What does English sound like?
[from a link on Andrew Sullivan, this is dedicated to Jack, for what I think are obvious reasons]
Ever wonder what English must sound like to non-English speakers? Like, say, Italians?
now, about that choreography
posted by Clemens @ 10:02 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Italians have been mocking American vowels since for a long, long time. The Italian dubs of the Stan and Ollie films pronounce Italian words with American vowels. I have no idea how to describe the comedic effect except to suggest imagining some French comedy (say, Jean Reno's The Visitors) dubbed into English with Inspector Clouseau accents.
Oh, and that isn't just any Italian, either, that's Adriano Celentano. The Adriano Celentano, which may mean nothing to you, but he was hugely popular not just in Italy but also in post-Glasnost Russia (embarrassingly, my wife introduced me to his music, although I'm still not much of a fan) and his daughter Rosalinda played Satan in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.
Thanks! I've always been fascinated by how languages all have their own music. Sometimes when listening to English spoken on the radio I will throw my mind out-of-gear (perhaps easier for me than a normal person) and just listen to the sounds.
I am always asking Carmen questions like "How does a Spanish accent sound to a Cuban?" My favorite description of a language was one I heard from a young American woman on a bus in Portugal: Portuguese sounds like a bunch of Russians trying to speak French.
And then there was the poor Hungarian monk in the fourteenth century writing that his country was filled "with Latins twittering like birds and Teutons roaring like bulls."
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