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The way languages sound | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Dylanarama Newbie United States Joined 5248 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 12 05 May 2011 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does a location of a certain language determine what it sounds like? Take a language like Persian, since Persian was next to languages like Arabic does it sound the way it does because of that, even though the languages of are different families? Or Finnish, to me Finnish sounds a lot like it's neighbor Swedish even though it is not Indo European. Is this just a coincidence or do languages sometimes end up sounding kind of similar to what they are near? If Persian was spoken in somewhere like Denmark would it end up sounding a little like Norwegian (especially if Norwegian speakers did a lot of trading with the Persian speakers?)?
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| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6468 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 2 of 12 05 May 2011 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Swedish and finnish do not use the same vowels. I cannot really see any similarities between the languages. Words
borrowed from Swedish into Finnish undergo big fonological changes, i.e. guld /goold/ which became kulta /kulltah/. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5262 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 3 of 12 05 May 2011 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think Swedish and Finnish sound alike at all. Finland Swedish phonology might share a few traits with Finnish
due to language contact, but still I wouldn't say they sound alike. I don't think Swedish and Sami or Norwegian and Sami sound alike either. Neither do Finnish and Russian. Neither do German and Polish, German and Czech, German and French, German and Hungarian or German and Italian. Edited by tractor on 05 May 2011 at 9:02pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6965 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 4 of 12 05 May 2011 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | ||
Perhaps in a very vague way involving certain features.. For example, I read somewhere that vowel harmony as observed in most Uralic and Altaic languages may be an areal feature (i.e. it was used in one of these language families (or a subgroup) and spread to languages throughout northern and central Eurasia. Something similar may be said about tones in certain Asian languages. Even though Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Punjabi aren't considered to be genetically related, it is interesting that all of them are tonal. Again perhaps one of the predecessors of these language became/had been tonal, and then somehow influenced the speakers of neighbouring languages, regardless of whether those languages were genetically-related to the source. However, it's very hard to define things since we're talking about how something "sounds" to others. tractor's example with German is a clear one about how it stands out sonically from its Romance, Slavonic and Finno-Ugric-speaking neighbours. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5190 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 12 05 May 2011 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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While certain sound features do spread across language families (such as R in Europe), there is no basis for what you say. Russian doesn't sound like Finnish, Chinese, Mongolian or Korean, French doesn't sound like Dutch, German doesn't sound like Polish, etc.
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| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5362 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 7 of 12 08 May 2011 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah Finnish does not sound like Swedish in the slightest. Swedish sounds entirely foreign. Just listen to the differences between Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish, the latter of which has Finnish vowels in it. It does sound like its neighbouring Saame languages and also Estonian, but that's because they all broke off from a common language vuonna nakki ja makkara.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5575 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 8 of 12 08 May 2011 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, that's also the reason why Icelandic reminds me of Mongolian and Cherokee of Cantonese.
But, actually - you might have a point there when it comes to bilingual areas. I remember that the first time I heard Alsatian French, I was surprised to hear a group of French women speaking German ... and then I cam closer and realized that it was French. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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