| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6] | Which language is the most beautiful language for you? Thread poster: wonita (X)
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Ty Kendall 
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:50
Hebrew to English
| Case in point..... | Mar 2, 2013 |
keshab wrote:
Mostly,all languages are beautiful to the native speakers, especially when they are monolingual. It becomes a question of choice when the speaker knows two or more languages.
Disagree, you don't have to be bi/multi-lingual to appreciate the aesthetics of another language. Indeed, the allure of another language based on aesthetic judgements is what drives many people to learn a language in the first place.
To me, Bengali is the language of romanticism. I am not saying this because my mother tongue is Bengali, it is fact that Bengali is one of the sweetest languages of the world in pronunciation. According to sweet and complex pronunciation, Bengali has a similarity with French (although I do not know French, wish one day I will learn it).
This is what I was just talking about, it isn't fact. It's your opinion. There's nothing wrong with that, I'm sure many people will agree with you, but fact it ain't.
But as a teacher I prefer Hindi because its grammar is more easy and scientific and contrary to Bengali,its pronunciation is just according to its script.
Again, and as I alluded to in my previous post, these are value judgements masquerading as fact. As linguists/people who work with language we should at least be aware of the difference and try not perpetuate it ourselves.
So friends! I love my languages which I know.They are beautiful to me.
Bingo!
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but I love English for its complexity, and easiness to express things. I also love Lithuanian as a part to of my ethnicity and its sound, and many other languages -- Russian, and Spanish, Korean. Many.
| | | | | Every language | Mar 2, 2013 |
has its beauty. The most beaytifull are the first words my children said to me, in Dutch.
I love French to listen to, as if it was sung. I love to hear Italian songs, not for the music though.
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 03:50
French to English
I even moved to France on the strength of it.
At school, I remember a teacher of French lit asking why a particular passage was beautiful, all I could say was "well it's French".
I started teaching English and then translating into English (among other things) like all native English drifters abroad, and came to appreciate the intricacies and range of English more and more as a result.
Although nothing can hold a candle to Baudelaire waxing lyrical on cats, and ... See more I even moved to France on the strength of it.
At school, I remember a teacher of French lit asking why a particular passage was beautiful, all I could say was "well it's French".
I started teaching English and then translating into English (among other things) like all native English drifters abroad, and came to appreciate the intricacies and range of English more and more as a result.
Although nothing can hold a candle to Baudelaire waxing lyrical on cats, and I'm still capable of reading a book in French that doesn't particularly inspire me just because the author's effortless use of the past subjunctive just blows me away.
Other than that, John Cleese makes a brilliant case for both Italian and Russian in his attempt to seduce Jamie Lee Curtis in "A Fish called Wanda". ▲ Collapse
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Tom in London wrote:
All languages are beautiful, but only when used correctly and elegantly.
A soft, smooth, paced delivery plays a huge role.
When, for any reason, the person speaks fast, carelessly, then probably even the most beautiful languages sound awful.
Also, when some people are so in love with their own accent and themselves (true egocentrics, "don't I speak beautifully?", they think of themselves) that they even seem to make it a point to intensify their accent in front of others, then the result is frankly disgusting, even unintelligible (specially on the phone).
[Edited at 2013-03-03 03:20 GMT]
| | | | Ty Kendall
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:50
Hebrew to English
| Sometimes it's about Prestige..... | Mar 2, 2013 |
http://www.theworldstandsup.com/Comics-A-Z/Agisilaou.aspx
What this comedian notices with different accents of the same language also applies to different languages. Sometimes prestige can affect the positive/negative/neutral associations with a speech variety.
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As Angelique says, every language. And every language is the most important to those who speak it.
I lke Swedish, and I love my frst language English especially with a French accent.
| | | | | I agree with Ty | Mar 3, 2013 |
You don't have to be bilingual to appreciate another language -- you may just not be able to resist the desire to learn it, if you really love it.
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| Aoäia õe uue oaõieaia õueaua ööau | Mar 4, 2013 |
You donʼt have to speak a language to love it — but it helps. People certainly can fall in love with a language they hear spoken in a song or a film, or on the street, or by someone they fancy, without learning it. But once you have got to grips with the languageʼs phonology through proper study, you can often appreciate its depth of beauty much better.
I was fortunate enough to be a teenager at a time when the latest ‘Celtic revival’ was under way, in the nineties, and foun... See more You donʼt have to speak a language to love it — but it helps. People certainly can fall in love with a language they hear spoken in a song or a film, or on the street, or by someone they fancy, without learning it. But once you have got to grips with the languageʼs phonology through proper study, you can often appreciate its depth of beauty much better.
I was fortunate enough to be a teenager at a time when the latest ‘Celtic revival’ was under way, in the nineties, and found all those Irish and Scottish Gaelic songs delightful, but when I took the trouble to learn the languages, it struck me what a rich phonetic system the languages had. They — along with the very vowel colour-rich English, actually — have a fuller vowel system than any other Indo-European languages within Europe, and are on a par with Panjabi with around twenty vowel sounds (although in the case of the Sanskrit-derived languages, many of these are nasalized versions of oral vowels, not vowels with distinct places of articulation). The Goidelic (Gaelic branch of Celtic) languages have both the fully close and the mid-close back unrounded vowels, /ɯ/ and /ɤ/, which are truly exotic by European standards (Korean is one of the few major world languages to have /ɯ/, and Dutch and Estonian have /ɤ/) and which to my ear give Gaelic poetry a sonorous, noble tone, especially as they can be long and stressed. At the risk of over-analyzing it, I think these shades of vowel appeal to me because they speak of longing but (as they are back in the mouth and close) a restrained, noble kind of longing.
Really, if you donʼt know from study what youʼre supposed to be listening for, you can miss most of the tricks in phonology, as the brain fills in so much from its own (remarkable) assumptions. For instance, the most vigorous living dialect of Scottish Gaelic, that of Lewis, realizes the phoneme /r/ as an apico-alveolar approximant, almost dental fricative [θ], giving it great softness (although other Gaels often find it an ugly dialect), which is a great surprise to those who associate the Scottish Highlands with the ‘r’ being trilled to death as in all the old films and cartoons.
I have recently (re)discovered Estonian, to my great delight, which has all the celebrated beauty of other languages rich in front-rounding and harmony (Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and their lesser-known relatives) but additionally that /ɤ/ (Estonian grapheme: õ) and (in the standard dialect, but not in the south) more systematized syncope and apocope than Finnish, so that many short words can (unlike in Finnish) be consonant-final, giving them a lovely ring if they end in a trilled ‘r’ plus a stop. Itʼs a chicken and egg situation: do the Estonians sing so majestically because they have such a musical language, or vice versa? At any rate, an Estonian phrase designed to show off the vowel system recently won a prize for beauty (see the title of this post), which translates somewhat whimsically as ‘the nocturnal honour of a watchdog in my sunrise-father-in-lawʼs sisterʼs garden of fresh bean-flowers’. Estonian diphthongs are evenly-weighted and give great musical effect to a syllable like pea ‘head’, hea ‘good’ or mäe ‘hill’.
Yet this is not the ‘childish’ vowel-dominatedness, as Otto Jespersen put it, of Polynesian languages, but to my ear a poised, vigorous vowel repertoire. I would say of Estonian what a friend once said of (Castilian) Spanish: it beautifully balances the masculine with the feminine. It sounds a gorgeously soft language when women are being endearing to little children but it can sound steamingly enraged in a protest song or steely determined in a soldiers’ ballad. Nor did the language get to that point by accident: it inherited more fricatives and glottal stops from proto-Finno-Ugric but (as Korean and Japanese did when evolving from their parent language) shed them in the standard language for a CV-CV-CV structure as life became a little less of a titanic elemental struggle for its speakers as the centre of gravity of the language shifted from the Eurasian landmass to the more temperate and variety-rich littoral (which also affects the habitual condition of the speakers’ nasal passages, as it did when English reached Australia).
Actually, it strikes me that the same phenomenon happened in a number of languages whose speakers (whether or not there was an actual population movement rather than a cultural transfer) shifted from a continental place of origin to a coastal destination: nasalization. Not in Estonian, but certainly in the Gaelic languages (as compared with what we know of proto-Goidelic and proto-Celtic), Polish (as compared with proto-Slavic), Portuguese (where the process is historically documented from Late Latin), and Dutch (where nasalization is not marked in the script but is certainly a (non-phonemic) feature in most dialects now). In some of these cases, people have theorized that such shifts (together with the ‘mushy’ final ‘s’ of many phonetic contexts in Portuguese) were subconscious or nearly-conscious ways of differentiating the speakers from the larger related language spoken in the continental hinterland. Whatever the cause, such a shift has given rise to several daughter languages more subtly beautiful than the parent language.
At the other end of the scale are languages whose beauty consists in their amazing consonantal repertoire and their vowel economy (with the NWC family having two historic vowel phonemes of which all other vowels found phonetically are mere allophones), especially the North-West Caucasian and North-East Caucasian language families, but that's not everyone's cup of (glottalized palatalized) T.
A good clue to whether a language one does not (yet) know is particularly sonorous is whether its speakers have given it an epithet. Estonians call their language the Languge of Birds; Gaels, the Language of Eden; the Welsh, the Language of Paradise.
[Edited at 2013-03-04 09:36 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Ty Kendall
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:50
Hebrew to English
To each his own, I've always considered Hebrew quite a "clunky" sounding language (the quality that, to my ears, makes it sound "old"), not really very sonorous, with some awkward consonant clusters and an almost comical overuse of the voiceless uvular fricative....yet each of these reasons are the reasons I love it. ♥ ✡
[Edited at 2013-03-06 08:16 GMT]
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 09:50
Chinese to English
| But in the UK the prestige gets reversed? | Mar 6, 2013 |
That's a funny clip. But I was thinking, has anyone on this thread said that they think Oxford English is the most beautiful? I've heard (elsewhere) people talk about how much they love the Yorkshire accent, or the Scottish, or the Welsh accent. Even the Westcountry accent (but never the Brummie!). But I can't remember anyone saying that they have a real sentimental attachment to RP.
Same applies where I live. I'm not sure anyone truly loves standard Mandarin, but they may well love their regional version of Chinese. A language needs to have roots and history for people to love it (most of the time).
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I absolutely love the way Bengali people talk. Sweetest sounding language in my opinion.
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Olaniza
Germany
Local time: 03:50
Member
German to Polish
+ ...
Amharic! I love the language!
and the amharic fidels as well!
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