Re: Opinions on English (was Re: basic vocab)

On Sun, 17 Sep 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> 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.
Maybe it's the distribution of nasals.  My exposure to Polish consisted
of a cassette tape of phrases, and all the other sounds were just
lovely.  I can't specify since I don't know enough about the language,
just that I like its sound better.

YHL