Re: Streaming foreign languages was Re: Maltese Phonology

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Thomas Leigh <thomas@M...> wrote:
 > Peter Clark wrote:
 >
 > > Would other people please post links to streaming audio
 > > in foreign languages? "Little" languages preferred, since these can be
 > harder
 > > to find. Also, please note whether it supports RealAudio or WMP or
both.
 >
 > Here are some of my favorites (all Real Audio, unless otherwise
specified):

I love it.  Audio samples say so much more about a
language than the orthography can...  that's why I
always urge people to record their conlangs as MP3s.
=P

I'm probably not doing these languages any justice
by judging them by a single speaker, but still...
a few impressions:

- Scottish Gaelic sounds very comfortable and
   homely.  Meesa like.
- Irish Gaelic sounds like a "normal" language
   recorded on tape and played backwards.  I don't
   know why...  either the speaker was very much not
   representative of the language, or the many
   clusters somehow conjure up that image.
- Greek sounds extremely Spanish.  I wasn't aware
   of that.  Very pleasant.
- Georgian sounds otherworldly alright, but I
   couldn't hear out the hair-raising consonant
   clusters it's supposed to have.
- Faroese sounds Scandinavian, and rather nasal,
   but I guess it could have the announcer having
   a cold.  ;-)
- Uzbek seems to be quite consonantal, with many
   syllabic consonants and the clusters I expected
   from Georgian.  =P

Thanks for the link.


-- Christian Thalmann

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