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.
If it’s good enough for William Shatner, it’s good enough for me, by gum!
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.
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.
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.)
I thought this was pretty well done and its a catchy tune!
A parody video of what English sounds like to non-English speakers:
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
I’ve no idea what it sounds like but I find Georgian scriptbeautiful.
For the record, the guy’s name was Jalbuu Choinhor, the Mongolian ambassador to the United States. Unfortunately they don’t have the audio available any more.
Sephardic music is my favorite type of music in the world, and Ladino lyrics certainly have something to do with that.
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.
Aren’t the Mongolians the ones who do that “throat singing”? I saw a documentary on that. Pretty neat to listen to.
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 (1999) was the documentary. Well worth watching.
Persian. Intriguing poetry and poets. Lots of melody and rhythm in it. Great vocabulary and stunning calligraphy.