Re: CHAT: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)

On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, John Cowan wrote:

> Raymond Brown scripsit:
>
>> Some find Finnish bland, rather than beautiful - others, probably most, are
>> indifferent to it.
>
> I haven't heard enough Finnish to comment, but this reminds me of the
> experience
> I had in a doctor's office a few months ago.  I had to wait for several hours
> (I was being "squeezed in" to a busy appointment schedule), and for about
> half an hour I was an involuntary listener to a monologue in Polish,
> of which I understood nothing.  A younger woman was speaking to an older
> woman at great length and with much emotion.
>
> I finally concluded that the feature that made the monologue
> so boring was the unvarying rhythm.  Polish has uniform penultimate
> stress, and (at least in this case) so-called "syllable-timed" rhythm.
> Spanish, of which I hear a good deal more than Polish, is likewise
> syllable-timed, but the location of the stress does vary considerably.
Huh! As a matter of fact, I feel exactly the opposite--regardless of its
uniform stress (which actually turns out not to be quite so uniform in
colloquial speech) I've always found Polish to be unavoidably riveting
(perhaps partly because even the simplest conversation will nearly always be
spoken with such verve and energy that nearby non-Polish-speakers think a
vicious argument is going on--my father and his parents are from Poland, and
this has always resulted in very interesting family dynamics).

Just the requisite contrary opinion from the Polish Blandness Defamation
League. :)


-Josh