CHAT: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)

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 found myself being excruciatingly bored by this monologue, and I began
to wonder why.  I routinely listen to talk in other languages, and
I'm usually quite intererested in picking out features even when (as is
generally the case) I understand nothing.  A memorable case of this
was a long conversation on a cab radio, which seemed to be in French,
but clearly contained much non-French phonology -- fascinating!
(I afterwards found out that it was a language mixture:  French and
Wolof.)

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.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter

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