Re: CHAT: Synesthesia and conlanging (was Re: The ConlangInstinct)

Quoth Grandsire, C.A.:
> Paul Bennett wrote:
> > Dang! That's a very good question!  May I state it in a more detailed way?
> >
> > I'm aware of the various ways that different languages sound to English speakers
> > who don't know that language (guttural, slurred, sing-song, fast, slow, hissing,
> > etc).  What "stereotypical" features do other languages have to describe
> > English?
>
>         Well, let's try to remember how I felt with English before I learned
> it. Well, the first thing for French people is that English is extremely
> fast, soft enough but not hissing, kind of mumbled, as if English people
> talked without opening the mouth, so that you can't distinguish any
> sound but just a stream of noise, without any vowel or consonnant well
> distinguished. Well, yes, I think "mumbled" would be the stereotypical
> feature monolingual French would use to describe English I think.
This sounds pretty reasonable.  Aside from the speed (I find French to
be rather fast), my perceptions of French are almost exactly the reverse
of each of these things. :)  In particular, I've noticed that virtually
every vowel is more clear, and I have to really think about it in order
not to schwa unstressed vowels, or collapse all nasals into the same
sound.  I don't notice the consonants as being so different from
English, though; like English, there is a tendency to voice intervocalic
consonants, and of course French is famous for all the final consonants
that have just disappeared from the spoken language (except in liaison,
and sometimes even then).  My best impression of French is run-together;
I find it much harder in French to enunciate word-by-word as I might in
English, because so many words just combine together with their
neighbours. :)

--
-=-Don Blaheta-=-=-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=-=-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
The danger of confusion arising between sexual and grammatical gender
is, in my experience, small, and confined to titles of books and
conference papers such as "Gender", or "Marking of gender in Bongo Bongo
pronominal clitics", and so on.                 --And Rosta