chris4355 said:
I actually learned French and Armenian first. Thats true, but I was able to relate this discussion with other people as well. It could be however that just posing the question made them make the relation and just say yes, without thinking about it thoroughly.
There are certainly physiological components of language skill that could give emotional feedback. For example, English typically articulates consonants by raising the tongue in the middle, so when you speak English it rests on the bottom of your mouth. Spanish with all of its labiodental consonants raises the tip, so when you speak Spanish your tongue is always poised with the tip close to your teeth. That's one less muscle in your body that's relaxed, so it may contribute to the way you feel.
For that matter, Spanish in general requires much more energy to speak since its ratio of syllables to morphemes is very high and therefore the rate of syllables per second is much higher than English; my own rough measure is a ratio of 3:2. The same is true of Italian, Japanese and many other languages. French with its many monosyllables is closer to English, and Chinese with its lack of inflections and near-meaningless noise words like articles and prepositions is even more leisurely.
Hmm, I never knew that. Is that common with most Eastern languages?
Not at all. For starters, there are several unrelated language families in East Asia. Sino-Tibetan is one, but there's also Mongolic, Japonic, Mon-Khmer, Malayo-Polynesian, etc.
I always thought Chinese people spoke somewhat funny, and always found the pitches to feel out of place... that explains it.
That's why Westerners call the sound of Chinese "sing-song." There are only 400 syllables in Mandarin phonetics, and that increases to 1,600 because each one can take any of four tones. Still that leaves a lot of homonyms, so most "words" in our languages are translated as compounds in Chinese.
Vietnamese is also a tonal language, but they manage to understand each other with the tones compressed into a much narrower range of pitch. They say that when Chinese learn to speak Vietnamese, they always sound like they're singing.
I wonder if facial expressions would matter much more as a result between two people speaking Chinese.
I don't think so. They seem to have no trouble expressing themselves on the telephone.
Is your native language Chinese?
No, I'm a Euro-American. My mother's family spoke Bohemian around me (we call it Czech now because it's easier to spell) and the bizarre phonetics must have sunk in unconsciously because I've found the sounds of foreign languages easier to master than the average American. But I spoke only English until I was eleven and we had mandatory Spanish classes in school. I was 26 when I studied Mandarin but I had a Chinese girlfriend and I urged her to speak it with me at home so even though I have a small vocabulary it comes out fluently.
Orleander said:
oh hell yeah. I hear a guy speaking Russian and immediately he's sexy. Scottish accents make me sad. Canadian accents piss me off. Southern accents make me shave off IQ points.
Americans generally find accents a bit exotic and charming since, unlike in the UK, accent is not a mark of class distinction here. Nonetheless a specific accent can acquite its own cachet due to social and cultural forces. When I was a kid a German accent was considered very unattractive, and during the Cold War that shifted to Russian. Now with the twin debates over immigration and terrorism, other accents are having their ups and downs.
But the one that we almost always hold in high regard is RP. That's "Received Pronunciation," what we call over here "Oxford English" or "BBC English," an artificial dialect invented early in the last century as a way for the upper class to teach their children to distinguish themselves from the others. We may have fought two wars, but in our hearts we still regard England as our ancestral home. King Arthur, Shakespeare and the Rolling Stones are just as much cultural icons here as there, and for as long as the world turns Americans will die to protect England.
I don't know how I would rate the various dialects of accented English, but the spoken language I find the most beautiful is Romanian.
