Re: Streaming foreign languages was Re: Maltese Phonology

From: "Christian Thalmann" <cinga@...>

> 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 listening to the North Caucasian, Georgian and Arabic files right now.
Just to get some idea of what Tech will sound like. The N. Cauc. languages
have another feature I LOVE besides the obvious "exotic" consonants -- the
"soft" and "hard" sounds of Russian! Chechen also has A LOT of vowels,
including a set of front rounded and back unrounded.

I really need to study my Arabic, by the way.

> - 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.
It does sound like something else spoken backwards! Note that a lot of
Gaeilge speakers in Eire aren't native speakers, including unfortunately
most people on RTE.

I really like the rhythm of the language. Very... Celtic.

> - Greek sounds extremely Spanish.  I wasn't aware
>    of that.  Very pleasant.
Modern German has a lot of words ending in -o, -a, -os and -as, so there's
its Spanish-like quality. It would sound more like Castillian I would
imagine.

I really like Greek in bouzouki songs.

> - Georgian sounds otherworldly alright, but I
>    couldn't hear out the hair-raising consonant
>    clusters it's supposed to have.
In everyday speech, many of those consonants kind of disappear. I'm thinking
that 21st or 22nd century Georgian might suffer from the same malady as
Irish Gaelic before the spelling reform in the mid 20st century. All those
unpronounced letters.

> - Uzbek seems to be quite consonantal, with many
>    syllabic consonants and the clusters I expected
>    from Georgian.  =P
Uzbek is Turkic with Persian vowels, specifically Tajiki. It doesn't really
have clusters; I think the "short" vowels are metathetized or something, but
I haven't heard any Uzbek in a while.

By the way, Arabic gets too much of a bad rap because of its uvulars and
pharyngeals. It's a really nice sounding language when spoken normally. I
don't know if I'm hearing Iraqi Arabic or Standard Arabic. Probably
Standard.

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