I asked my wife this while English was still a relatively unpleasant experience for her.
She said that to her Brazilian-Portuguese-tuned ears it sounded choppy. Lots of breaks between words, in contrast to the more melodic flow of her native language.
I have long felt that our English rhythm is a challenge for new speakers to adopt. For lack of a better term, I have always imagined English as having an iambic rhythm (da DA da Da da Da da Da da Da…)
Now bordelond has provided me with better terms for this as well as proper cites.
Amazingly like English, actually. The best description I can offer is that it sounds like something from Motown that I’ve never heard, played too softly to make out the words…only loud. It’s weirdly impressive, as well as being hilarious.
? That has nothing to do with what I said. If I’m standing here and my friend Bob is standing just East of me, by knowing that he’s East, I know that I’m comparatively Westward from Bob’s standpoint. If I know that Sally is West of me, then I’m comparatively Eastward from Sally’s standpoint.
And it is one of the things which do vary between dialects: many native English speakers will “stop to breathe” in the middle of a word (actually, right before a stressed syllable), but it’s very common in British English and Australian English, not so much in American dialects, and then you get the Jamaicans who just seem to turn every sentence into a single word (not everybody, and yes I’m conscious that people from the Isle of Skye don’t speak like Mancunians).
This is something I understood when I heard about how English poetry metrics work: yes, you’re iambic. In Spanish, Italian or French, verses are measured in terms of total syllables; in English, in terms of stressed syllables. Y’all use iambic pentameter, we use versos endecasílabos. An English speaker might pronounce that last word as “endecah (breathe in) SEElahbos”, a Spanish or Italian speaker wouldn’t even “come up for air” in the middle of esternocleidomastoideo.
Some dialects sound like there is one or maybe two vowels, too, and they’re strange ones (“was that an a or an e?” “eeeh, neither” “what do you mean, neither?” “English vowels are different, they’ve got more” “argh!” “yeah… :(”).
The most distinctive thing is that English has so many vowels, and in particular lax vowels which are not so prolific in most European languages. Also, what many languages produce as “pure” diphthongs, SAE issues like a single sound. Those dialects of English, however, (such as Southern US), will often stretch them out and “accentuate” the upper and lower production areas in the mouth.
What that Italian guy is doing to sound like English most of all, I think, is to emphasize the lax vowels on top of the stress-timed nature of the language. I think, in fact, that that has a lot to do with the distinctive sound to the vocals in English-language pop music.
Are you sure English vowels are actually lax? I thought it was the 5 vowel languages (like Spanish, I think) where you could get away with pronouncing a single vowel in different ways and still get your meaning across. Is Serbo-Croat a 5 vowel language? I once had a discussion with a Croat who just could not hear the difference between ‘pin’ and ‘pen’. I’m Scottish and I might say those words very differently from someone from Louisiana or New Zealand, but I think we’d all be able to tell one from another in each other’s dialect.
My point is that subtle differences in pronunciation of vowels in English, which may not be audible to many learners, make for big differences in meaning.
If the pronunciation is different, it’s a different vowel, but I’m not talking about phonemes. And that’s in large part why you understand the folks in Louisiana.
Yes, many English phonemes are lax. That’s exactly one of the problems facing your Croat friend. (Perhaps being Scottish you might not perceive it, though–and context will inform comprehension anyway.)
My Spanish wife says English sounds “nice, nicer than my own language sounds to me. Musical, because before I ever understood English I related it to the songs I heard and liked.”
Guizot, I think you misunderstand me. As native English speakers we are used to distinguishing a large number (up to 20 perhaps?) of subtly different vowels. That is why we can easily hear the difference between ‘pin’ and ‘pen’ in a variety of English dialects, even if one person’s ‘pin’ actually sounds closer to your own ‘pen’; their ‘pen’ will still be distinguishable. Whereas a non native speaker might not be able to distinguish any of these pairs.
Perhaps what I’m having difficulty with is the use of the word ‘lax’ - is this a technical usage? Like I say, it implies to me that you can get away with pronouncing a vowel in a number of ways and still be understood within your own dialect; I do not believe this is the case in English. If anything it’s the opposite; if I say to someone “put the pin by the peg and put the pen by the pig” I will be understood 98% of the time by someone from the same area as me, but a non native speaker might not be able distinguish any of the 4 crucial vowels. That suggests to me that I am in fact being very precise, not lax, in my pronunciation. I don’t think being Scottish makes any difference, all native English speakers have an accent - like I say we might not understand what another native speaker means but we can still distinguish similar sounding words.
Or are you using ‘lax’ to describe the wide range of ways of pronouncing the same word across the various dialects and accents of English?
That reminds me of when I was in Japan, and there was a Japanese word that had what would be close to our “e” sound, but the people there didn’t seem to pronounce it consistently (I forget what the word was now). I asked my Japanese friend whether it was supposed to be an “ay” sound (as in ‘mane’) or an “eh” sound (as in ‘men’). She said, “I don’t hear any difference”.
I’m pretty sure that’s right. They actually don’t have vowels at all; they have phonemes. We interpret the phonemes as a consonant followed by a vowel, but it’s a single sound to them. It was my experience that Japanese-speakers were unable to pronounce English words that ended with a consonant, without adding an extra vowel sound to the end of the word. In fact, many didn’t even seem to hear the consonant without a vowel following it.
First, that does sound like English!
Second, after listening to all the versions of this “translated” I’m sure I will have this stuck in my head all weekend.
On the English vowel thing, I remember trying to teach some Chinese neighbours to hear the difference among Mary, merry and marry. No matter how much I tried, they couldn’t hear the difference at all.
And a Portuguese friend to whom I once posed the question in the OP said English sounded like it was spoken with a “fat tongue”- I guess it’s all the th sounds - this, thing, think, that, thought, the, thorough - were what he was picking up on.
To me, what’s “lax” about our vowels is that we let them vary a lot. Sure, when it’s crucial to understanding, we’ll keep the vowel sounds more exact, but not always.
And I think you are thinking about the wrong words. The most lax sounds are in unaccented syllables. We convert a lot of vowels into this lax, indescript sound called a schwa. We have to accent a syllable to clarify the vowel being used.
And the reason why Scottish is different is that the accent seems to actually distinguish between the vowel. A common example is that ir, er, ur, or, and ar all sound different in Scottish, but the same in most other varieties of English.
