any portion of it. I'm not qualified to edit the article properly, so will go no further than this addition to the talk page. Best regards to all the bona fide editors out there.208.119.151.50 (talk) 20:19, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Katamari Damacy

This song appears in Katamari Damacy. Where should this be added? Other references to the song? 76.19.4.2 (talk) 18:50, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Aw shit...I guess I'm wrong? I just youtube'd Que Sera Sera and it sounds like some 50s song? Was it mislabelled in the release of the Katamari Damacy soundtrack or something? 76.19.4.2 (talk) 18:50, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

No other language

I have restored the paragraph stating that L&E took an Italian saying and recast it as Spanish, and that no other language was involved. This is essential for resolving the confusion that has existed about the identity of the language. I originally wrote "No other language was involved" in order to save us the trouble of listing all the languages that were not involved. It would not be appropriate to go to other Wikipedia articles where there are expressions in Spanish or Italian and insert statements about their coincidence or lack of it with French, Portuguese, etc., and I think the same applies here. This article is not about linguistic curiosities of French. Related note: Before checking "This is a minor change", please click and read "what's this?" for Wikipedia's definition of "minor".Kotabatubara (talk) 17:11, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

It is portuguese

"O que sera, sera..." is a Brazilian expression meaning what ever has to happen will happen, implying that we have no control of the future...

Occam Navel: Instead of assuming an that the sentence is grammatically incorrect Spanish based on a Italian proverb, Why not accept from a Brazilian that it is a expression used here, even song as part of a new years eve chord. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 187.91.0.73 (talk) 23:08, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

The article states that the lyricist, Ray Evans, based his song title and lyric on an Italian saying which he rewrote in his imperfect Spanish. This statement is not an assumption -- it is a historical fact, documented in a personal letter written by Evans himself in 1995, as well as in the two published sources cited in the article. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the song has any relationship to Portuguese other than (1) similarities of form based on the shared origin of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese in the Romance language family, and (2) the fact that Portuguese may be one of the many languages that the song was translated into.

Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the song "Corcovado" -- the classic bossa nova song written (in Portuguese, of course) by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Now try to imagine someone inserting a statement in that article to say that the song title is Spanish, because Spanish also has the word "corcovado". It would be totally inappropriate, right? Bringing Portuguese into the article on "Que Será Será" would be inappropriate in the same way. Actually, it would be even more inappropriate because one purpose of the Que Será Será article is to dispel the confusion that has existed about the identity of the language. Kotabatubara (talk) 16:20, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Other uses for the song

Although listed as being sung by English football clubs and, in 1990, the Rep. of Ireland squad, it was sung much earlier by the fans of the Scotland national team, and eventually recorded, by the Scotland 1978 World Cup squad. Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hEElLJl_4 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.93.204.190 (talk) 07:16, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Ungrammatical in Spanish

"Que será será" -- with or without an accent on "Que", and with or without a preceding "Lo" -- if any such expression occurs in spoken Spanish, it has thus far avoided being captured in writing. No such expression appears in the 100-million-word Corpus del Español (which includes texts dating from the 13th century through the 20th century, oral transcriptions, and fiction), nor in any of the thousands of books published in Spanish between 1500 and 2008 that were scanned for the Google Books Ngram Viewer. If Spanish-speakers quote this American song lyric in their speech, I would maintain that it's "foreigner talk", something like an English-speaker saying "Long time no see". Kotabatubara (talk) 00:39, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Academy Award for which film?

The last paragraph in the lede says,

"The song received the 1956 Academy Award for Best Original Song with the alternative title 'Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)'. It was the third Oscar in this category for Livingston and Evans, who previously won in 1948 and 1950. The title sequence of the Hitchcock film gives the song title as Whatever Will Be."

Which Hitchcock film? 129.2.167.211 (talk) 07:54, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

"The Man Who Knew Too Much" is named in the second sentence of the article. Kotabatubara (talk) 19:01, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Origins

I have done a thorough rewrite of the section "Language in title and lyrics", trying to take into account the concerns of those Portuguese-speaking and French-speaking readers (see above) who had an early intuition that the song's title was speaking to them in a form of their native languages, at the same time as I have tried to remain true to the verifiable facts that I know about the song and the saying.

I have done some research—no, let me restate that: I've done a lot of research on "Que sera sera" and its various forms through the several centuries of its history. Wikipedia's policies discourage the inclusion of original research in its articles, so the facts that I have supplied to this article are just the tip of the iceberg of what can be known about the saying. I will share my sources with anyone who asks; contact me on my Talk page. Kotabatubara (talk) 22:38, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

What language?

Read this:

http://mypage.siu.edu/lhartman/kss/quesera1.html

--77.46.88.60 (talk) 13:03, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

French, Italian, Spanish...

'Que sera, sera' without accents is also 'what will be, will be' in French. I am a native French Canadian and I always thought it was a French song. We were taught that 'que sera, sera' in the song was French. It makes more sense then misspelled spanish and/or italian. --Silver (contribs) 06:28, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Silver/AdriaDracis, I hope you don't mind, I've moved your post down a bit, rather than up there above old April and June posts, to try to preserve some sense of chronological order. Yours is a very interesting observation, particularly interesting to me because of material (later removed by another editor) which I had added in early November 2006:

There is some perceived ambiguity about the title as to whether it's Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or even badly pronounced French. According to information hashed and rehashed on various discussion groups online, the allegedly Italian origin ("Che sera, sera" from the 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa) may be spurious and its alteration (allegedly to sound more Spanish) equally so. / *January 2006: Question and responses from Google Answers / *March 2006: Lengthy English usage group discussion / None of this has diminished the song's popularity.

A few weeks later, in early December, another editor added these lines:

Although it has similar pronunciation and the same meaning in all four Romance languages, "che sera, sera" is not grammatically correct in any of them. The Italian would be "Che sarà, sarà" whereas in both Spanish and French it would be spelled "Que sera, sera".

About a week after that, yet another editor (edit summary: "simplified: the title could not be French") changed it again, removing some, adding some, leaving this:

There is some doubt about the language of the song's title. According to information on various discussion groups online, the allegedly Italian origin ("Che sera, sera", the family motto of a character in the 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa) is spurious. "Che sera, sera" is grammatically incorrect in any modern Romance language. The Italian would be "Che sarà, sarà", whereas in Spanish it would be spelled "Qué será, será".

The google answers bit is less than half-baked (that's where the Portuguese notion came from), but the linguistics discussion dissects it thoroughly. The truth of the matter is exactly what Kaicarver said here on the talk page last month: the phrase "Que Sera, Sera" in this song is in "generic Hollywood Romance language" which resembles all these languages while actually being none of them. That's Hollywood.

Are any of you good at getting permission from publishers? One small image of the sheet music cover in the article, as clearly shown here, would be enormously helpful. Athænara ✉ 13:49, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

P.S. That children in Quebec are taught that "Que Sera, Sera" is French is intriguing—I wonder how far we, editing this song article, should go in pursuing the further linguistic migrations of the phrase. –Æ. ✉ 13:56, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not from Quebec, I'm from Ontario. There are many French communities outside of Quebec, and French is mandatory in our school system from grade 1-9, unless there are developmental problems. The city where I was born, most people spoke both languages, but it often ended up been a franco-anglo hash with some borrowed Algonquin and Gaelic words. Silver 08:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

"Que sera, sera" is not "perfectly good French", at least not modern French. As such it would be rendered "Ce qui sera, sera". 217.210.227.101 22:59, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I disagree, I think that makes even less sense then 'Que, sera sera'. The object is 'what' not 'who'. Silver 08:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

No, you need "qui" and not "que" because it functions as the subject of the sentence. 2602:306:CFEA:170:11D1:C664:C2EB:4CA4 (talk) 19:44, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

I further simplified the language info: "incorrect both in Spanish and Italian" (who knows about "any Romance Language"). Kaicarver 22:01, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I find it reasonable that the title is somewhat simplified through the omission of both accents and the less important word preceeding que, but I am annoyed by the wowel pronunciation Doris Day used in que: It is like in Day. The French pronunciation might be too alien for the Hollywood film public, but the simple Spanish que wowel (like in heh) shouldn't be too difficult? Although the movie action is in a French colony, a Spanish cultural heritage is more likely for the US tourists. OlavN (talk) 17:44, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

In Spanish, the phrase "Whatever will be, will be" would be translated as "Lo que sea, será". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.52.220.46 (talk) 08:08, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

It is perfectly good Italian to omit pronouns unless the meaning becomes unclear—a holdover from Latin. The omitted accents aside, the phrase would be correct Italian as sung (but spelled Che sarà,sarà), with the stress on the last syllable, and 'che' pretty much as Miss Day sang it. I have seen the expression (with the proper spelling, of course) written in Italian, and used as proverbial.˜˜˜˜ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Former Academic (talk • contribs) 18:35, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

From all I read here, and counting on my knowledge of portuguese (native tongue), spanish (fluent), french and italian (intermediate knowledge), It strikes me as evident that Kaicaver is right on the spot: this is generic Hollywood romance language. Phonetically, I intuitively perceived it as portuguese spoken by a "gringo" when i first heard the song (I was a child and didn`t know any other languages back then). The fact that it doesn`t follow perfect grammar rules is not very relevant, as songs and poetry often do play with prepositions and stuff like that, at least in latin languages. Quoting Former Academic above, "It is perfectly good Italian to omit pronouns unless the meaning becomes unclear" - and i would add, portuguese, spanish, and french follow the same "spoken grammar" rule. The evidence presented here by native speakers make it clear that it sounds french to a french speaker, italian to a italian speaker, spanish to a spanish speaker, and portuguese to a portuguese speaker. The same applies to galicians, for sure. I don`t know about catalan, and in romenian i would guess it doesn`t sound like native tongue. The fact that it is written closer to spanish, portuguese and french is not a reason to rule out italian out of the generic language set here. The "wrong" part when comparing to portuguese, for example (the accent ' in será) indicates, i believe, the true anglo-saxon origin of the phrase, where the accent doesn`t exist. It is supposed to be something exotic but, still, it is made for anglo-saxon markets, and with an anglo-saxon mindset/grammar structure. So, I will change the text in the article to reflect this idea. Feel free to change it back. But please, if you do that, concede us the grace of your thoughts so the that discordance becomes public. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marco.natalino (talk • contribs) 19:46, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

I will change the article back to reflect the fact that QSS is Gringo Spanish inspired by Italian, and nothing else. I have already "conceded the grace" of my thoughts many times in this Discussion area. Search for my name, Kotabatubara, on this page. It is the aim of this encyclopedia to be based on facts (like the lyricist's own written account of writing the song) rather than on subjective impressions (like "it strikes me"). Kotabatubara (talk) 21:34, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Reading the first post its wrong when you stated that its misspelled in Spanish and/or in Italian. when you look at the origin of how Spanish and Portuguese came to be they`re closely related to Italian and French in some way or form. So all 4 languages apply when you use a dictionary because they all mean the same thing.(April 1, 2014) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.97.163.24 (talk) 10:20, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

I did read your comments, but they do not address correctly the issue of what language it is. I don`t really follow your accusation of subjectivity. "It strikes me as evident" means it is evident to me, and I was simply recognizing that others have already expressed a different opinion on the subject. My argument was that the sentence is understood by native speakers of many languages, and therefore the determination of what language it is cannot be reduced to one linguistic source. If gringo spanish, on that case, is no different from gringo french, italian or portuguese, how is it possible to draw the distinction? The account of the lyricist is important to understand how he came to know the phrase, but the fact that he (subjectively) identified it with spanish does not change the fact that it is not spanish (or, rather, only spanish). 'The question is not what language the lyricist thought it was (that is settled), but what language it is. It is somehow ironic that you accuse others of subjectivity while proposing that what decides the matter is the subjective view of someone that does not possess enough knowledge to judge. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marco.natalino (talk • contribs) 00:06, 6 May 2012 (UTC) No doubt, It is spanish. In french it would be pronounced as (Ke segá) the first e as a schwa. Easy for a english speaker but I only hear será with a perfect spasnish r. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.14.243.235 (talk) 22:05, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Nitpicking - a French "r" does not sound like a "g". Otherwise you are correct.