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

On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 04:57:05PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> How do others' language-aesthetic-preferences match up?
A few days behind here, but:

I'm an (American) English speaker, and I certainly don't find English to be
a beautiful-sounding language (although British RP sounds a lot nicer than
American dialects).  As far as what I *do* like the sound of, I can only
answer thanks to the international news broadcasts on WNVC (public TV station
in Fairfax VA, close to Washington DC and all the embassy personnel there).

I've had opinions about languages since long before moving into WNVC's
broadcast area, but they were based on the *look* of the *written* language,
not on the sound of the spoken language.

I like the look of Finnish, but I don't believe I've heard it spoken enough
to know about the sound of it.  I'm not impartial on Russian and Japanese,
due to knowing Russian and currently learning Japanese - I'm aware that
Russian should sound ugly to me, but I once spent a semester lovingly learning
the exact dip and swoop of every vowel, how to narrow "sh" properly and bear
down on "zh", how to soften all the consonants, etc, so it sounds beautiful
to me now because it clicks with my knowledge and reinforces it.

I haven't got myself any Japanese tapes to practice with, yet, but I am
focussed on trying to soak up the language every time I listen to it, so
I'm not able to judge impartially there, either.

Of the languages I *don't* know that I hear on WNVC, I guess Italian is the
most beautiful (it can be a relief to hear something so variably timed after
Japanese :), and surprisingly to me, the Spanish spoken by the CNI (Mexican
news) anchor.  This surprises me because it annoys me at the same time as
being beautiful, due to inducing bad flashbacks of trying to achieve that
weird nasal sound in 6th grade Spanish class :)

French depends on what mood I'm in.  It partly sounds beautiful, but it has
some unfortunate sounds in its phonetic inventory that kind of ruin the effect.
Greek doesn't do much for me.  Polish is frustrating because it keeps sounding
like Russian, but not quite :)  Arabic is too harsh, but I bet I'd like some
of the languages in the Indian subcontinent, because those retroflex consonants
just sound neat.

The Chinese spoken on news broadcasts is relentless and dizzying, but the
Chinese spoken in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was beautiful.

Amanda