Re: Opinions on English

----- Original Message -----
From: John Cowan <cowan@...>
Subject: Re: Opinions on English (was Re: basic vocab)


> On Sun, 17 Sep 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > > I actually *don't* like French's
> > > *sound,* aesthetically.  All these people were going on about how
> > > romantic it sounded, and all I heard were these honking nasals.
> > > <apologetic look>  Polish and Russian, OTOH, sound quite romantic to
me.
> >
> > The nasals don't sound romantic to me, either. Actually, I thing of
> > French as being a very, very ugly language, because whenever I hear it,
> > it's Quebec French, which is, shall we say, not the nicest of dialects.
> > I'm sure the French from France sounds a lot better.
> >
> > When I think of romantic languages, Polish & Russian are on the list for
> > me, too.
>
> What is this?!  Polish has even more nasal vowels than French.
1. french has 4 phonemic, very frequent (not much less than the rest), pure
nasal vowels
2. according to many modern grammars there are even NO phonemic nasal vowels
in polish. and from the phonetic point of view, there are 2 or 6 of them (it
depends, i think, rather on speaker's manner), they occure only before
fircatives and at the end of the word, so are unfrequent and even then they
are (again according rather to the modern grammars) rather diphtongs with
the nasal resonance applied to the second, weak vowel. mayby that's, why it
sounds different... ^_^

by the way, i like the sound of french and i don't like english mostly for
it's phonetic and the orthography. i use it only because it's the only
foreign language i know enough to express almost everything i want (with the
LITTLE help of the dictionary, of course) and because it's, by the very
fortunate coincidence, a very (if not the most) common language on the earth
(esp. here in the web)

--
lukasz korczewski