# Most beautiful Language **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [August 10, 2013, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862 "2013-08-10T12:34:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/son_of_a_rich/32/5439_2.png) [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Son_of_a_Rich)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2013, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/61 "2013-08-12T18:14:38Z")
Portuguese, at least the Portuguese I’ve heard sung, sometimes has an “acht” sound, a bit like huckering a loogie. Don’t know what it’s called, but it can be a bit distracting. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2013, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/62 "2013-08-12T18:21:58Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > With Bill Shatner, no less: > > [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHUfHj2lTaM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHUfHj2lTaM) > > Enjoy! 😃 If it’s good enough for William Shatner, it’s good enough for me, by gum! ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2013, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/63 "2013-08-12T19:09:11Z")
> [@sylmar](#): > > Isn’t that conflating the sound and message? Paul Mcartney’s repetoire would be argument for a seperation between the two. > > And yet, the frequently used “Lost in tanslation” would seem to support the two are somewhat entertwined . What I mean, is it’s the difference between listening to a news cast and listening to something artfully put together. Spanish is a beautiful language, but hearing one of my best friend’s family speak it in High School, or flipping through a telenovela, it’s not very beautiful at all. So it seems only fair to me, that if we’re going to compare Italian through opera, or other languages through poetry or folk, then it seems only fair to compare English in a similar fashion, with music and poetry rather than news. And yes, there are certain aspects of language are lost in translation, particularly in the form of the message, but just how it sounds should remain the same. A big part of what makes Shakespeare beautiful is the meter, and that will still be there whether you understand what’s being said or not. So, I guess I’m just saying, when we compare apples to apples, which most people probably can’t fairly do with their native languages, or perhaps any language their fairly versed in. > [@terentii](#): > > Not to rain on your parade, but Finnish isn’t Scandinavian; it isn’t Germanic or even Indo-European. It’s a Fenno-Ugric language related to Estonian and Hungarian. > > I’ve studied it a little and it’s quite difficult to learn, particularly when you have no real point of reference. > > Swedish, on the other hand, is incredibly easy to learn if you know English and German (or even just one of them), in terms of both vocabulary and grammar. Ah, well, I didn’t know that. I’ve heard plenty of Finnish in music, and only heard it a little when meeting Finnish bands in person, and pretty much the opposite for Swedish, since most of the Swedish bands I’ve met sing almost exclusively in English. So it never occured to me that they were that different. Ignorance fought. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2013, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/64 "2013-08-12T19:16:50Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > Ah, well, I didn’t know that. I’ve heard plenty of Finnish in music, and only heard it a little when meeting Finnish bands in person, and pretty much the opposite for Swedish, since most of the Swedish bands I’ve met sing almost exclusively in English. So it never occured to me that they were that different. Ignorance fought. Yeah, completely unrelated. To a speaker of Swedish, Danish or Norwegian, Finnish is so bizarre that it might as well be Klingon. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2013, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/65 "2013-08-12T21:06:29Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > Yeah, completely unrelated. To a speaker of Swedish, Danish or Norwegian, Finnish is so bizarre that it might as well be Klingon. As long as we’re talking about Scandinavian languages, Icelandic is (from what I gather) far more difficult to learn well than any of those three. Fifteen grammatical cases, I seem to recall (though that is an improvement over Old Norse, which had many more—fifty, I think.) ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2013, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/66 "2013-08-12T21:15:58Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > I’m gonna go out a bit on a limb here and say that English isn’t too bad itself, and I’ve heard from some people I’ve known who aren’t native speakers, particularly those who don’t speak it at all, that they enjoyed hearing it spoken. I think it’s hard to think of it that way since it’s so common and, obviously, everyone here is fluent in it, and so much of what we hear of it is utilitarian rather than artsy, like how we might hear a foreign language in music or film. But look at the artiest forms of English, like Shakespeare, and it’s a damn beautiful. At the very least, it’s probably one of the best sounding Germanic languages. I thought this was pretty well done and its a catchy tune! A parody video of what English sounds like to non-English speakers: [![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BZXcRqFmFa8/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEmCOADEOgC8quKqQMa8AEB-AGmA4ACwAKKAgwIABABGGUgZShlMA8=&rs=AOn4CLB0bykr3NOpUWccjRGKUtR91mNjVw "What American English sounds like to non-English speakers") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZXcRqFmFa8) ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2013, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/67 "2013-08-12T22:00:04Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > As long as we’re talking about Scandinavian languages, Icelandic is (from what I gather) far more difficult to learn well than any of those three. Fifteen grammatical cases, I seem to recall (though that is an improvement over Old Norse, which had many more—fifty, I think.) Not seeing what you mean. From what I can tell, Old Norse had a pretty basic morphology – four noun declensions across three genders and plurals, with some typical variation, and a verb structure that is not particularly unusual amongst various languages [apparently not all that pretty, though](http://notendur.hi.is//~haukurth/norse/sounds/ragn1_2b.mp3) ---
**Author:** ![lisiate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f05b48/32.png) [@lisiate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lisiate)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2013, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/68 "2013-08-13T00:19:50Z")
I’ve no idea what it sounds like but I find [Georgian script](http://ka.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%83%9B%E1%83%97%E1%83%90%E1%83%95%E1%83%90%E1%83%A0%E1%83%98_%E1%83%92%E1%83%95%E1%83%94%E1%83%A0%E1%83%93%E1%83%98)beautiful. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2013, 8:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/69 "2013-08-14T08:23:58Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > What may surprise you—spoken Mongolian sounds pretty nice. I heard a Mongolian poet once being interviewed on NPR, and when he recited some of his poetry in Mongolian, the interviewer was all “Wow! That sounded _beautiful!_” For the record, the guy’s name was [Jalbuu Choinhor](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1007721), the Mongolian ambassador to the United States. Unfortunately they don’t have the audio available any more. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2013, 8:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/70 "2013-08-14T08:32:57Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > To me, the most beautiful language in the world is undoubtedly Ladino - a Jewish dialect that is to Spanish what Yiddish is to German. > > [Example](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZtU3yNAuMA). [Sephardic](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0yENso9jag) [music](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVsIFl53QRg) is my favorite type of music in the world, and Ladino lyrics certainly have something to do with that. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2013, 9:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/71 "2013-08-14T09:42:47Z")
> [@Batistuta](#): > > I might be taking this a bit off-topic, but isn’t this quite typical of Germanic languages? When discovering something new, they just combined existing words to give it a new name. > > The Swedish word for ‘turtle’ is ‘shielded toad’ (sköldpadda), the gums in your mouth are ‘teeth meat’ (tandkött), vegetables are ‘green things’ (grönsaker) and strawberries are ‘old men from the soil’ (jordgubbar). You just can’t hate a language that adorable That’s a common mechanism for word formation; it’s less likely to happen if there is someone around to ask him “what do you call this?”, and even in that case there may be some loss in transliteration, but if there’s nobody around to ask, you just come up with a name mixing previously-existing words. Swedish and German pull the different wordbits together into a single word, other languages are more likely to leave spaces, but _blat de moro_ or _coche de caballos_ didn’t get their names from asking someone what do you call this, they got it by combination of preexisting words. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2013, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/72 "2013-08-14T16:52:25Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > What may surprise you—spoken Mongolian sounds pretty nice. I heard a Mongolian poet once being interviewed on NPR, and when he recited some of his poetry in Mongolian, the interviewer was all “Wow! That sounded _beautiful!_” Aren’t the Mongolians the ones who do that “throat singing”? I saw a documentary on that. Pretty neat to listen to. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2013, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/73 "2013-08-14T17:34:50Z")
It looks like throat singing is a thing in Mongolia, but I suspect that the Tuvan form is the one you’ve heard of. Tuva is an autonomous republic of Russia, but its people are mostly Turkic, i.e. distantly related to Mongolians. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2013, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/74 "2013-08-14T17:38:44Z")
> [@thelurkinghorror](#): > > It looks like throat singing is a thing in Mongolia, but I suspect that the Tuvan form is the one you’ve heard of. Tuva is an autonomous republic of Russia, but its people are mostly Turkic, i.e. distantly related to Mongolians. That’s right. [Genghis Blues](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Blues) (1999) was the documentary. Well worth watching. ---
**Author:** ![JustsomeDude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a183cd/32.png) [@JustsomeDude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JustsomeDude)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2013, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862/75 "2013-08-14T17:40:51Z")
> [@movingfinger](#): > > A vote here for Farsi. Very melodic with no harshness or gutturals. And Finnish, of course. When I started learning Finnish I heard the comment thast it sounded like Japanese spoken by an Italian. Persian. Intriguing poetry and poets. Lots of melody and rhythm in it. Great vocabulary and stunning calligraphy. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-beautiful-language/665862.md?page=3)