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

David Peterson sikayal:

> You know, I find this very interesting.  There have been several mentions of
> how beautiful Icelandic, Finnish, Hungarian, and so forth are, and at least
> one person said that Romance languages were the ugliest he'd ever heard.
> That could not be more opposite to myself and most Westerners, I think (the
> ones I know).  Everybody wants to learn either Spanish, French or Italian,
In my hometown in Colorado, Spanish was the most popular because there was
a very large immigrant population that spoke Spanish.  Now that I live in
Seattle, Japanese and Chinese are the most popular foreign langs because
of the number of immigrants from those areas.  So pragmatics has a lot to
do with it.

> claiming it to be the most beautiful language on the planet (for me, it's
> French, and I know someone was dogging French earlier).
That was probably me.  I hate French.  Sorry!

> People who take
> German are made fun of, let alone anyone who so much has heard of any other
> language from any country surrounding Germany, or near it (France/Belgium
> excluded, of course).
They're actually made fun of?  That's simply outrageous.  The German
language students at my high school were a minority, but they were hardly
ostracized (sp?).  Stupid fools.  They obviously can't appreciate the
beauty of German and the other Germanic tongues.

> Now, to avoid a hornets' nest, I myself am not advocating such a view (I
> really like Hungarian), but just so you know that there are other ones out
> there.  :)
Yeah, I know.  There's no accounting for taste.

Which, BTW, would be an interesting idiom translation project.  How do you
express the idea given by the English phrase "There's no accounting for
taste" in your conlangs or various natlangs?  I'll come back with the
Yivríndil later, but the Romanian is:

Nu-i frumos ce-i frumos, e frumos ce-mi place.
Literal: "What's beautiful isn't beautiful, what's beautiful is what I
like."


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

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