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 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.)
<embarrassed look>  What's Wolof and where's it spoken, or by whom?

> 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.
Er...where can I find a definition of "syllable-timed" rhythm?

Japanese would be monotonous in its metronomicity (?) if it weren't for
the varying pitch accents.

I had pitch-accent perfectly regular in Chevraqis but the regularity
started bothering me and I think I may well switch to irregular accents
(marked somehow for ease).  Or something.  :-)

How have other people handled stress/accent?

YHL

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