I mean, how do they speak non-English so fluently? I couldn’t do that for German (a language I’m trying to get better at these days, but I’m not that good). I couldn’t even do it for English.
I suppose there’s a lot left to personal preference. But to me, “hard” languages are harsh to the ear. By which I mean languages with a lot of hard consonants, like German. The softest language I know is Irish, and it is the most beautiful to me.
There is also a difference in sonorous vs nasal sounds. I had a Norwegian boyfriend who always felt he needed to speak nasally to make his English sound correct. It was the first I had heard of English being nasal, but I had to admit he was right. A language whose vowels come straight from the chest/throat will always sound better than a nasally one.
There have been studies of various mathematical phonotactical models that claim such things. No idea if it is generally accepted as true or not.
As I see it, they have included some legit English sentences, short ones, (like: “sure”, “sounds good”, “my shit”, “done the wash today”, “you fucking asshole”) to prime you to expect English and then made up words from English phonemes. The prosody is good, I concede that gladly, but with a bit of practice it seems feasible. I have seen/heard similar exercises done with French in a Spanish setting. Skillfully playing with your “previous bias and preconceptions”, as mentioned above. Fun, but only for a short while.
They practiced, and learned their lines, like any other actor. I don’t think anyone could do that off the top of their head. Sid Caesar used to have a routine where he did that in four different languages very convincingly.
Counterpoint:
They did that with varying degrees of success on Whose Line Is It Anyway:
And there are problems like the one in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25VhUJn038.
Klingon doesn’t sound so beautiful.
To me, those “hard consonants” make a language more intelligible and, maybe, more aesthetically appealing. Without them, speech just sounds like gurgling mush. For example, to me, French sounds like the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoon specials.
But maybe the distinction between “beautiful” and “aesthetically appealing” is an important one. The music of Mantovani may be more beautiful than the music of Beethoven, without being more aesthetically appealing.
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Of course what one says is crucial, but you can’t compare that very easily. Euripides, Plutarch, Goethe, Gibran, Li Po, Anatole French and Shakespeare were not screenwriters.
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Modern research states the theory of how people learn (preferring visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) is wrong. Some people can see words, but I am not one of them.
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Almost regardless of first language, people preferred in this study (in order): implosive sounds, musicality and spectral entropy (noise) and progressively dislike (in order): nasal sounds and number of vowels (though these are pretty neutral), diphthongs, pitch variability, novelty, tones, pitch and make speakers.
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But yeah. There are accents that considerably turn me off and ones I could listen to all day. It’s hard to believe the result unless big differences are hidden in small score variations. So not sure if this study is useful.
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Some folks like to talk Jebus more than others.
That was hysterical
And, of course, the beauty of French.
People liked “implosive sounds” most of all (apart from female speakers). Only 13% of languages have them, but no European languages do. I know more than average about language but admit I still had to look this up.
Since I don’t currently speak Mayan or Kru…
Hypothesis:
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people don’t like consonants that they’re not familiar with. Especially the ones that sound like the speaker is trying to cough something up. Exceptions can be made for consonants that are a real novelty, like click consonants.
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people who aren’t used to tonal languages don’t like tonal languages that have high and low tones, because the melody of such speech throws off expectations. (Languages like English use something like tone to convey emphasis, or to distinguish between questions and other kinds of statements- but other languages use tones in very different ways that are confusing to those who are not familiar to them).
As per Pritchard
Poetry should not be fun. It should be oppressive and the reader should hate it. Poems are from hundred years ago. They were written by a bunch of dead men to punish children. When you read a poem, you should never feel emotion. In summary, poems stink.
People who do not know anything at all about American SIgn Language often tell me they think it is a “beautiful” language.
What’s weird, and maybe ironic, is that a few of them will then make motions that are their idea of ASL, and it 1) looks nothing like ASL and 2) to me, looks very ugly.
In the YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vbraa31zNI Emilia Jones is shown singing at the BAFTA awards in 2022 the song “Both Sides Now” that she sang in the movie. There is an ASL interpreter on one side of her and a BSL interpreter on the other side. This allows you to see the difference between the two sign languages. I don’t know which is which. ASL and BSL are different enough that they are different languages, not two dialects of one language.
It’s highly, uh, interpretive by two interpreters who are both hearing, and may not even be interpreters, just people who learned something for the show. I think the brunette is the American one, but it wasn’t real ASL-- the interpreter just has a simpering smile the whole time, and none of the facial expressions of ASL. Meanwhile, the other interpreter was pretty clear to me most of the time, and I do not know BSL at all, and should NOT have been able to understand as well as I did-- if you watch closely (try it with the sound off) you’ll see the are not in sync, but are still doing quite similar things at the same time.