… Or so says this interesting study in The Economist, which took a film recorded in many languages and asked people from many countries to rate them. Most had similar scores, a finding that may surprise you if you have your preferences.
no one has carefully studied the touchy question of which ones are seen as beautiful or ugly.
That is until three scholars—Andrey Anikin, Nikolay Aseyev and Niklas Erben Johansson—published their study of 228 languages last year. They hit upon the idea of using an online film about the life of Jesus, which its promoters have recorded in hundreds of languages. Crucially, most recordings had at least five different speakers, as the film has both exposition and dialogue. The team recruited 820 people from three different language groups—Chinese, English and Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew and Maltese speakers)—to listen to clips and rate the languages’ attractiveness…
People preferred female voices and did not like breathy ones. These films all used the same script with five different speakers so lacked spontaneity, which might make a… HEY! SQUIRREL! Five speakers is not a big number and if one was particularly mellifluous or mealymouthed…
(Excerpt. If this is paywalled and someone could post a shareable version then that would be appreciated. I can’t tell and likely reached my quota in any case.)
Beautiful language? Does this not 100% depend on the class of poets writing in that language?
There is a story that a translator of Halldór Laxness subsequently retired, saying no other task would measure up.
I will grant that each language tends to have its own inimitable style.
“Most had similar scores” — if it’s all Greek to you, then it’s all Greek, right? No big surprise there!
Who is doing the writing in each language? And then isn’t that writer’s skill a great part of the result when evaluating the beauty of a language based on listening to a common story?
I once got into an argument on the subject of Quebec language policies with a French-speaking Quebecois who insisted that the most beautiful language in the world is French. I don’t agree, but there are worse. To paraphrase the great philosopher and linguist Dave Barry, those would be the languages that, in order to enunciate them correctly, you have to sound like you’re about to hork up some major bodily fluids onto the sidewalk.
But I’m sure that the English language sounds equally brutal to the other side.
Quite. I meant to suggest that is it writers who make something beautiful out of language, not something inherent in the language.
Sounds like dog sounds, is one way I have heard it described.
I assume this is about the sound of the language and, having listened to a fair amount of German and Italian, I’m pretty sure Italian is prettier sounding. I can’t tell what English sounds like, since it just sounds right to me.
Anyway, obligatory Simpsons clip. Wanda likes Russian, though.
It sounds like this:
Hahaha! That’s excellent. Doesn’t sound as pretty as Italian.
That’s legitimately one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen.
“Seen as,” or heard as?
English also sounds like this.
I also guess that the study was about the sound of the different languages, that has nothing to do with the craft or skill of the writer or his fluency in matters of style, gramar, syntax or semantics. And further, that the movies were played to people who did not know or understand the languages being analyzed to minimize previous bias and preconceptions. So being in that study must have been a pretty boring exercise, the attention probably wandering around after a couple of miracles (Jeez! A movie about the life of Jesus? Really?). I wish the participants that they only had to endure one linguistic version or two, because 228… Anyway: The only valid conclusion I think that can be drawn is that all languages are more or less at the same level of internal phonetic coherence. That makes them about equally pleasant to our ears when we don’t understand them. Call that beauty if you wish, I am not convinced you can deduce much more from this experiment.
Speaking of previous bias and preconceptions to me as native Spanish and German speaker Italian, with its frequent "i"s (pronounced “ee”), can sound childish and effeminate.
I wonder whether Klingon was included in the sample.
I love this comparison of other languages to the beauty of German.
What, no love for the Black Speech?
{{Grumble, grumble, grumble, stupid Elf-Hobbit biases …}
Sure. I knew a (French) guy who insisted that French was the language of science and precision, while German was the language of philosophy, dreams, and the unconscious. Don’t know what he thought about Portuguese.
How do they do that? It really sounds like English to me.
I know, right? I keep feeling like I just missed a word or two, and it would make sense if I heard it again. The phonology and prosody is spot on, even though the vocabulary is nonsense.
Amazingly well done.
They don’t do it, it’s your brain that does it. Humans want to make sense.