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The way languages sound | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5554 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes  Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 9 of 12 08 May 2011 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
Or why Mongolian reminds me of Russian :D By the way, does anyone have an explanation for why European Portuguese is spoken with that weird slavic accent (if you know what I mean)? Kind of random for that area of Europe, Portugal being as far west in Europe as you can get from the Slavic nations... Neighbouring countries etc. can have huge impacts on languages in terms of vocabulary and phonemes, and in bilingual cases even in terms of syntax/grammar (so we get languages like Finnish Swedish which sounds like Finnish because it's surrounded by Finnish speakers, and thus Finnish phonemes etc - Finnish and Swedish are in no way related linguistically and there's no other reason for a Swedish dialect to take on the phonemes of an unrelated Ugric language). But also, really, I think also in a lot of cases 2 similar-sounding languages point to a common ancestor, regardless of proximity. Have a listen to the Bench language of Ethiopia: http://globalrecordings.net/audio/c80810/mp3/C80810-A.mp3 Sounds like Chinese, doesn't it? Or at least a tonal Asian language. Yet Ethiopia isn't really anywhere near an Asian nation. But if it's true that humans first migrated from Africa to Asia, then there's a (possible) explanation there. Edited by kyssäkaali on 08 May 2011 at 11:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 12 09 May 2011 at 6:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting example of how perceptions differ. To me that doesn't sound remotely Chinese, and certainly not tonal in the way the Chinese languages are. It does, however, remind me of Japanese. Also, Vietnamese sounds a bit like Cantonese, yes? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5554 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 11 of 12 10 May 2011 at 12:34am | IP Logged | |||||
I admit it doesn't really sound like Chinese. That's the way someone described it when I first downloaded that clip. I listened to it just now and you're right, it sounds totally like Japanese. Skip to 0:44 for example. As for Viet and Cantonese, I just watched a Cantonese clip on youtube and I didn't get any viet vibes at all. More Mandarin. However I'm not at all familiar with Mandarin; for all I know it sounds totally different. I know Cantonese still has the final consonants that Mandarin lost etc. Maybe it all depends on familiarity. A monolingual Mandarin speaker might turn right around and say German, French and Dutch all sound identical. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5925 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 12 of 12 10 May 2011 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Finnish and Swedish don't sound similar to me either. Listen to both languages a little more and you'll begin to notice the differences.
There was a time when I thought that Finnish and Japanese sounded alike, even though I don't think so now. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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