That makes sense. It also sounds a touch Frenchy at times for some of the same reasons (mostly the first part), I should think.
Finnish and Estonian have a great many cognates in common, but the Finnish variant tends to be a longer word, and the Estonian variant tends to be more truncated.
Example:
English – one, two, three, four, five
Finnish – yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi
Estonian – üks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis
As a result, it’s somewhat harder for Finns to understand Estonian than for Estonians to understand Finnish.
While Estonian uses the accented letters ä, ö, and ü, it doesn’t appear to use them nearly as much. Here are some random snippets from the respective languages:
Kapybara muistuttaa ulkonäöltään suurta marsua, jolle se onkin läheistä sukua. Kapybaralla on raskas ja tynnyrimäinen ruumiinrakenne sekä lyhyt pää. Kuono on tylppä, ja silmät, korvat ja sieraimet ovat lähellä päälakea. Turkki on selkäpuolella punertavanruskeaa ja vatsapuolella vaihtuu kellertävänruskeaksi. Hikirauhasia on ihossa karvojen peittämällä alueella, mikä on epätavallinen piirre jyrsijöillä.Karvat ovat harvassa, mutta turkki on karkeaa.
Kapibaarad on levinud eelkõige Lõuna-Ameerika mandril. Kõige tihedamalt leidub neid Panamas, Colombias, Venezuelas, Guyanas, Peruus, Brasiilias, Paraguays, Kirde-Argentinas ja Uruguays. 1960. aastatel transporditi kapibaarasid ka Jaapani loomaaedadesse. Kuna kapibaarad on olemuselt tagasihoidlikud ja sotsiaalsed, muutusid nad loomaaedades väga populaarseteks. Neile ehitati isegi spetsiaalsed kuumaveeallikad, mida kapibaarad Jaapani loomaaedades siiani kasutada saavad.
Here in SoFL we have legions of Spanish-speaking Latin American natives and Portuguese-speaking Brazilian natives. I get to hear lots of it though understand rather little of the Spanish and none of the Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese is apparently rather different from Portugal’s Portuguese. Both in vocabulary and in accent.
In any case, my impression is BP sounds a lot like LatAm Spanish spoken with a thick French accent. As @MrDibble said, it’s probably the predominance of those sounds.
From The Onion’s Our Dumb World: Portuguese was invented by someone trying to speak Spanish with too many olives in his mouth.
IIRC, my mom made a similar observation, but since she happens to not know any Russians, I think she substituted some other Slavic language. Polish?
That would even be a better fit than Russian, as both Polish and Portuguese have nasal vowels in addition to a lot of ch/sh/zh sounds.
For me, Finnish is mainly recognizable by the volume of umlauts and vowels.
Welsh is recognizable by the popularity of y’s and ae’s
You’re not the first to observe this. Specifically European Portuguese, people usually don’t say this for Brazilian Portuguese.
Yeah I lived in Europe for six years, so that’s the variant I mostly encountered.
One of the characteristics of Dutch is the ij digraph. In handwriting it looks like and can be replaced by ÿ. Note that in IJsselmeer, both letters are capitalized which I assume means that the combination is perceived as a single letter.
Huh. That’s something I’ve somehow never come across. IJ looks to be a digraph that is treated as a single letter, but other languages have such digraphs, like Hungarian gy, but don’t capitalize both letters in initial position (like the town of Győr.) I wonder why Dutch does it that way.
And if I hear people speaking Spanish but I can’t understand a single word, it’s because it’s actually Greek.
That must be the nasal vowels.
Conversely, when French is sung on Brazilian rhythms, it sounds deceptively like Portuguese.
It took me a while to realize that the chorus (starting at the 0:58 mark) is in French.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. Should have put two and two together when I remarked that Polish is a better comparison than Russian because it has nasal vowels. Duh, that would make it sounds “Frenchy,” as well.
I think I’ve seen the Welsh “FF” capitalized together? But I’m never sure about anything with Welsh.
Don’t know, but Unicode supports it as a single character. Here they are: IJ / ij, try to select one letter individually and you can’t.
As in people’s names? That’s both maybe from Welsh and also a uniquely upper-crust British/English thing. Often you see it lowercase at the beginning like this guy: Charles ffoulkes. Which I just learned also has its own Unicode: ff
That one doesn’t surprise me as it’s a common ligature, like fl or fi. Do those have their own Unicode? I’m at my phone so can’t check. If so, ffl?
I checked, yep.
ffl
ffi
Yeah. Looks like the standard set. “fj” if they’re especially thorough, which I’d guess Unicode is.