Re: ZBB: Another "What language is this song in" thread.

Carsten Becker wrote at 2005-07-29 15:34:16 (-0400)
 > Hey all!
 >
 > On the Zompist Bulletin Board, Echobeats recently asked:
 >
 > > No, it's not _Dragostea din Tei_. What it is, though, I have no
 > > idea. I found it among an ocean of my sister's untagged music,
 > > the only tagging being "Words ni Spainish" [sic], which they
 > > aren't. If anyone has any clues, I'd be grateful. My best guess
 > > is Irish, but I really have no idea.
 > >
 > > http://www.freewebs.com/mohaisis/UnknownCoolForeignSong.wma
 > >
 > > Yours, Tim.
 > >
 > > P.S. Thanks to King for hosting it.[/quote]
 >
 > On the ZBB, we didn't know which language this could be. Guesses
 > were Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Frisian, Estonian,
 > Lithuanian, Breton, Luxembourgish, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian or
 > some conlang. The Swedes said it's definitely not Scandinavian, and
 > it's also confirmed that it's not Dutch. The thread this question
 > is discussed in is [1]. I'll leave a notice on the ZBB that I asked
 > here as well.
 >
 > Have a nice week,
 > Carsten
 >
 > [1] http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=11142

I've uploaded a copy to
http://www.atqz73.dsl.pipex.com/language/sound/UnknownCoolForeignSong.wma
which should hopefully download a good deal faster.

Let's approach this linguistically.  First of all, what can we rule
out already?  It doesn't sound Romance to me.  Apparently it's not
northern Germanic.  Dutch and German speakers could probably have
recognized a western Germanic dialect.  Not Hebrew or Arabic.  Slavic?
Doesn't sound like it to me, but I'd rather have an explicitly stated
opinion from a speaker of a Slavic language.

I've been trying to compile a phonetic inventory and transcribe part
of it, but I'm not very good at that, and I don't want to prejudice
any more phonetically skilled listmembers.  But relative to English,
there's definitely a lot of [x] or [X] and some [G] or [R].  I don't
hear any [T] or [D].  A lot of [S], or something like it.  Not sure
that I hear any affricates.

I don't really have any idea what Persian sounds like, but it seems
plausible based on the phones I'm getting.

Anyone listening to this who knows a language not already ruled out,
let us know.

Replies