Re: OT: German reputation

From:    "B. Garcia" <madyaas@...>
> Most Americans find German to sound harsh, and will often immitate a
> "German Drill Sargeant" when immitating it. Not a lot of Americans
> find it pleasant to hear. [...] I actually kind of like hearing
> German spoken.
Agreed on both points.  For some reason, whenever I see a fine watch,
I think of that line from Schiller: "Freude, Freude treibt die Raeder
/ in der grossen Weltenuhr", which strikes me as sublimely euphonious.
(It's always hard, of course, to separate out meaning from the sound
as such.)

> By the way, no one I know pronounces "French" as /fr\EnS/ unless
> immitating the accent. Everyone I know says /fr\EntS/
Oh, I've met a few who say [fr\EnS]. All of these people had the
marked dialectal feature [+drunk], however.

From:    "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>
> It's funny that German speakers may think of Spanish as a harsh language
> (most immigrants come from Spain), whereas Spanish speakers think of
> German as a harsh language!
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my
horse." -- your former common Emperor, Charles V

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Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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