"Essiness, Ishiness, Veeiness, Aitchiness & /X/" (was: none)

--- "Douglas Koller, Latin & French"
<latinfrench@...> wrote:
> Clint wrote:
>
> >Ihekwike J Y S Czhang:
> >
> >(And, hehe, you thought English was a "hissing
> >tongue"...eh?)
> >
> >I remember the kids in Honduras saying "shu shu shu
> >shu" to imitate the sound of English, like American
> >kids might do to Chinese, "ching chang chong."  Is
> it
> >because English has some sort of "hissing" quality
> >that others pick up on but not native speakers?
>
> I read once something somewhere eons ago where a
> writer (linguist?),
> presumably a native speaker of English, complained
> about the essiness
> of English, what with plurals and the third person
> singular et al. It
> never bothered me, but I'm a native. When I took an
> adult ed. class
> at the local high school, Portuguese initially
> struck me with its
> ishiness (lots of /S/ goin' on), but it's *really*
> beginning to grow
> on me; can watch hours of mind-numbing melodrama on
> the local
> Portuguese cable channel without a clue as to what's
> going on (I draw
> the line at variety shows). Having lived in China, I
> continue to
> wince when Americans (and it ain't just kids) launch
> into the "hip
> choy ching yang yang mwong" schtick, though Mandarin
> speakers have
> been known to do the same thing about Cantonese.
/LOL, tears in eyes/

Highly agree with Kou about the "mind-numbing" effect
of the beautiful Portuguese ishiness (but, AFAIK, that
ishiness is from Brazilian P and less common in
Portugal - can anyone confirm?).

I find both P's ishiness and E's essiness as very
stylish sounds, and both these sounds I made sure to
include in Vyh -- although Vyh. is turning out to be
built more upon its "veeiness" [v] and "aitchiness"
[h] than anything else (*o*), although I'm
contemplating to incorporate more of the /X/ [as in
Dutch g or Spanish j].  BTW, /X/ is called a fricative
- right?  (Get that confused with affricative)

M.E.S.

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