# Romance languages: Che sera sera



## Arrius

In the play of Christopher Marlowe, contemporary of William Shakespeare, "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" there occurs the line:
*"What doctrine call you this? Che Sera Sera (What will be, shall be)".*
What language or dialect is the foreign phrase in? I know the Italian to be _(Quel) che sarà sarà_ and the Spanish _que será será, *but what is this apparently hybrid form, or has Marlowe made a (not too serious)mistake here?*_
This saying has already been discussed on the following thread where the form I am questioning was suggested, before I noticed it in the Marlowe play. A girl was asking about an Italian version for a tattoo she was planning to have done:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.phpt=642464&highlight=che+sara


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## jmx

Tho only thing that I can tell you is that, in Spanish, "_qué será será_" does *not* mean 'what will be, shall be', instead you should say "_lo que sea será_" or "_lo que tenga que ser será_". At most, you could hear "_¿ Qué será, será ?_" as a rather childish way of saying 'I wonder what it will be'.


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## Outsider

In another thread about this expression, I speculated that it might be a "Spanishized" spelling of an Italian phrase, done by non-natives. A different hypothesis has since occurred to me. Perhaps it's an archaic spelling of an Italian phrase. I noticed recently that _che_ used to be spelled _que_.


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## Arrius

Thank you, *jmartins,* I had thought my thread had sunk without trace.
I can only think then that Marlowe, (a part-time government secret agent who many people think faked his murder at an early age, and turned up again as Shakespeare) had heard the Italian saying and, knowing French better than Italian used the French form of the third person future tense of to be (sera). Even modern English-language writers usually don't bother to check when they use a foreign phrase in their work which doesn't bother many readers. This play, _Dr Faustus,_ is full off Latin quotes which seem to be OK, since at the time upper class Englishmen could generally speak Latin much better than any modern European language except their own.
By the way, we no longer say _what will be, shall be_ as Marlowe did, but _what will be, will be_ perpetuated in the Doris Day song.
I also thank *Outsider,* an undoubted expert in "pan-romance", but after reading carefully what you say, I can't really grasp your meaning. Perhaps you mean that the whole phrase may be archaic Italian. That italian _che_ used to be _que_ is not surprising since the latter is closer to Latin _quod_, but Marlowe uses _che._


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## Outsider

Oh, sorry, I hadn't noticed the context of your question. So, the phrase goes back to Shakespeare's time?! How interesting!

Could it be then that _Che sera, sera_ is in some Italian dialect? In modern standard Italian, the phrase would be _Che sarà, sarà_, with an "a"...


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## Arrius

The modern Italian phrase you have given, *Outsider*, is the Italian form I gave in Post 1.  Italian has many dialects, some of them not readily inter-intelligible, so it is possible that the form used by Marlowe is Italian dialect, but I now tend to think he just slipped up, as Shakespeare (if he wasn't really the resurrected Marlowe) also did sometimes when he introduced foreign snippets into his plays. "He knew small Latin and less Greek". Perhaps some Italian who knows a few dialects can tell us, but I doubt if one will drop by.


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## irene.acler

I can tell you that "che sera sera" doesn't belong to my dialect (_trentino_, north of Italy), for sure. 
I don't know if in the dialects in the south it is used..


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## Arrius

Thank you, *irene.a*c*ier*. That rules one dialect out, but as I said, it may just have been a mistake. Strangely enough it was written that way by a forero on the earlier thread that both I and *Outsider* have both given independently, one who is very unlikely to have read Marlowe.


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