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The Rhythm of the Romance Languages.

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
15 messages over 2 pages: 1
culebrilla
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United States
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Speaks: Spanish

 
 Message 9 of 15
11 January 2014 at 4:40am | IP Logged 
viedums wrote:
It’s been said that some languages are stress-timed, meaning that there’s a roughly equal length of time between stressed syllables, and other languages are syllable-timed, meaning that the duration of each syllable is more or less equal.  English and German are stress-timed, and Romance languages like French and Spanish are syllable-timed, in this view. Look up the Wikipedia page on ‘Isochrony’ to learn more about this.

There’s also a third type, the mora-timed languages. Japanese is the best-known of these, and if you listen to Japanese pop music (I am thinking of Pizzicato 5) you can hear this phenomenon clearly.

Now, some linguists have debunked the idea of classifying languages in this way. It’s problematic to apply it to whole languages. Personally I don’t think it’s helpful to say, for instance, that Chinese is syllable-timed but Thai is stress-timed. There are many other factors, like syllable shape, tone etc. Still, the most likely reason people keep coming back to this idea is that they are trying to explain the difference in rhythm between English and the Romance languages. In your case, it may be that you are stress-timing your Spanish when you should be giving each syllable its own beat.


I'm not stress-timing my Spanish. The rhythm thing is just something that my perfectionist Mexican friend was mentioning to me. He has a VERY good accent in English and has set his goal to be absolutely native-like in his English accent. So that is perhaps why he brought it up to me. I'm quite happy with where I'm at, if only I could just trill my R's. :(

Edit: I'm specifically talking about the purported "rhythm" of the romance languages and not other languages in particular, fyi.

Edited by culebrilla on 11 January 2014 at 4:42am

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Serpent
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 Message 10 of 15
11 January 2014 at 10:53am | IP Logged 
Well, it's impossible to describe the Romance languages as a whole without comparing them to non-Romance languages. It's possible to compare their rhythm of course but this would focus on the differences and not the similarities.

You also didn't make it clear in the original post that your interest is only theoretical, so no need to bark if people interpret it as asking for help ;)
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smallwhite
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 Message 11 of 15
11 January 2014 at 1:59pm | IP Logged 
I think Cantonese news announcers usually read Cantonese evenly. While there's one announcer who groups words together by rushing them, and it's very annoying. Kind of like someone reading a bank account number to you as "one... two... threefourfivesix... seven... eightnineten". (Ta... ta... tafatefi... ta... tafate... in music notation) It's still comprehensible; just very annoying.
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Medulin
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 Message 12 of 15
11 January 2014 at 8:02pm | IP Logged 
''In the real world languages do not fit quite so easily into such precise categories. Languages exhibit degrees of durational variability both in relation to other languages and to other standards of the same language.[15]

There can be varying degrees of stress-timing within the various standards of a language. Some southern dialects of Italian, a syllable-timed language, are effectively stress-timed.[16] English, a stress-timed language, has become so widespread over the globe that some standards tend to be more syllable-timed than the British or North American standards, an effect which comes from the influence of other languages spoken in the relevant region. Indian English, for example, tends toward syllable-timing.[17] This does not necessarily mean the language standard itself is to be classified as syllable-timed, of course, but rather that this feature is more pronounced. A subtle example is that to a native English speaker, for example, some accents from Wales may sound more syllable-timed.

A better-documented case of these varying degrees of stress-timing in a language comes from Portuguese. European Portuguese is more stress-timed than the Brazilian standard. The latter has mixed characteristics[18] and varies according to speech rate, sex and dialect. At fast speech rates, Brazilian Portuguese is more stress-timed, while in slow speech rates, it can be more syllable-timed. The accents of rural, southern Rio Grande do Sul and the Northeast (especially Bahia) are considered to sound more syllable-timed than the others, while the southeastern dialects such as the mineiro, in central Minas Gerais, the paulistano, of the northern coast and eastern regions of São Paulo, and the fluminense, along Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and eastern Minas Gerais as well the Federal District, are most frequently essentially stress-timed. Also, male speakers of Brazilian Portuguese speak faster than female speakers and speak in a more stress-timed manner.''   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony
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culebrilla
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United States
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Speaks: Spanish

 
 Message 13 of 15
11 January 2014 at 8:58pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
Well, it's impossible to describe the Romance languages as a whole without comparing them to non-Romance languages. It's possible to compare their rhythm of course but this would focus on the differences and not the similarities.

You also didn't make it clear in the original post that your interest is only theoretical, so no need to bark if people interpret it as asking for help ;)


Don't really see how it was "barking." My bark can get a lot louder than simply replying to a quote. But yes, I should have been clearer in the original post.

The perception of somebody's accent or language level is also, obviously, really dependent on each individual. Somebody told this Mexican friend that his accent was really "bad" and when he told me this I was dumbfounded. I'm very hard to impress and for me to say that this guy's English is very good means that he must be extremely advanced.
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Serpent
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 Message 14 of 15
11 January 2014 at 9:09pm | IP Logged 
I was just teasing based on your original example sentence ;)
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culebrilla
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 Message 15 of 15
11 January 2014 at 9:24pm | IP Logged 
Wow. That was awesome. Nice.


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