# What do other languages sound like to speakers of your language?



## Wordy McWordface

For example, let's imagine a group of anglophone tourists arriving in a quiet village in your part of the world: a non-English speaking country. They walk down a street, jabbering away loudly in English.  A group of local children, who can't understand a word the tourists are saying, follow them down the road, imitating the sounds they hear.  What sounds would the kids be making? Blob-blob-blob, maybe? 

What about other languages? How do they sound to speakers of your language?


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## Chrzaszcz Saproksyliczny

I would reverse this question and tell what image of my L1 I get from non-native speakers. Once I read Polish "sounded like Welsh spoken backwards". It is also referred to as a "rustling" language because of many "shch"-like clusters. Our literature contains a lot of mockery of Yiddish, though.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Wordy McWordface said:


> For example, let's imagine a group of anglophone tourists arriving in a quiet village in your part of the world: a non-English speaking country. They walk down a street, jabbering away loudly in English.  A group of local children, who can't understand a word the tourists are saying, follow them down the road, imitating the sounds they hear.  What sounds would the kids be making? Blob-blob-blob, maybe?
> 
> What about other languages? How do they sound to speakers of your language?



Among others, we caricaturize German speakers' English as pronouncing 'v' as 'f' (like in German where the letter is called 'faw'), French speakers as pronuncing 'th' as 'z', Italian speakers as adding '-a' at the end of words, Spanish speakers as pronouncing 'v' ('_b de vaca_') as 'b', the speech of the characters Boris Badenoff and Natasha Fatale in the _Rocky and Bullwinkle _cartoons as our caricaturization of a Russian accent, etc. Cruel, but there you are. I imagine speakers of some other languages would likely caricaturize our tendency to use diphthongs instead of pure vowels.


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## Chrzaszcz Saproksyliczny

It brings me to mind studies like this when they wondered why Disney characters' accents were Middle-Eastern or East-European for villains, and protagonists sounded white Anglo-Saxon. Same for action films, of course. Perhaps that has changed over the years.


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## serbianfan

Having Middle-Eastern og East European villains is kind of racist, but getting back to the languages themselves - I'm sure almost all British people would say that Italian "sounds nicer" (is a more beautiful language) than e.g. Russian, Dutch and Arabic. I happen to think Farsi is very pleasant on the ear, though I can't speak it and I know no Iranians personally. Russian sounds pleasanter to me than to the average Englishman, because I speak some and I've met some nice Russians. But is it racist to say that a particular language "sounds horrible"?


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

I don't think it's racist, serb; beauty is in the ear of the hearer.


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## Penyafort

Wordy McWordface said:


> For example, let's imagine a group of anglophone tourists arriving in a quiet village in your part of the world: a non-English speaking country. They walk down a street, jabbering away loudly in English.  A group of local children, who can't understand a word the tourists are saying, follow them down the road, imitating the sounds they hear.  What sounds would the kids be making? Blob-blob-blob, maybe?



More like_ wachiwachi kay._ Which is how Spaniards used to imitate English singers not that long ago.

Someone I knew who spoke nothing but Spanish and was indeed from a quiet village used to tell me English sounded to him like a duck spitting. (Not that he had nicer words for other languages either) But trying to analyze his graphic perception from a linguistic point of view, I guess what he meant in more technical words would be that the stress timing of English prosody and the aspirated stops were the most striking features for him.


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## Terio

For speakers of French, English sound like mumbling, probably because so many vowels are reduced to schwas. Other germanic languages sound pretty harsh. Spanish, Brazilian Portugese and Italian are rather melodious. Slavic languages are pretty soft.


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## apmoy70

I've heard many foreigners saying that when they hear Greek spoken for the first time, all they can hear is _blah-blah-os, blah-blah-as, blah-blah-es_, referring to the nominative singular/plural suffix of many nouns and adjectives. For Greek speakers, European Spanish sounds alot like gibberish Greek. There's an interesting YT video (Why Does Greek Sound Like Spanish?!) on the similarity of phonotactics between Spanish and Greek . Italian sounds melodious, while Germanic languages (English included) sound a bit harsh


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## sound shift

French sounds soft but also flat and monotonous, thanks to a lack of word stress, a lack of variation in vowel length, and a narrow range of pitch. Danish is the only Germanic language that sounds harsh to me.


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## serbianfan

Interesting that 'Danish is the only Germanic language that sounds harsh' to you. Norwegians and Swedes tend to think of Danish as a 'soft language'. Of course, there's no arguing with your personal perception, but as I suggested in #5 above, I think most British people would find Dutch and Arabic more 'harsh' or 'unpleasant', primarily because of the sounds produced in the back of the throat (velar fricatives and the like). I expect some readers of this forum have heard the saying 'Dutch isn't a language, it's a throat disease'. I suppose if you don't have such sounds in your own language, you connect them with retching and coughing, which are not particularly pleasant sensations.


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## matakoweg

Spanish sounds like a machine gun firing bullets.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Another thing many people sayis that American English speakers talktooquicklyandruntheirwordstogether. This is more true of speakers from some parts of the US than of those from others. We do tend to "swallow" some of  our syllables, though.


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## Chrzaszcz Saproksyliczny

In this clip from a Polish comedy _Miś_, an airport announcer is supposed to switch to English. So... she sticks a dumpling in her mouth. I think it's both a joke on the quality of old airport loudspeakers and on the Polish perception of English.


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## dojibear

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> Another thing many people sayis that American English speakers talktooquicklyandruntheirwordstogether. This is more true of speakers from some parts of the US than of those from others.


People from New York City and its suburbs (like northern New Jersey, where I grew up) talk faster (with faster pauses) than most Americans. It's real. It's difficult to change. It causes conversational problems (especially the pauses -- is this a short "don't interrupt" pause or a longer "okay to interrupt" pause?). But fluent speakers of every language sound super-fast if you aren't fluent. Spanish TV or radio. Chinese movies. Italian...well, everything! 

To me, Korean sounds like English. Japanese sounds like Spanish. Chinese languages all sound alike, but I know there are several different ones. 

I think Farsi (persian) sounds nice. Maybe some other languages, but I've never thought about it. 



ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> Among others, we caricaturize


I think we get these caricatures from real accents -- how foreigners speak English, if they can't pronounce certain sounds. Spanish speakers use Spanish I ('heet heem') instead of short I ("hit him"). Russians and Turks use V and F instead of voiced TH and voiceless TH. It only takes a few of those changes to get Boris and Natasha's English. But do their languages sound like that, or just their English?


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## Michael Zwingli

Hey, McWord! This thread involves the same basic concept as one I began just yesterday. Unfortunately, I have not had the response that you have😒


Chrzaszcz Saproksyliczny said:


> Once I read Polish "sounded like Welsh spoken backwards". It is also referred to as a "rustling" language because of many "shch"-like clusters.


I am always surprised at how many vowels I hear in spoken Polish. When one looks at the written text, he is prompted to wonder where the vocalizations appear! Polish seems to have a very consonant-heavy orthography. I had a chum during my upbringing whose surname is Andryszewicz, and I used to joke with him about his surname containing only two vowels out of twelve characters. Of course, English orthography is not much better, when you think of it...


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## Penyafort

apmoy70 said:


> For Greek speakers, European Spanish sounds alot like gibberish Greek.



European Spanish (or more properly, the Northern standard), I agree. Not only phonemes but also a certain monotonous prosody makes them look alike.



dojibear said:


> Spanish speakers use Spanish I ('heet heem') instead of short I ("hit him").



Vowels are usually one of the hardest things. Speakers of languages with few vowels such as Spanish, Japanese or Arabic will have a hard time to tell the difference between so many vowels in other languages. But the same thing can happen the other way round because both quantity and quality matter. Most English speakers who speak fluent Spanish always commit mistakes in the quality of the unstressed vowels because of being so used to reduce them in English. And despite English having so many vowels, there are no Spanish e's and o's in English.


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## Stoggler

Michael Zwingli said:


> Andryszewicz, and I used to joke with him about his surname containing only two vowels out of twelve characters.



Two vowels...?


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## Michael Zwingli

Penyafort said:


> Most English speakers who speak fluent Spanish always commit mistakes in the quality of the unstressed vowels because of being so used to reduce them in English. And despite English having so many vowels, there are no Spanish e's and o's in English.


Penyafort, will you please elaborate on those observations?


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## Penyafort

Michael Zwingli said:


> Penyafort, will you please elaborate on those observations?



Let me try to exemplify a bit.

It is not easy to find English-speaking celebrities who speak Spanish with almost flawless pronunciation (most who claim to do so have a super thick accent) but there are indeed a few. One is British actress Hannah New, from Black Sails. In this video her vowels are excellent in general but then, on second 0.21, she can't help unrounding the "u" in "mucho en s*u* vida". I mean, she pronounces a perfect "u" in _mucho _but then she goes British for the "u" in _su vida_, because she knows it's an unstressed word and she unconsciously makes it lax, as she would do in English. 

My point is, even if you know how to pronounce something properly, the fact that you're not used to do so in certain phonic contexts will make you commit mistakes when speaking fast.


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## Terio

Penyafort said:


> Vowels are usually one of the hardest things. Speakers of languages with few vowels such as Spanish, Japanese or Arabic will have a hard time to tell the difference between so many vowels in other languages.


The number of vowels is one thing, but their nature and the whole system is also to be taken into account. French has many more vowels than Spanish (16 to 5). However, they do not overlap with English vowels. So many English vowels are difficult for French speakers and French vowels to English speakers.


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## Michael Zwingli

Penyafort said:


> Let me try to exemplify a bit...


Ah, I think I understand that for Spanish, the pronunciation of letters and syllables should not be effected by, I guess, stress or syllable weight? Is the same also true for the other Iberian Romance languages?


Penyafort said:


> It is not easy to find English-speaking celebrities who speak Spanish with almost flawless pronunciation (most who claim to do so have a super thick accent)...


If I may ask, how does the native English speaker's accent sound in speaking Spanish? What are the commonest pronunciation errors for the English speaker?


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Speakers of languages which don't have the "rrrroled" _r_ (I'm sure there's a term for this in phonetics) of Spanish (and Italian) can have trouble with this.


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## Terio

Michael Zwingli said:


> Ah, I think I understand that for Spanish, the pronunciation of letters and syllables should not be effected by, I guess, stress or syllable weight? Is the same also true for the other Iberian Romance languages?



In Spanish, stressed syllables have a different intonation than other ones. But the sound of the vowels remains the same. The _u_ in _agudo _(stressed) sounds the same as in cuchara  (unstressed).

It is an different in Portuguese : unstressed vowels are reduced. Simplifying, there are seven possible oral vowels in stessed syllabales, five in pre- or post-stressed syllables and only three at the end of the word.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

If I am not mistaken, the most common "mistake" in pronunciation among learners of Italian is the difference in pronunciation between the way "e" and "o" are pronounced when followed by a doubled consonant (e. g. the "o"s in "R*o*se r*o*sse per te", song title).


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## Dymn

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> If I am not mistaken, the most common "mistake" in pronunciation among learners of Italian is the difference in pronunciation between the way "e" and "o" are pronounced when followed by a doubled consonant (e. g. the "o"s in "R*o*se r*o*sse per te", song title).


Well _rose_ is mid-open and _rosse _is mid-closed but this doesn't have to do with what consonants come next, does it? Otherwise there wouldn't be pairs such as _pèsca/pésca_. I think vowels in open-syllables in Italian are pronounced longer than in other contexts but this is a phonetical rather than phonemical trait so it's probably not very important


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## Awwal12

Terio said:


> The number of vowels is one thing, but their nature and the whole system is also to be taken into account. French has many more vowels than Spanish (16 to 5). However, they do not overlap with English vowels. So many English vowels are difficult for French speakers and French vowels to English speakers.


Russian has a considerable amount of vowel sounds (due to the exteme degree of vowel allophony), but they're merely positional realizations of 5 to 6 vowel phonemes, and a good half of them are even indescernible for the native speaker. That results in extreme difficulties in learning and reproducing some of the more vocalic languages (like the Germanic ones). I myself still have troubles with /ʊ/ vs. /u/ (both correspondings sounds are allophones of /u/ in Russian), and dialectal/individual variations in English don't help at all; /o/ vs. /ɔ/ in some other languages, as well as /ɪ/ vs. /i/ vs. /e/ are also somewhat problematic (at least most typical varieties of English lack [e], having only [e̞]~[ɛ], which is already outside of the perceptional area of the Russian /i/; German /e:/ is bad news, though).


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## Kaoss

Michael Zwingli said:


> Ah, I think I understand that for Spanish, the pronunciation of letters and syllables should not be effected by, I guess, stress or syllable weight? Is the same also true for the other Iberian Romance languages?


That is why many people say that Spanish sounds like a machinegun to them, specially when speaking fast. We tent to keep all sylabes instead of shortening the non-stressed ones.


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## Penyafort

Michael Zwingli said:


> Is the same also true for the other Iberian Romance languages?



Catalan and Portuguese reduce unstressed vowels. That is certainly noticeable too when Catalan or Portuguese speakers speak Spanish, although in different ways.


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## Awwal12

Yes, Portuguese is well known for its reduction of vowels (taking its consonants into account, many say it resembles Russian, although to me the amount of [ʃ] alone in Portuguese makes it difficult to mistake for Russian).


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## elroy

Yes, keeping Spanish vowels straight is the bane of my Spanish-speaking existence! 

I feel like most of the posts in this thread have veered from the topic, though?  So, to try to get us back on track:


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## Awwal12

elroy said:


> Yes, keeping Spanish vowels straight is the bane of my Spanish-speaking existence!


You always may attempt imitating a machinegun.  Actually intensive articulation of all vowels is easier than it may seem. Languages which still have *some* reduction in unstressed syllables, like many languages of Eastern Europe, look harder in that regard to me, at least as long as you're trying to produce a natural pronunciation and not just make your speech clear.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Since there's no "_f"_ sound in Georgian, "Frank" is pronouncd "Pranki" (for instance).


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## Michael Zwingli

Awwal12 said:


> ...at least most typical varieties of English lack [e], having only [e̞]~[ɛ], which is already outside of the perceptional area of the Russian /i/...


Eh? 😏


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## Awwal12

Michael Zwingli said:


> Eh? 😏


"Eh" is [ɛ] in both GA and RP.  
On the other hand, the standard German "geh" (/'ge:/, phonetically ~['ɡʲe:]) will be most likely percieved as /'ɡʲi/ by a Russian speaker.


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## Nanon

It is said that Cervantes called the Portuguese language "Castilian without bones".


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## Michael Zwingli

Nanon said:


> It is said that Cervantes called the Portuguese language "Castilian without bones".


Hahaaa! Can you give a reference for that? It is, in a very strange way, quite an apt description, as is the above-noted French description of English as a "mumbling" language. The fact that we can swallow entire syllables and still be understood is something that we, at least we in America, take full advantage of. The nuns who taught me in grade school were fighting a war against that. One of their favorite exclamations to the students was: "enunciate!", said with grossly exaggerated enunciation, of course.


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## Nanon

There is a reference, although I am not sure where exactly Cervantes said or wrote that. Miguel de Unamuno, who also attributed that statement to Cervantes, went further: he wrote it backwards. 


> "Dijo Cervantes del idioma portugués que es el castellano sin huesos, y, retrucándole, cabría decir que el castellano es el portugués osificado".
> "Cervantes said of the Portuguese language that it is a Castilian without bones, and in response, we might say that Castilian is ossified Portuguese".


To summarise, Unamuno described Castile, the Castilian language and the whole of Spain as harsh, severe, rigid and dry (the _bones_) while the Portuguese and Portugal were soft, moist, flexible and mild (the _flesh_). A reference in English can be found, _inter alia_, in: Robert Patrick Newcomb - Iberianism and Crisis: Spain and Portugal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Iberianism and Crisis)


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## Michael Zwingli

Nanon said:


> Miguel de Unamuno, who also attributed that statement to Cervantes, went further: he wrote it backwards...To summarise, Unamuno described Castile, the Castilian language and the whole of Spain as harsh, severe, rigid and dry (the _bones_) while the Portuguese and Portugal were soft, moist, flexible and mild (the _flesh_).


Of course, such generalizations as these are untrue by their very nature; this one is true to form, to which both the severity of Portuguese slavery in Brasil ( which made the history of slavery in the U.S. seem "mild" in comparison) and the "mildness" of many Spanish cultural traditions attest. There may be a minute granule of truth in this, but human nature forever defies categorization. My goodness, though, what profound imagery! Unamuno was a gem.


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## Penyafort

Generalizations indeed. Because native speakers of a language are well aware of how different the same language sounds depending on the area.

Many would agree with that imagery, though. Castilian has two fricatives that are alien to most other Romance languages (th and kh) and that make it certainly sound a bit harsher and drier.


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## Ithilien

Penyafort said:


> Castilian has two fricatives that are alien to most other Romance languages (th and kh) and that make it certainly sound a bit harsher and drier.


I can't tell about other nationalities, but Brazilians tend to link the sound of own guttural R with any guttural/aspirate sound in other languages. Majority of Brazilians have it sounding like the English H while others (like me) have it sounding like Spanish J (or KH, as you wrote it), but we generally don't distinguish these sounds at all. In other words, Brazilians don't distinguish English H and Russian X without a phonetical training.


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## Penyafort

Ithilien said:


> I can't tell about other nationalities, but Brazilians tend to link the sound of own guttural R with any guttural/aspirate sound in other languages. Majority of Brazilians have it sounding like the English H while others (like me) have it sounding like Spanish J (or KH, as you wrote it), but we generally don't distinguish these sounds at all. In other words, Brazilians don't distinguish English H and Russian X without a phonetical training.



I didn't know that about the Brazilian variation for that sound, so interesting! Most Spaniards don't distinguish between H and X either, that's quite obvious when English h- words are said. The hall becomes _el jol_.


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## Awwal12

Penyafort said:


> I didn't know that about the Brazilian variation for that sound, so interesting! Most Spaniards don't distinguish between H and X either, that's quite obvious when English h- words are said. The hall becomes _el jol_.


Russians don't either. That situation seems natural when only one kind of back fricative is present in the language. English speakers, in turn, normally adapt Spanish /x/ as /h/.


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## Penyafort

Awwal12 said:


> Russians don't either. That situation seems natural when only one kind of back fricative is present in the language. English speakers, in turn, normally adapt Spanish /x/ as /h/.



What I've always found interesting is why Russians turn the English h into a g. I mean, I'd understand if you did like Spaniards and use the x, but why a stop? Járrison For vs Gárrison Fort.


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## ahvalj

Penyafort said:


> What I've always found interesting is why Russians turn the English h into a g. I mean, I'd understand if you did like Spaniards and use the x, but why a stop? Járrison For vs Gárrison Fort.


That's a more general issue affecting _h _from most foreign languages… In the 17th century, after the acquisition of Kiev, Russia received Ukrainian priests and scholars who introduced their way to pronounce the Cyrillic letter _г/g_ as _h_. This new double pronunciation of that letter (_g_ in everyday Russian words and _h_ in the church-related vocabulary) made it possible to use it to convey the foreign _h_. When in the course of the 18th century the influence of the Ukrainian tradition faded away, the pronunciation reverted to _g_ in Slavic words, and the same happened to _h_ in the loanwords. Until recently this substitution in new loans and in contemporary surnames simply followed the existing pattern. It is only in the last decades that _х/х_ began to be used in new loans and contemporary onomastics.


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## Awwal12

Penyafort said:


> What I've always found interesting is why Russians turn the English h into a g.


They don't. Modern Russian approximates the English /h/ as /x(ʲ)/. Old loans are a different matter, though. The reason is that for some period "г" letter represented two different sounds: [g] and [ɦ]. /g/ was a regular development of the proto-Slavic /*g/ in North and Central Russian dialects (and therefore in Moscow and St.Petersburg speech); /ɦ/, on the other hand, was basically prescribed by Russian Church Slavonic orthoepy since the 17th century, under Ukrainian influence. So, for some time Russian orthoepy demanded to pronounce all Church Slavonic loans with [ɦ], and that also was extended to loans from European languages which originally contained glottal fricatives. Trouble is, that situation was doomed to be unstable, because the majority of speakers actually lacked /ɦ/ in their speech and there was even no separate letter for it. Ultimately, all "г" letters started to be pronounced as [g] (or [gʲ], according to the general principles of Russian orthography).

(cross-posted)


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## Ithilien

Penyafort said:


> I didn't know that about the Brazilian variation for that sound, so interesting!


Letter R is undoubtedly the most diverse in means of complementary distribuition in Portuguese. The range of different ways to pronounce the guttural R is diverse and some people don't have a guttural R though, they pronounce it exactly as it's in Spanish and Catalan, others just have the sound of intervocalic R without the RR sound; we can also find the typical sound of English R for coda R in some dialects.

A thing that I was amazed is that, when talking to a Galician, he told me that Portuguese V sound like F to him. Yeah, I know they distinction is just voiced-voiceless pair, but the sound of B/V allophone in Iberian languages with betacism is seen as something between a B and a V by Lusophones, I thought that V was seen as more similar to this allophone by people who speak a language with betacism. Obviously, there is also have the case of some Chileans that have V-sound instead, but I mean the people with B-sound.


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## merquiades

Awwal12 said:


> They don't. Modern Russian approximates the English /h/ as /x(ʲ)/. Old loans are a different matter, though.


 _гамбургер_ must have been introduced very recently though, no?
It is confusing the _г_ can be used for /g/, and sometimes /x/ _бог_, and /v/ _сегодня_ too.


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## ahvalj

merquiades said:


> _гамбургер_ must have been introduced very recently though, no?


But _Hamburg>Гамбург_ is old.


merquiades said:


> It is confusing the _г_ can be used for /g/, and sometimes /x/ _бог_, and /v/ _сегодня_ too.


This spelling predates the changes in the words you mention. _Бог_ with [x] is the only survival of that Ukrainian-induced church pronunciation of the 17th century: it is presumably retained here to avoid homonymy with _бок_ “side”. The change _g>v_ in the genitive singular is obscure and inexplicable; besides northern and central Russian dialects, it is attested in Kashubian.


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## Awwal12

merquiades said:


> _гамбургер_ must have been introduced very recently though, no?


True. Trouble is, its quite transparent etymon Гамбург was introsuced much earlier (directly from German), and defined the shape of the English loan too.

(cross-posted)


ahvalj said:


> The change _g>v_ in the genitive singular is obscure and inexplicable


It's theoretized that it comes through some early interaction between g-dialects and  ɦ-dialects somewhere in the northern part of Old Russian area, with -ɦo as an intermediate stage (and if I am not mistaken, it's directly attested in North Russian dialects). Ultimately -vo became the marker of North and Central Russian dialects, but since Russian orthography was essentially based on Church Slavonic (obviously unaffected by that change), that "г" letter in genitive inflections had to stay. At any rate, that purely morphological irregularity is quite easy to memorize (with "e" it's much worse).


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> It's theoretized that it comes through some early interaction between g-dialects and  ɦ-dialects somewhere in the northern part of Old Russian area, with -ɦo as an intermediate stage (and if I am not mistaken, it's directly attested in North Russian dialects). Ultimately -vo became the marker of North and Central Russian dialects, but since Russian orthography was essentially based on Church Slavonic (obviously unaffected by that change), that "г" letter in genitive inflections had to stay. At any rate, that purely morphological irregularity is quite easy to memorize (with "e" it's much worse).


[Sorry for flooding this thread as well… Another existing explanation is that it wasn't _g>h_, but _s>h>∅>w>v_. The inherited ending of the genitive singular in this type of pronominal declension was _-so,_ attested in _česo_. The ending _-go_ is the most etymologically obscure in all the Slavic grammar, and it was suggested to have arisen as a result of an idiosyncratic change _s>*h _(perhaps somehow related to the disappearance of the final _s_ in earlier Common Slavic, which may have passed via the stage _h,_ that is _*-s>*-h>-∅_). _H_ did exist in late Common Slavic, it was a marginal consonant found for example in the pronouns in _he- _(Belarusian _гэты__,_ Russian _этот,_ with the absence of iotation due to the former presence of _h-_). This marginal _-h-_ of the genitive ending would merge with _g>ǥ>h_ in the stripe from Czech to southern Russian, with _g_ in South Slavic, Polish and perhaps partly in Russian, and disappear while leaving a hiatus filled with _w>v_ in northern and central Russian and Kashubian.]


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## apmoy70

Awwal12 said:


> Russians don't either. That situation seems natural when only one kind of back fricative is present in the language. English speakers, in turn, normally adapt Spanish /x/ as /h/.


Ditto for Greeks too, /h/ is always /x/, sometimes even /ç/


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## swintok

After all this learned and considered discussion, it is time to dumb down the conversation again and return to the original question.

In Ukraine I was told that to Ukrainian-speakers, Russian sounds like Ukrainian spoken by a lazy person (due to the reduced vowels and shortened case endings) and Polish sounds like Ukrainian spoken by someone with a speech impediment.  Indeed, I once attended a very solemn celebration in Warsaw at which I had difficulty not to laugh, as to my Ukrainian-speaking ear it sounded like Elmer Fudd reading the US Declaration of Independence (apologies to any Polish speakers here; no offence intended).

The only observation about English that my Ukrainian friends and relatives make to me is that they find English-speaking people incapable of speaking quietly; they always sound like they are yelling at you or trying to sell you something.

To my English-speaking ear, Dutch sounds like someone who does not know English trying to imitate the language, I think mainly due to the similarity of pronunciation of many of the vowels.

I often mistake Portuguese for Polish when I overhear it on the street because of the nasal vowels and all the sibilant consonants.

A Belgian once told me that to speak Canadian French you had to open your mouth very wide and quack like a duck.  To speak Parisian French, however, you had to purse your lips very tightly and pretend you were speaking out of the other end of the duck.

I'll stop there.


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## ahvalj

swintok said:


> In Ukraine I was told that to Ukrainian-speakers, Russian sounds like Ukrainian spoken by a lazy person (due to the reduced vowels and shortened case endings)


Interestingly, I've read a lot of times that Ukrainian and Russian sound similar except for this or that difference, but nobody ever mentioned palatalization in Russian as a distinguishing trait.

P. S. There are instances when case endings are shortened in Russian (_новой_ vs. _нової, новою_) and when they are in Ukrainian (_нова: новая, нову: новую, нове: новое, нові: новые_).


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> There are instances when case endings are shortened in Russian (_новой_ vs. _нової, новою_) and when they are in Ukrainian (_нова: новая, нову: новую, нове: новое, нові: новые_).


Even "unshortened" endings like "-ая", "-ую" etc. actually lack [j], representing vocalic combinations instead, which may be monophtongized under some circumstances.


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> Even "unshortened" endings like "-ая", "-ую" etc. actually lack [j], representing vocalic combinations instead, which may be monophtongized under some circumstances.


I can't think of any circumstances when — in the normal speech — these sequences of two vowels merge into single ones. Unless Moscow indeed speaks a language of the 31th century.


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> I can't think of any circumstances when — in the normal speech — these sequences of two vowels merge into single ones. Unless Moscow indeed speaks a language of the 31th century.


When both vowels are unstressed, they may merge in fast speech (/-aja/ in particular resulting in an [ɛ]-like sound). Spectrograms seem to verify that, and it concerns not only Moscow speech alone.


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## Kaoss

swintok said:


> To my English-speaking ear, Dutch sounds like someone who does not know English trying to imitate the language, I think mainly due to the similarity of pronunciation of many of the vowels.


To me dutch sounds like they are trying to clear their throats.


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## Awwal12

Kaoss said:


> To me dutch sounds like they are trying to clear their throats.


Yes, due to numerous uvular and back velar trills and fricatives (which make it sound very distinct from English).


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## Şafak

There are registers (not sure if this is the right word) in Turkish and different accents. As a non-native speaker, I would divide the language into 2 groups: people from İstanbul and people from any other place.   A silly division but generally I've not encountered anyone incomprehensible in Istanbul. When I came to Izmir for the first time, I had no idea what they were talking about.

Generally, Turkish sounds like an absolutely incomprehensible string of similar sounding words: [complete gibberish] oldululululululunununun [gibberish] kikirininininini. 

However, when you listen to the first group of people, you can at least hear proper words and the way they enunciate helps you to follow the conversation. The difficult part comes with the second group: if I were to write a script of my last conversation with someone from a rural part of Turkey, the transcript would be: yaniashlaonnununnednburdanininiululunumu alla alla? *the man turns around and walks away leaving me puzzled about what just happened*.


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## overdrive1979

apmoy70 said:


> I've heard many foreigners saying that when they hear Greek spoken for the first time, all they can hear is _blah-blah-os, blah-blah-as, blah-blah-es_, referring to the nominative singular/plural suffix of many nouns and adjectives. For Greek speakers, European Spanish sounds alot like gibberish Greek. There's an interesting YT video (Why Does Greek Sound Like Spanish?!) on the similarity of phonotactics between Spanish and Greek . Italian sounds melodious, while Germanic languages (English included) sound a bit harsh



I agree. For me as a native speaker from central Spain, Greek sounds like someone saying random words and syllables. Let's see the next sentence in Spanish language:

"Ayer estaba comiendo en un restaurante del paseo marítimo."

Let's see the syllables of the sentence:
"A-yer es-ta-ba co-mien-do en un res-tau-ran-te del pa-se-o ma-rí-ti-mo."

Well, for me Greek sounds like someone is saying random syllables with clear Spanish phonology but also so randomly that the sentence doesn't make any sense. For instance, as if a Greek person is saying the syllables from the sentence above but with other order.

I still remember back in 2010 watching online the anti-austerity movement strikes in Athens, so I realised how Greek phonology sounds pretty much like Spanish one, especially the Spanish varieties spoken in central and northern Spain.


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## Sobakus

I still remember my shock at first hearing a trans woman speaking on Dutch TV and it sounding literally like someone trying not to choke every 2 seconds. I was familiar with Hebrew then, and there was no comparison. I don't think I ever had such a language experience before or after, and I haven't been able to find the clip again to compare my current impressions, but ever since that happened I take every opportunity to bash the northern Dutch /g/ in a futile attempt to contribute to that sound forever disappearing from the face of our planet. Promote Belgian Dutch!! (it sounds aristocratic)

Everyone seems to agree that Farsi sounds pleasant in a lush and velvety kind of way. There are mentions on the internet of Ukrainian having been chosen as the second most melodious language in the world (after Italian, duh), and it doesn't surprise me if that's true. It's difficult for Russians to judge it on its sound because we already judge it on the basis of its vocabulary, which sometimes sounds hilarious, other times bucolically poetic, and the rest of the time as "that's, like, Polish, but ok" (naturally speakers of closely related languages are very sensitive to differences - some Ukrainians will tell you Russian isn't even a real Slavic language).

There's one Slavic language that stands out as harsh to me, the BCS of Serbia ("Serbian"). It the striking lack of palatalisation coupled with the short vowels, which sound to me like starting a vowel but then changing your mind; or like stressing an unstressed vowel - very confusing. Czech doesn't confuse me like that because uniquely among Slavic languages, I can't even tell where the words begin or end. This is due to its prosody, where stressed syllables are always initial, but are usually - I kid you not - lower in both pitch and intensity than post-stressed ones!

British English sounds exactly like the above-linked Polish clip with sound randomly cutting out (the glottal stops). American English sounds aggressively, nasally cool and plastic. English has always sounded plastic to me, and smelled of fresh electronics.

Catalan sounds like gloomy medieval Spanish with a vowel mannerism (the Majorcan schwa). Occitan sounds precisely like a crusade in the name of love. Lombard sounds like a beautiful Alpine valley with many streams. Swiss German sounds like dancing on a galloping donkey. Logudorese Sardinian sounds now like bursts of machinegun fire, specifically MG-34 (not a sustained PPSh-41 like Spanish), now like tank tracks clanking, with a certain grazing animal vocalizing in the distance. Swedish sounds rubbery and elastic. Danish sounds like a looped vowel pronounced together with a consonant neither of which has a definite place of articulation. Finnish sounds like you have a stutter and are somewhat slow, but you couldn't care less because you have a cottage on a lake and a freezer full of beer. European Portuguese sounds like Russian 5 centuries in the future. Brazilian Portuguese sounds like playfully smiling while speaking. Metropolitan Neapolitan (xP) sounds like using telepathy to repeatedly smack someone across the face and still be friends. Russians sound like we wish there were fewer sounds to pronounce and are sad about it.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Sobakus said:


> I still remember my shock at first hearing a trans woman speaking on Dutch TV and it sounding literally like someone trying not to choke every 2 seconds. I was familiar with Hebrew then, and there was no comparison. I don't think I ever had such a language experience before or after, and I haven't been able to find the clip again to compare my current impressions, but ever since that happened I take every opportunity to bash the northern Dutch /g/ in a futile attempt to contribute to that sound forever disappearing from the face of our planet. Promote Belgian Dutch!! (it sounds aristocratic)
> 
> Everyone seems to agree that Farsi sounds pleasant in a lush and velvety kind of way. There are mentions on the internet of Ukrainian having been chosen as the second most melodious language in the world (after Italian, duh), and it doesn't surprise me if that's true. It's difficult for Russians to judge it on its sound because we already judge it on the basis of its vocabulary, which sometimes sounds hilarious, other times bucolically poetic, and the rest of the time as "that's, like, Polish, but ok" (naturally speakers of closely related languages are very sensitive to differences - some Ukrainians will tell you Russian isn't even a real Slavic language).
> 
> There's one Slavic language that stands out as harsh to me, the BCS of Serbia ("Serbian"). It the striking lack of palatalisation coupled with the short vowels, which sound to me like starting a vowel but then changing your mind; or like stressing an unstressed vowel - very confusing. Czech doesn't confuse me like that because uniquely among Slavic languages, I can't even tell where the words begin or end. This is due to its prosody, where stressed syllables are always initial, but are usually - I kid you not - lower in both pitch and intensity than post-stressed ones!
> 
> British English sounds exactly like the above-linked Polish clip with sound randomly cutting out (the glottal stops). American English sounds aggressively, nasally cool and plastic. English has always sounded plastic to me, and smelled of fresh electronics.
> 
> Catalan sounds like gloomy medieval Spanish with a vowel mannerism (the Majorcan schwa). Occitan sounds precisely like a crusade in the name of love. Lombard sounds like a beautiful Alpine valley with many streams. Swiss German sounds like dancing on a galloping donkey. Logudorese Sardinian sounds now like bursts of machinegun fire, specifically MG-34 (not a sustained PPSh-41 like Spanish), now like tank tracks clanking, with a certain grazing animal vocalizing in the distance. Swedish sounds rubbery and elastic. Danish sounds like a looped vowel pronounced together with a consonant neither of which has a definite place of articulation. Finnish sounds like you have a stutter and are somewhat slow, but you couldn't care less because you have a cottage on a lake and a freezer full of beer. European Portuguese sounds like Russian 5 centuries in the future. Brazilian Portuguese sounds like playfully smiling while speaking. Metropolitan Neapolitan (xP) sounds like using telepathy to repeatedly smack someone across the face and still be friends. Russians sound like we wish there were fewer sounds to pronounce and are sad about it.


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## Nanon

swintok said:


> A Belgian once told me that to speak Canadian French you had to open your mouth very wide and quack like a duck.  To speak Parisian French, however, you had to purse your lips very tightly and pretend you were speaking out of the other end of the duck.


On a side note, there is a French expression that means pursing one's lips: _avoir la bouche en cul de poule._ Litterally, this means the other end of a hen, instead of a duck.


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## Nanon

Oh, my God, @Sobakus - that northern Dutch G! I can't get used to Gouda sounding like XXXXXxxxxXxXxawda. 

About Finnish - having heard and sung choral music by Rautavaara in Finnish and Swedish, when I actually got to go to Finland and heard spoken Finnish, I felt disappointed - it sounded so harsh.


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## Red Arrow

Sobakus said:


> I still remember my shock at first hearing a trans woman speaking on Dutch TV and it sounding literally like someone trying not to choke every 2 seconds. I was familiar with Hebrew then, and there was no comparison. I don't think I ever had such a language experience before or after, and I haven't been able to find the clip again to compare my current impressions, but ever since that happened I take every opportunity to bash the northern Dutch /g/ in a futile attempt to contribute to that sound forever disappearing from the face of our planet. Promote Belgian Dutch!! (it sounds aristocratic)
> 
> Everyone seems to agree that Farsi sounds pleasant in a lush and velvety kind of way. There are mentions on the internet of Ukrainian having been chosen as the second most melodious language in the world (after Italian, duh), and it doesn't surprise me if that's true. It's difficult for Russians to judge it on its sound because we already judge it on the basis of its vocabulary, which sometimes sounds hilarious, other times bucolically poetic, and the rest of the time as "that's, like, Polish, but ok" (naturally speakers of closely related languages are very sensitive to differences - some Ukrainians will tell you Russian isn't even a real Slavic language).
> 
> There's one Slavic language that stands out as harsh to me, the BCS of Serbia ("Serbian"). It the striking lack of palatalisation coupled with the short vowels, which sound to me like starting a vowel but then changing your mind; or like stressing an unstressed vowel - very confusing. Czech doesn't confuse me like that because uniquely among Slavic languages, I can't even tell where the words begin or end. This is due to its prosody, where stressed syllables are always initial, but are usually - I kid you not - lower in both pitch and intensity than post-stressed ones!
> 
> British English sounds exactly like the above-linked Polish clip with sound randomly cutting out (the glottal stops). American English sounds aggressively, nasally cool and plastic. English has always sounded plastic to me, and smelled of fresh electronics.


Dutchmen think the Belgian g sounds "impossible to take seriously" or even "gay". Luckily the rest of the world is on our side


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## AndrasBP

Sobakus said:


> I still remember my shock at first hearing a trans woman speaking on Dutch TV and it sounding literally like someone trying not to choke every 2 seconds. I was familiar with Hebrew then, and there was no comparison. I don't think I ever had such a language experience before or after, and I haven't been able to find the clip again to compare my current impressions, but ever since that happened I take every opportunity to bash the northern Dutch /g/ in a futile attempt to contribute to that sound forever disappearing from the face of our planet. Promote Belgian Dutch!! (it sounds aristocratic)
> 
> Everyone seems to agree that Farsi sounds pleasant in a lush and velvety kind of way. There are mentions on the internet of Ukrainian having been chosen as the second most melodious language in the world (after Italian, duh), and it doesn't surprise me if that's true. It's difficult for Russians to judge it on its sound because we already judge it on the basis of its vocabulary, which sometimes sounds hilarious, other times bucolically poetic, and the rest of the time as "that's, like, Polish, but ok" (naturally speakers of closely related languages are very sensitive to differences - some Ukrainians will tell you Russian isn't even a real Slavic language).
> 
> There's one Slavic language that stands out as harsh to me, the BCS of Serbia ("Serbian"). It the striking lack of palatalisation coupled with the short vowels, which sound to me like starting a vowel but then changing your mind; or like stressing an unstressed vowel - very confusing. Czech doesn't confuse me like that because uniquely among Slavic languages, I can't even tell where the words begin or end. This is due to its prosody, where stressed syllables are always initial, but are usually - I kid you not - lower in both pitch and intensity than post-stressed ones!
> 
> British English sounds exactly like the above-linked Polish clip with sound randomly cutting out (the glottal stops). American English sounds aggressively, nasally cool and plastic. English has always sounded plastic to me, and smelled of fresh electronics.
> 
> Catalan sounds like gloomy medieval Spanish with a vowel mannerism (the Majorcan schwa). Occitan sounds precisely like a crusade in the name of love. Lombard sounds like a beautiful Alpine valley with many streams. Swiss German sounds like dancing on a galloping donkey. Logudorese Sardinian sounds now like bursts of machinegun fire, specifically MG-34 (not a sustained PPSh-41 like Spanish), now like tank tracks clanking, with a certain grazing animal vocalizing in the distance. Swedish sounds rubbery and elastic. Danish sounds like a looped vowel pronounced together with a consonant neither of which has a definite place of articulation. Finnish sounds like you have a stutter and are somewhat slow, but you couldn't care less because you have a cottage on a lake and a freezer full of beer. European Portuguese sounds like Russian 5 centuries in the future. Brazilian Portuguese sounds like playfully smiling while speaking. Metropolitan Neapolitan (xP) sounds like using telepathy to repeatedly smack someone across the face and still be friends. Russians sound like we wish there were fewer sounds to pronounce and are sad about it.


This must be one of the funniest and most entertaining posts ever written on WR!  
Any thoughts on Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian or Georgian?



Red Arrow said:


> Luckily the rest of the world is on our side


I actually enjoyed the sound of Dutch as spoken in Ghent.


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## merquiades

Red Arrow said:


> Dutchmen think the Belgian g sounds "impossible to take seriously" or even "gay". Luckily the rest of the world is on our side


No way, Dutch from Amsterdam etc. sounds awful.  Imagine going to the Museum Van XXXXXXoXXXXX.
I also can't stand that r sound at the end of words.
Listening to the KLM air hostesses, it really sounds like ever word has two XX
Belgian Dutch should be promoted, it sounds so sweet and majestic. The way people speak in Bruges sounds like poetry.  I hope it doesn't become influenced by the way of the north.  I hope you don't get much of their audiovideo materials


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## ahvalj

Still, the perception of sound of foreign languages is as much an individual trait. Speaking the same language as Sobakus and living in the same city, I have completely different impressions of perhaps two thirds of the languages he mentions ,)

A couple of personal observations. When I first heard Norwegian on the radio around 1988 I decided it was some babies talk: later I realized Norwegians actually speak this way. Swedish to me often sounds as a dense granular spicy mustard. Faroese sounds familiar but completely unrecognizable (and as un-Germanic as English), as if it were a European language from some alternative history.

My mom said Swahili is very Romance-sounding.


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## Awwal12

ahvalj said:


> Faroese sounds familiar but completely unrecognizable (and as un-Germanic as English)


Sounds just like a peripheral Germanic language to me. Resembles Frisian a bit.


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## AndrasBP

ahvalj said:


> Faroese sounds familiar but completely unrecognizable..., as if it were a European language from some alternative history.


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## ahvalj

For those curious, a clip in Faroese with several speakers and subtitles: Føroyskar loysnir hava gjørt okkum til eitt av heimsins fremstu samfeløgum.


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## AndrasBP

ahvalj said:


> For those curious, a clip in Faroese with several speakers and subtitles: Føroyskar loysnir hava gjørt okkum til eitt av heimsins fremstu samfeløgum.


Amazing. It reminds me of Old English (Anglo-Saxon). It's hard to believe these people live today and not a thousand years ago.  

.

Another European language that sounds like it's from another planet is Scottish Gaelic.


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## merquiades

Faroese just sounds Scandinavian to me.
Scottish Gaelic more like Dutch


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Are there any Klingon speakers here? Esperanto? Double-talk (_à la _"Professor" Irwin Corey)?


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## Sobakus

AndrasBP said:


> This must be one of the funniest and most entertaining posts ever written on WR!


<3


AndrasBP said:


> Any thoughts on Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian or Georgian?


I think my first impressions of Hungarian were "the sonorous clarity of Scandinavian - maybe Swedish - mixed with Slavic softness". Since then I've come to believe it's one of the most soothing languages to listen to, due to its phenomenally flat intonation - but not Finnish jumpy-grumpy-flat. It has rather melodious intonational events that only happen once every sentence, at the beginning or the end. The rest of the time it's chill-out time; kind of like sedated, intonationally upside-down Turkish. The Hungarian back /a/ sounds adorably indulgent to us, since it only occurs in (folk-)sung Russian or in emphatically dialectal speech.

Latvian is literally an Estonian speaking aggressively dialectal Russian with almost no soft consonants and an -s stuck to half the words. It's half-forgotten now, but in pre-revolutionary Russian there was an infectious (and oft-ridiculed) honorific suffix -s, whose effect was very nearly like adding a _sir_ or _milord_ to the end of every utterance (-с < short for _су́дарь <_ short for _госуда́рь_).

The first time I heard Lithuanian, I thought I was listening to an incomprehensible East Slavic dialect from somewhere like Belarus. It probably sounds like folk fairy-tale Russian to heroes of Russian folk fairy-tales (the ones not dead from alcoholism).

Georgians sound like they speak an indefinitely normal language, but every few seconds their spicy food habits catch up to them and IT''HS-XXXOTT yes as I was saying bURRNLXTSHHH oh jaja don't pay any attention to this please itS''''MKTNothing.

Hearing Icelandic is like stroking an intensely purring cat, while Faroese is a plastic imitation of it _Made in USA,_ but honestly it's not such a bad idea - the original sometimes bites >,..,<

All my attempts to categorize Scottish Gaelic have ended in "it sounds like Dutch that a Norseman has polished to a squeaky-clean shine". There's always a chance I'm really listening to West Frisian.

Incidentally, I think I've heard a Russian say that Swedish sounds like mustard once before, a comparison so singular that when encountered twice, merits consideration as being objective.


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## Red Arrow

Latvian and Lithuanian sound to me like Russian with more vowel sounds, especially diphthongs.

It would be funny if a Russian could record him/herself speaking Russian with a diphthong adding in every word and then post that in the Guess the Language thread. I bet many would think it's a Baltic language 

Georgian's consonant clusters are even worse than in the Slavic languages. And it has ejective consonants. For instance, the Georgian word for trainer is მწვრთნელი = mts'vrtneli (s' is an ejective s) and "you peel us" is გვრწვრთნი = gvprtskvni. I got these examples from Wikipedia but that's also what Georgian sounds like. Honestly, I find Georgian one of the least appealing languages I have ever heard.


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## Awwal12

Red Arrow said:


> It would be funny if a Russian could record him/herself speaking Russian with a diphthong adding in every word and then post that in the Guess the Language thread.


Russian stressed vowels are often what's traditionally described as diphtongoids (the actual degree of diphtongization may vary). Note how most Russian users on Forvo pronounce "кот" or "пел". Unstressed vowels are mostly very short and centralized, although you still can get some semblance of diphthongs there through positional vocalizations of /v/, for instance.


Red Arrow said:


> Honestly, I find Georgian one of the least appealing languages I have ever heard.


To me, Standard Georgian is certainly the prettiest of the native Caucasian languages (Turkic languages not included). Its main problem is that it's slightly monotonous due to the lack of expiratory stress.  (Some speakers do have pretty ugly pronunciation, but these are isolated cases.) Now, listening to Avar is literally painful (and it will really make you worry about the speaker's health if you're not accustomed to it).


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## ahvalj

Sobakus said:


> Latvian is literally an Estonian speaking aggressively dialectal Russian with almost no soft consonants and an -s stuck to half the words. It's half-forgotten now, but in pre-revolutionary Russian there was an infectious (and oft-ridiculed) honorific suffix -s, whose effect was very nearly like adding a _sir_ or _milord_ to the end of every utterance (-с < short for _су́дарь <_ short for _госуда́рь_).



There's a variant (or a separate language) with palatalizations, _ɨ _and more Russian-type intonations, namely Latgalian — here too is a clip with subtitles. The presenter has Ukrainian surname and phenotype, but a local name, so I am not sure if his speech is completely authentic…


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## ahvalj

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> Are there any Klingon speakers here? Esperanto? Double-talk (_à la _"Professor" Irwin Corey)?


A native Esperanto speaker.


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## twenty6

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> Are there any Klingon speakers here? Esperanto? Double-talk (_à la _"Professor" Irwin Corey)?


Klingon (from Star Trek) sounds very guttural, it's full of abrupt stops and generally sounds like someone coughing while speaking of mix of various unidentifiable languages. One gets the impression that it might be some obscure dialect of a long-lost language. I've studied it before (only half-heartedly, haha), and it's like no other language, in the sense that you can't really find any similarities with other languages, nor can you assign it to a certain place or location. Sounds like the alien language it was meant to be.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

ahvalj said:


> A native Esperanto speaker.



Many   s, twenty6! It sounds like someone put a lot of Spanish and French with varying doses of Portuguese, German, Italian, Romanian, and frequently borrowed English into a blender and pressed "Purée"!


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## Awwal12

twenty6 said:


> and it's like no other language, in the sense that you can't really find any similarities with other languages


Its phonetics was largely inspired by some Native American languages.


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## ain'ttranslationfun?

Awwal12 said:


> Its phonetics was largely inspired by some Native American languages.



Are you sure, Awwal? That's not what (English) Wikipedia says...


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## Penyafort

ain'ttranslationfun? said:


> Are there any Klingon speakers here? Esperanto? Double-talk (_à la _"Professor" Irwin Corey)?



Mi iomete parolas Esperanton. And it sounds as if Italian was a Slavic language.


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## ahvalj

Awwal12 said:


> Now, listening to Avar is literally painful (and it will really make you worry about the speaker's health if you're not accustomed to it).


Others may wish to share this experience — a verse in Avar, concerning alien languages…


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## Olaszinhok

Penyafort said:


> Mi iomete parolas Esperanton. And it sounds as if Italian was a Slavic language.



Well, I am not a great fan of my native language (Italian) but I reckon Italian sounds a bit more melodious and cheerful. In the clip, Esperanto sounds so flat and dull! It is  probably due to the speaker's Hungarian prosody, which is pretty flat, indeed.
Esperanto lacks the difference between simple and geminate consonants, open and closed e/o vowels, ɲ and  /ʎ/ sounds. To my mind, all these phonological features can tell Italian from Esperanto.
By the way, being Italian and knowing some other languages, I can understand a great deal of Esperanto.


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## Penyafort

Olaszinhok said:


> Well, I am not a great fun of my native language (Italian) but I reckon Italian sounds a bit more melodious and cheerful. In the clip, Esperanto sounds so flat and dull! It is  probably due to the speaker's Hungarian prosody, which is pretty flat, indeed.
> Esperanto lacks the difference between simple and geminate consonants, open and closed e/o vowels, ɲ and  /ʎ/ sounds. To my mind, all these phonological features can tell Italian from Esperanto.
> By the way, being Italian and knowing some other languages, I can understand a great deal of Esperanto.



Other than stress being placed on the next-to-last syllable, Esperanto prosody depends much indeed on the speaker. E's and o's are also pronounced open or closed depending on the speakers, usually based on their first language. You may hear geminate consonants in compounds words as dropping the ending vowel is allowed. Palatalization is indeed rare in Esperanto, usually having to do with diminutive forms or as a result of -l/n + j- in some compounds.

Of course for anyone knowing Italian, it sounds nothing like it! We could also change it for Spanish if you like!  But what is usually meant by that is that Esperanto sonority is intentionally 'round' and clear, as in _standard_ Italian or Spanish, languages where the stress of words is usually on the next-to-last syllable. To me, the Slavic touch would come from the frequent use of fricatives and affricates in the language.


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## AndrasBP

Sobakus said:


> Latvian is literally an Estonian speaking aggressively dialectal Russian with almost no soft consonants and an -s stuck to half the words. It's half-forgotten now, but in pre-revolutionary Russian there was an infectious (and oft-ridiculed) honorific suffix -s, whose effect was very nearly like adding a _sir_ or _milord_ to the end of every utterance (-с < short for _су́дарь <_ short for _госуда́рь_).


 Yes, I know this "-с" from Russian literature.
Cпасибо-с!


----------



## Linnets

Italian and Spanish sound pretty similar, but some Spanish accents are quite harsh. Portuguese is more different but also more melodious (and, yes, it sounds like_ Español hablado por un ruso_). Catalan reminds me some Gallo-Italian language (e.g. Lombard).


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## Michael Zwingli

twenty6 said:


> Klingon (from Star Trek)... it's like no other language, in the sense that you can't really find any similarities with other languages, nor can you assign it to a certain place or location. Sounds like the alien language it was meant to be.


Ha! I think it to be of the same linguistic clade as Dothraki. There seem to be some similarities...


----------



## Michael Zwingli

Sobakus said:


> <3
> 
> I think my first impressions... Incidentally, I think I've heard a Russian say that Swedish sounds like mustard once before, a comparison so singular that when encountered twice, merits consideration as being objective.


Whatever the case, @Sobakus, your mode of expression in English is beautiful, quite good indeed! Your post left me chuckling to myself in several instances.


----------



## Michael Zwingli

Olaszinhok said:


> Well, I am not a great fan of my native language (Italian) but I reckon Italian sounds a bit more melodious and cheerful...


Eh??? Italian is quite appealing to myself... I have never heard anybody say that they disliked the sound of Italian.


Penyafort said:


> ...Esperanton...sounds as if Italian was a Slavic language.


I think that is a reflection of its creator. Mr. Zamenhof basically used Latin for his word stock, but to an "outsider" (one who has not studied Esperanto, such as myself) certain phonological aspects, certain features of the alphabet (such as the voiced palatal approximant "j"), and perhaps the derivational and inflectional suffixation seem to show some Slavic influence. 

I love the concept of Esperanto, and especially the simplification of grammar it employs, but I have a couple of problems with Zamenhof's approach. If I were to undertake such a project, I would have addressed some of the basic faults that I discern in the Indo-European languages as a whole, such as the overuse of grammatical gender (I don't oppose grammatical gender _per se_, but to me, anything which is inanimate as well as anything animate which does not exhibit an easily recognizable sex should be of neuter gender), and the grammatical identifiers of the grammatical genders as well (masculine "-os", feminine "-a", and neuter "-om"), which for human anatomical reasons, I would have changed to (masculine "-o", feminine "-e", and neuter "-a"). in addition, I would have used Greek more in the development of lexemes and in derivation; I would have given Greek equal footing with Latin in that. Basically, my approach would have been somewhat more radical than that of Zamenhof.


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## Olaszinhok

Michael Zwingli said:


> Eh??? Italian is quite appealing to myself... I have never heard anybody say that they disliked the sound of Italian.


I am not able to judge my native language, to be honest.  However, I do like European Portuguese, Russian and Arabic, which sound pretty different from Italian, indeed. I adore French too, but that's another story.


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## merquiades

I wouldn't generalize in referring to Italian.  I love the standard Italian you find on RAI tv and radio.  It is beautiful and clear.  People speak this way in Tuscany but also in northern Italy, Milan and surrounding area.  It's easy to understand and wonderful.
Yet, I have heard people speaking Italian in a very ugly way... but I cannot discern where they could be from.  In fact, I have to listen really hard before I realize it's Italian.  It's got a dark, murky quality about it.


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## Olaszinhok

merquiades said:


> Yet, I have heard people speaking Italian in a very ugly way... but I cannot discern where they could be from. In fact, I have to listen really hard before I realize it's Italian


In my opinion, that could be said for every single language: English, Spanish, French, Russian German and so forth.
The Italian spoken by Tuscans and "Northern" Italians is so different to my ears.


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## merquiades

Olaszinhok said:


> In my opinion, that may be true for every single language: English, Spanish, French, Russian German and so forth.
> The Italian spoken by Tuscans and "Northern" Italians is so different to my ears.


I know.  I don't doubt it.  Italians had told me for a long time that people in Milan and Bergamo spoke terribly.  But when I went there I found it incredibly easy to understand, and it's not just because they might have been making an effort to talk to me.  Riding along in the metro and sitting in restaurants etc..  I heard people speaking among themselves and it was clear correct Italian.  I mean it matched what we consider to be Italian and was articulated in a way close to the written language.  Unfortunately I have not been to southern Italy so I don't know how they speak there.


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## Şafak

merquiades said:


> Yet, I have heard people speaking Italian in a very ugly way...


So true! Yet it applies to every language. I’m a huge fan of Turkish but sometimes it throws me off how horrible it sounds from some native speakers! How come they speak the best language of the entire universe so badly! I have no idea!


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## Michael Zwingli

merquiades said:


> [...] Yet, I have heard people speaking Italian in a very ugly way... but I cannot discern where they could be from.


Haha, from the Jersey shore, perhaps? Did they sound like Robert DeNiro in this scene?


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## Olaszinhok

Michael Zwingli said:


> Haha, from the Jersey shore, perhaps? Did they sound like Robert DeNiro in this scene?


That's not Italian.  Just English native speakers trying to speak/butcher Italian/Sicilian.


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## Şafak

Michael Zwingli said:


> Haha, from the Jersey shore, perhaps? Did they sound like Robert DeNiro in this scene?


This is so bad. I speak Italian better.


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## elroy

That’s not Italian.


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## Michael Zwingli

elroy said:


> That’s not Italian.


It's probably a hacked-up attempt, by non-native speakers, to use a southern Italian dialect like Calabrese, or even Sicilian dialect. That would be my guess...


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## Olaszinhok

Michael Zwingli said:


> or even Sicilian dialect.


It's supposed to be a mixture of Sicilian and Italian (with a thick American accent).


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## elroy

Olaszinhok said:


> It's supposed to be a mixture of Sicilian and Italian (with a thick American accent).


Emphasis on "supposed to be"?


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## Michael Zwingli

Olaszinhok said:


> It's supposed to be a mixture of Sicilian and Italian (with a thick American accent).


My only knowledge of spoken Italian comes from my maternal grandmother, who, being the daughter of immigrants from Caserta and Taranto, spoke it fluently. Even so, I could tell from DeNiro's pronunciation of his first utterance, that it was not going to be good.


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## Michael Zwingli

Olaszinhok said:


> I am not able to judge my native language, to be honest.


I understand exactly how you feel, Olaszinhok. I had my own similar experience in mind, of my not being able to evaluate the phonetic character of English speech, when I created this thread: https://forum.wordreference.com/thr...ages-to-the-membership.3795032/#post-19528331
In that thread, one fellow had the excellent suggestion of saying sentences with the words in reverse order:


Juju333 said:


> I've always thought the English language sounded beautiful...If you want to know how it sounds, say a sentence in English but start with the last word. For example:
> 
> Read this first and then say it out loud without looking at your laptop and this is how it sounds:
> "Amazing so are you think I".
> Or
> "That doing you are why"


It appears that by doing this, you partially subvert the brain's tendency to ascribe meaning to the words and phrases (your brain's primary function when hearing a language that you can speak), yet maintain the ability to hear the phonetic character of the language. I tried doing this with English, and found it to seem helpful in my hearing what the language might sound like to a non-speaker. You might want to try this with Italian.


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## ahvalj

As an opposite example:


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## Linnets

Michael Zwingli said:


> I have never heard anybody say that they disliked the sound of Italian.


I'm a native speaker of Italian (and even Tuscan) but there are some features of Italian I don't like:

lack of final consonants (well actually that's no longer a problem...);
lack of -_nst_- clusters (e.g. _costante_ ~ _constant_);
lack of -_pt_-, _ct_- -_x_-, in words of classical origin (only recent borrowings feature them).
In other words, a more Spanish-looking/sounding Italian.


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## merquiades

Linnets said:


> I'm a native speaker of Italian (and even Tuscan) but there are some features of Italian I don't like:
> 
> lack of final consonants (well actually that's no longer a problem...);
> lack of -_nst_- clusters (e.g. _costante_ ~ _constant_);
> lack of -_pt_-, _ct_- -_x_-, in words of classical origin (only recent borrowings feature them).
> In other words, a more Spanish-looking/sounding Italian.


I agree.  I just want etymological h reinstated.


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## Linnets

merquiades said:


> I agree.  I just want etymological h reinstated.


I recall Ariosto writing _huomo_ and _Hercole_; anyway Italian without that features looks like a (Central-) dialect rather than a national, literary, and scientific language.


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## Olaszinhok

I do like geminate consonants and open and closed vowels (e/o) in Italian.  Spanish lacks both of them (not to mention syntactic doubling in Italian). I daresay Spanish is less complex, phonologically speaking, in my view.
As for final vowels, Italian has apocopation, which is pretty common. _Andar via, vuol fare, abbiam fatto han detto, miglior, peggior amico, il professor Giovanni, il dottor Gini, il cardinal Poletti, etc. _


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## Dymn

In Spanish it's also *very *common to simplify _-nst-_ clusters to _-st-_ (_costante, costruir..._), _-x-_ to _-s-_ (_másimo, tasi..._), and /pt/ /kt/ are pronounced with a soft approximant: [β̞t], [ɣ̞t].

In Italian there's less distance between inherited and learned words. In Portuguese there's the doublet _feito/facto_. In Italian both would be _fatto._


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## Penyafort

Michael Zwingli said:


> I love the concept of Esperanto, and especially the simplification of grammar it employs, but I have a couple of problems with Zamenhof's approach. If I were to undertake such a project, I would have addressed some of the basic faults that I discern in the Indo-European languages as a whole, such as the overuse of grammatical gender (I don't oppose grammatical gender _per se_, but to me, anything which is inanimate as well as anything animate which does not exhibit an easily recognizable sex should be of neuter gender), and the grammatical identifiers of the grammatical genders as well (masculine "-os", feminine "-a", and neuter "-om"), which for human anatomical reasons, I would have changed to (masculine "-o", feminine "-e", and neuter "-a").



I don't know if I get exactly what you mean, but Esperanto does not really have grammatical gender (if we don't count the pronouns _he _and _she_)


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## Awwal12

I like Mexican Spanish, to be frank, it can easily compete with standard Italian. Other varieties tend to be less pleasant, having one problem or another.


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## Olaszinhok

Awwal12 said:


> I like Mexican Spanish


Any variety of Spanish lacking the θ sound is not appealing to me. As you can see, tastes differ.


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## Awwal12

Olaszinhok said:


> Any variety of Spanish lacking the θ sound is not appealing to me.


And it's precisely one of the reasons why I like Mexican.   [θ] is far from being pleasant to me. Turkmen even sounds like one big defect of speech because of its numerous [θ]s and [ð]s (as if at some point all Turkmens lost their front teeth in some huge brawl).


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## AndrasBP

Awwal12 said:


> Turkmen even sounds like one big defect of speech because of its numerous [θ]s and [ð]s (as if at some point all Turkmens *lost their front teeth* in some huge brawl).


But you can't pronounce inter*dental* fricatives if you're toothless!


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## Awwal12

AndrasBP said:


> But you can't pronounce inter*dental* fricatives if you're toothless!


Except [θ]s and [ð]s are not necessarily *inter*dental. 
(I'm not quite sure about the exact articulation in Turkmen.)
You still can make [θ]s and [ð]s with your gums alone, but you definitely cannot do dental [s]s and [z]s without your teeth.


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