Yeah, Polish looks like an alphabetical vomit at times. Names like Szczepanczyk come to mind. The [“dark l” (ł)](Velarized alveolar lateral approximant) sounds like baby talk sometimes. Spoken, I’d say Polish is not excessively ugly nor beautiful, it comes out “normal.”
French and Portuguese both have the nasal, it’s just that the former writes out the n but it’s not strictly pronounced, whereas the latter (usually?) puts a ~ over one of the preceding letters, etc. It’s subtle enough to not be grating though. And not to knock French - it’s my second most proficient language. The “r” sound is phlegmy, but I can at least pronounce it better than trilling, etc.
And of course (more for the other thread), Black Speech is not very euphonious!
It’s actually not a “dark l” in most dialects of Polish. In standard Polish, and the dialects I’m familiar with, it’s just a bog-standard /w/ sound, or a Labio-velar approximant.
Also, when it comes to accents, as I mentioned in the “ugly languages” thread, I love English as spoken by Scots, especially Glaswegians. I know this is a minority position, though.
Agreed. Scottish is gorgeous. Borderline incomprehensible at times, but gorgeous. Also, when produced by a reasonably attractive speaker, it makes me feel all funny in the pants department.
I used to think English was boring until I started teaching it as a foreign language. I’m now fascinated by its grammatical intricacies, its voluminous vocabulary, and its amazing etymology. I also understand why Shakespeare and other English poets are so avidly studied around the world.
German was my second language, and I’ve never understood why so many people find it unattractive. I love speaking and hearing it, and German singing can be positively sublime.
I’m a Slavicist by profession, but the only Slavic language I can really appreciate is Russian (preferably Muscovite). Ukrainian and Belarussian sound mushy to my ears, while Czech and Polish are just plain harsh. South Slavic languages like Serbian are somewhere in between.
Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian don’t bother me, even though I can’t understand any of them. Latvian and Lithuanian sound remarkably like Czech to me, but they don’t grate on my ears.
Romance languages are okay; Scandinavian languages (except for Danish) are better. I especially like Swedish.
Dutch is weird. It sounds like English and German mixed together and spoken with a faux Swedish accent.
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
I’m glad to see some love in here for Scandinavian languages. I have a fair amount of Finnish folk music in my collection and it’s some gorgeous stuff. I love Swedish and Icelandic as well.
Romance languages are beautiful as well, but I think they’re a mixed bag. Still, Spanish and Portuguese are amazing, Italian is so-so, and French is horribly overrated. Romanian gets some bonus points for having the Slavic touches, especially since, as much as I love the Slavic accent, the language itself sounds fairly harsh to me.
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 remember being pleasantly lost in Montreal in the spring one time and hearing a woman speaking French with a strong Jamaican accent. She sounded operatic and for all I know, she was being rude.
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.
Maybe, although the Elder Scrolls does use a (somewhat altered) version of Esperanto to represent harsh demonic necromancer chanting. Note the link to the translation at bottom.
