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Old 07-04-2008, 06:50 AM   #200 (permalink)
Samuel De Mazarin
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This is so stupid. Cultural background completely warps the way one hears a language. Some people say it's French, but others think French is too feminine... Urdu has beautiful sounds but has a balanced cadence... Arabic and German appeal to those who love more guttural, rich sounds... languages like Japanese and Spanish and Italian have softer sounds, no retroflexing or 'harsh' velars... Sanskrit is metrically complex and has a particularly distinguished phonological array... no one knows how Latin was spoken (same is true with Sanskrit, but it's much better preserved orally) so we can't really say, though ecclesiastical Latin has a mystique all its own. Some people may find Xhosa, a click language of South Africa, to have a vibrant rhythm and energy that no other language can match. Bengali (standard Calcutta Bengali) has rich conjunct consonant structures and a rounded vocalic system which gives it a distinctively sweet sound... Russian conveys, to some, a majesty or grandeur which comes partly from its palatal gliding consonants (das verdan(y)a)... Chinese's tonal system is utterly unique and, when spoken well, is a model of efficient grammatical logic...

How futile is it to try to pronounce one single language, or even a group of languages, as most beautiful? Words and meanings are conveyed through differences in sound (and also context)... differences in sounds demand that certain sound groups be ignored or assimilated for the sake of intelligibility... this means that NO single language can ever possess the strengths of all the others without their weaknesses...
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