What does English sound like?

Guest   Thu Feb 22, 2007 6:41 am GMT
No khay, only Klav Khalash
Neil   Fri Apr 20, 2007 2:08 pm GMT
I live in Rhode Island which is in New England, The accent I have is different even from the surrounding states, the accent of people who live in Boston for example sounds much different from myself. And this holds true thorough out the country. For example the Southern accent is so much slower and actually hard for me to understand some times.
Thom   Mon Jul 09, 2007 6:24 pm GMT
It's generally true that English sounds more masculine/harsh than the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian), but more feminine/elegant than German. But it certainly depends on the individual of either party.
But on the whole it mixes utility and beauty in appropriate measure.

I think it's a very appropriate lingua franca for the world; It's such an amalgam language. It borrows from the romance languages/latin, German, Greek, and others. Which is why it's LEAST twice as large (big, huge, massive, great, gigantic..) as the second largest language.

That's better than the world speaking French.. because they'd just be speaking that - French. From France. When the world's speaking English, it's sort of speaking 'European'. At least more so than any other single language.

Also.. when people say it sounds too formal or tight mouthed.. well, that's true, but that's exactly because it is so expressive!! In English you don't NEED to wave your hand around, or make shapes with your mouth, etc, because the language does it itself.
Jasper   Mon Jul 09, 2007 7:12 pm GMT
My take is probably unique. I think the non-rhotic English varieties pleasant, while the rhotic varieties unpleasant, including my own Inland Southern dialect. To my mind, the acme of American pronunciation is Mid-Atlantic dialect in the North, and Virginia Tidewater in the South, both of which are becoming extinct. The rest of the American dialects sound either nasal, cloying, or country.

RP is beautiful in the UK, but I have found that most of the dialects are unpleasant for various reasons. Cockney, in particular, makes me wince.

If you want to talk about the sound of the language in general? I once reversed some English speech; now while this isn't scientific, it might give at least an indication of what the language sounds like to others-the same sounds, arranged in an unintelligible way.

I found that English sounded like we speakers have a mouthful of marbles. Unpleasant. Too much emphasis on vowels.

For what it's worth, Spanish is unpleasant, too--too harsh, particularly the Spain version. It's the opposite of English in that there's too much emphasis on consonants--sounds like a machine gun.

Swedish, in my humble opinion, is the most pleasant language on Earth--somewhat like a softened-down German.
greg   Tue Jul 10, 2007 10:08 am GMT
Thom : « It's generally true that English sounds more masculine/harsh than the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian), but more feminine/elegant than German. »

Non, la seule vérité générale c'est que toute perception individuelle est subjective.

Selon moi, l'anglais est plus "féminin" que le français ou le castillan. Et l'allemand plus "élégant" que l'anglais.
Travis   Tue Jul 10, 2007 2:39 pm GMT
I have to agree with greg here about English versus German. To me at least, at least Standard German just comes off as much cleaner and sharper than most English dialects and standards, which seem just "mushy" for lack of a better word in comparison. Of course, this is probably largely due to English's tendency towards assimilation, elision, and epenthesis (especially in the insertion of glides between adjacent vowels) as well as the use of diphthongs for (at least mid) tense vowels in most dialects. (Where Standard German just likes to insert glottal stops between vowels and at the starts of words starting with vowels.) (Note, of course, that this is ignoring the apocope and like which can be found in High German dialects.)
Thom   Tue Jul 10, 2007 5:19 pm GMT
Greg: Depends on your interpretation of my description of masculine and feminine! I shouldn't really have used those words descriptively, because they mean something else altogether in terms of grammar..

But purely what I mean by feminine/masculine is that one is more soft and delicate, whereas the other is more strong. Not 'ugly' or unattractive, just different.

It depends on the speaker and the listener, of course, but phonetically English surely IS a mixture of Romantic and Germanic language.. so it's not THAT overtly subjective to say that it is, to the ear, somewhere inbetween.



By the way: Who can you find from any country that has the most beautiful voice?

My bet is on *Joanna Lumley*.
Youtube her if you don't know who she is!
Travis   Tue Jul 10, 2007 6:13 pm GMT
>>It depends on the speaker and the listener, of course, but phonetically English surely IS a mixture of Romantic and Germanic language.. so it's not THAT overtly subjective to say that it is, to the ear, somewhere inbetween.<<

The phonology of English is purely that of a Germanic language; for instance, it has typically Germanic characteristics such as aspirated fortis plosives at the starts of words and before stressed syllables and stress timing, which differ from the typically Romance lack of aspirated plosives and stress timing (of course there are both Germanic languages which lack such aspiration patterns, such as Icelandic, and Romance languages with stress timing, such as European Portuguese, but these are the exceptions.) And even though English may differ in overall sound from, say, German, there are other Germanic languages which share things like widespread vowel diphthongization (such as Faroese).

All in all, the only areas where Romance languages have had any influence upon English are the lexicon and possibly some particulars of syntax such as the usage of "of" and the ability to have postnominal attributive adjectives (even though my default attributive adjectives in English are prenominal, like in other Germanic languages).
Guest   Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:57 pm GMT
" but phonetically English surely IS a mixture of Romantic and Germanic language "


I don't think so. to me english sounds very germanic. (PS: I said germanic, not german)
Thom   Fri Jul 13, 2007 6:04 pm GMT
Okay, you obviously know more than I do, Travis!

I agree English is much more Germanic. But what I meant to suggest is that much more of the actual words themselves are borrowed from Romantic languages and Greek, etc.
Although I guess it's the pronunciation that matters.

English speakers call a bucket a bucket.. not a "buck-ayy".
Travis   Fri Jul 13, 2007 6:10 pm GMT
>>I agree English is much more Germanic. But what I meant to suggest is that much more of the actual words themselves are borrowed from Romantic languages and Greek, etc.
Although I guess it's the pronunciation that matters.<<

Even when it comes to lexicon, the thing is that while English has a large number of Romance and Latinate loans (and a smaller amount of Greek loans), the core lexicon of English is still primarily Germanic in nature (albeit not altogether Anglo-Saxon, though, since a good amount of very basic vocabulary in English today is actually from Old Norse, such as the pronoun "they").
Sausage   Tue Jul 17, 2007 2:34 pm GMT
>>Even when it comes to lexicon, the thing is that while English has a large number of Romance and Latinate loans (and a smaller amount of Greek loans), the core lexicon of English is still primarily Germanic in nature (albeit not altogether Anglo-Saxon, though, since a good amount of very basic vocabulary in English today is actually from Old Norse, such as the pronoun "they").<<

One of the things about English is that it can be very subtle. Much of this subtlety is attributable to its very large vocabulary, a goodly portion of which is made up of borrowed words. A classic example is the collection of words word a smell. The words "aroma" and "odor" are borrowed from French, I think, and "smell" and "stench" are Anglo-Saxon; but the first two are more genteel ways of describing smells while the latter two are considered more direct or even crude. English has a lot of gradiations of meaning like this, thanks to the number of "foreign" particularly French or Norman words. It goes back to the societal divide of Norman England, when the upper class spoke Norman French and the lower/slave classes spoke Anglo-Saxon.
Earle   Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:03 pm GMT
I once had a next-door neighbor, a German, who had lived in the US for about 25 years, describe the difference between German and English as German being "long-faced," and English being "wide-faced." I was briefly puzzled, but then I thought about the fact that the German "o" and "oo" sounds have to be made (properly) with the lips rounded. It's possible to make the English equivalents while smiling...
Jérémy   Tue Jul 17, 2007 5:08 pm GMT
The word I often use to describe what English sounds like is "yogurt". I think the delivery and the sounds are like yogurt: they flow and melt.
Jasper   Tue Jul 17, 2007 5:26 pm GMT
<<By the way: Who can you find from any country that has the most beautiful voice? >>

Actress Juliette Mole. A deep, sexy RP.

Catch her on Poirot's Murder in the Mews.