Re: OT: Slightly OT: French as a second language
| From: | Josh Roth <fuscian@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, November 18, 2001, 7:11 |
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In a message dated 11/18/01 1:58:31 AM, tb0pwd1@CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU writes:
>On Sun, 18 Nov 2001, Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Patrick Dunn wrote:
>>
>> > My French sucks like a hoover, of course, but today I was writing a
>story
>>
>> Huh? I thought you were American and it was Englishmen who used `hoover'
>> to mean `vacuum'?
>>
>> > about a guy who finds a rip in reality, and steps through it into a
>> > desert, and returns with some of the sand. I wanted to make him a
>Dr, and
>> > a fairly pathetic fellow, so of course I fell back on French (sorry,
>> > Christophe, but I hate your native language, as much as I like you).
>>
>> Must be English ;) (That was, of course, a go at your not liking the
>> French.)
>
>I'm an American. And I don't dislike the French; I just dislike the
>language on aesthetic grounds -- but I'm weird. I think Hebrew is pretty.
So do I, depending on who's speaking it, or singing it. Some people really go
crazy with their /x/s, like they're in a contest or something, making me
cringe. And of course there are different pronunciations - I've heard the
Ashkenazic one and the Israeli one, and the "American" one that's somewhere
in the middle ... never heard Yemenite or anything though.
Same thing with Spanish ... some people I know really hate how it sounds, and
indeed they make it sound horrible when they speak it. But, as my 9th grade
teacher made sure to impress upon us, it can also be really lovely.
When I listen to those Voice of America broadcasts, I find the most pleasant
version to be Armenian, followed by Georgian.
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html