I never said it affected timing. I said it affected the depth and height of the peaks and troughs - they corresponded to pitch. (I’m not sure how you thought I was talking about timing when I mentioned tonal languages and said that English sounds flat in comparison).
I haven’t read much about stress-timing or anything like that, tbh, but it would be a bit crazy to claim that English has regular patterns of stress in its sentences. One of the main noticeable features of Englsh is that the stress patterns are not that regular.
Ayup, though his vowels don’t sound as exaggeratedly r-ish as what I remember hearing. But in that clip you can especially hear the effect I’m talking about right after he says “Rock and Roll.” He then says something that sounds like it’s supposed to be something like “Ken kan kon” or something, but it sounds like “kehrn karn korn” except with the r’s “mashed into” their preceding vowels. Hard to explain–but you can probably hear it on the clip.
Well, Fernando Lamas gave his reaction on a late night talk show, probably Johnny Carson, many, many years back.
First, he said that (English speaking) Americans seem to have particular reactions to how French, Spanish, etc., sound to them. For instance, he said something along the lines of French sounding very soft, flowing, flowery. I seem to recall that he gave impressions of each example along the way.
Then he gave the punch line to his anecdote.
When I first came here, all of you sounded like
DOGS BARKING!
He then proceeded to give an imitation of what his first impression was.
EXCELLENT! And (of course!) there is a slew of stuff linking off that video that I’m about to go watch. I watched one from a German guy that was wonderful. And you tube never ceases to amaze me…of course someone had the same question I did, evidently, since a bunch of those vids are in response to some query for “fake English” - which makes me think of another thread…aha…(off to MPSIMS)
That’s pretty good. Of course I understand enough English to know that it was gibberish but there was no doubt whatsoever which language it was supposed to be.
As far as American English is concerned I’ve heard that the average American sounds to us as a parody of a thick southern accent sounds to the rest of the US. For obvious reasons I can’t really tell how accurate that is. (On a possibly related note, I have been told that Foghorn Leghorn has a southern accent. He just sounds typically American to me.)
Right. I just meant to say that tone and volume are not the same. English syllables have more volume and length when they are part of content words (as opposed to grammatical words). In this regard, English is far from “flat.”
(B) The cats will have been eating the mice. (nine syllables)
[ðə kaets Il ǝv bǝn iɂn ðə mais]
Both (A) and (B) have only three stressed syllables. As a result, English sounds more “ragged” to speakers of many other languages, because English speakers use blending, deletion, elision and reduction in volume in order to “rush” through the grammar syllables. To them, it sounds like the English speaker is “swallowing” the unstressed syllables.
Japanese, at least, is easy to distinguish, because of the characteristic alternation of vowel and consonant sounds. You never get two consonant sounds in a row in Japanese, nor a word ending in a consonant sound.
I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing here. English doesn’t sound flat - I never said that. It does sound relatively flat. (To be precise, it’s pitch I’m talking about, though volume often changes when pitch does too, of course).
Yup, that raggedness is what the students were indicating when they drew English going all over the place in rhythm and doubling back on itself.
Persuading ESL students to ‘swallow’ the unstressed syllables is quite difficult. ‘But there’s a vowel there! And two consonants, look! I must say them!’
I came in to mention precisely this – only my recollectrion is that it was Ricardo Montalban.
His rendering of “English” as “dogs barking” was pretty good – it really did resemble both English and barking dogs.
I am an American in Budapest. I have, perhaps, a very slight Southern accent, but probably tend more toward unaccented “generic” American. I sound nothing like an Englishman. Yet Hungarians with little or no knowledge of English guess that I am British as often as they guess that I am American.
In my office where the locals all speak good-to-excellent English, they can readily distinguish among American English, British English, Scottish English, etc.
That was hilarious! I need to see the rest of this movie. Awesome.
But, yeah, Polish (and pretty much all the Slavic languages) make extensive use of sibilants. Hungarian also has its fair share of these, too. I’ve never thought of “s,” “sh,”“z,” and “zh” as being particularly English sounds, but that may just be a result of the foreign languages I’m familiar with.
Interesting. Just trying to say the two phrases out loud, sounded kinda like this:
(A) CATS-EAT-MICE.
(B) the CATS willaben EATing-the MICE.
Is that what you’re referring to? How “will have been” gets all rushed together and lazily/economically pronounced since there’s no stress in there, etc.?
Perhaps it depends on your accent. Saying those sentences aloud, I’d say there’s only a slight difference between how long it takes to say those sentences, unless you’re stressing it unusually. His point is that English elides syllables more than other languages tend to. Latinate languages, for example, don’t elide vowels as much as we do, and Germanic and Slavic languages have a tiny ‘skip’ in between each word, which doesn’t happen in English. (I don’t know any other languages well enough to comment).
I also wonder why many languages (other than English) sound like they’re talking really fast and staccato and sound angry or unpleasant with each other.
