Re: CHAT: (no subject)

Clint wrote:

>Ihekwike J Y S Czhang:
>
>(And, hehe, you thought English was a "hissing
>tongue"...eh?)
>
>I remember the kids in Honduras saying "shu shu shu
>shu" to imitate the sound of English, like American
>kids might do to Chinese, "ching chang chong."  Is it
>because English has some sort of "hissing" quality
>that others pick up on but not native speakers?
I read once something somewhere eons ago where a writer (linguist?),
presumably a native speaker of English, complained about the essiness
of English, what with plurals and the third person singular et al. It
never bothered me, but I'm a native. When I took an adult ed. class
at the local high school, Portuguese initially struck me with its
ishiness (lots of /S/ goin' on), but it's *really* beginning to grow
on me; can watch hours of mind-numbing melodrama on the local
Portuguese cable channel without a clue as to what's going on (I draw
the line at variety shows). Having lived in China, I continue to
wince when Americans (and it ain't just kids) launch into the "hip
choy ching yang yang mwong" schtick, though Mandarin speakers have
been known to do the same thing about Cantonese.

Kou

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