Nice sounding natlangs

[Travis B.]

Or in other words, to analyze an English variety as having glides as separate segments that introduce offglides (or onglides) to vowel nuclei which are themselves separate segments, you would have to introduce two separate classes of glides, glides that are subordinate to an adjacent vowel nucleus and take up no length and glides that are independent entities that can form syllable onsets and which take up length. The problem is, I have never heard of a language being analyzed this way (even though honestly I have not read much in the way of grammars, someone may have done this).

Okay, you could get around this when analyzing a dialect that lacks onglides by saying that glides have a dual nature; glides before vowels are independent while glides after vowels are subordinate to the preceding vowel, and glides between vowels act as both for the preceding and following vowels. The problem is then how do you account for the dialects that do have onglides? The only way I can see doing it is treating onglides as not phonemic, which should work for most cases of onglides (for instance, my /æ uː ʊ/ could be analyzed as /æ ʊw ʊ/ even though they can be realized as [e̯ɛ ʉ̯u ʉ̞̯ʊ] respectively, and I have heard others with /uː/ (that is, /ʊw/) as even [i̯ʉ] or [i̯u] and others can have more pronounced onglides for /æ/ such as [i̯ɛ], i.e. conditionally have onglides, even though honestly the analysis as /ʊw/ would be questionable because it states that the glide should be an offglide when in fact, when there even is one, it is an onglide).

[Rui]

Not sure if you're joking but... [ɪ ʊ ə ɛ ɔ æ ɑ]. I'd say there's seven?

/ɪ ɔ æ/ get diphthongized in some dialects (to [iə̯ uə̯ eə̯] or so), although I'm not sure if there's any that hit all three.

Probably Philadelphia. Their vowels are insane. Although actually I don't think they have a diphthong for /æ/, but they definitely have something weird going on with their /ɔ/ and /ɪ/. I only have a diphthong for /ɔ/, which is [ɔə̯], but the other two are monophthongs. [eə̯] is marginally phonemic for me ('can [ability]' vs. 'can [container],' 'have' vs. 'halve,' etc. with [eə̯] in the second word of the two pairs)

NE: Southern English. I'm pretty sure they actually diphthongize all GenAm monophthongs and monophthongize all GenAm diphthongs...

[----]

NE: Southern English. I'm pretty sure they actually diphthongize all GenAm monophthongs and monophthongize all GenAm diphthongs...

I've heard some older speakers do this, but for everyone my age (teenagers) and young adults, diphthongization doesn't happen that severely, or at least I don't hear it. My individual speech usually monophthongizes /ai/, and less commonly, /au/.

I live in Georgia, and the situation is probably different in other states of the region, but this is just how I've heard everyone talk that I'm usually around.

[Nortaneous]

Not sure if you're joking but... [ɪ ʊ ə ɛ ɔ æ ɑ]. I'd say there's seven?

/ɪ ɔ æ/ get diphthongized in some dialects (to [iə̯ uə̯ eə̯] or so), although I'm not sure if there's any that hit all three.

Probably Philadelphia. Their vowels are insane. Although actually I don't think they have a diphthong for /æ/, but they definitely have something weird going on with their /ɔ/ and /ɪ/. I only have a diphthong for /ɔ/, which is [ɔə̯], but the other two are monophthongs. [eə̯] is marginally phonemic for me ('can [ability]' vs. 'can [container],' 'have' vs. 'halve,' etc. with [eə̯] in the second word of the two pairs)

Philadelphia diphthongizes some /æ/, and definitely /ɔ/ (as a side note, my father, who's spent all his life in PG County, has [uə̯] in "on" but nowhere else), but I'm not sure about /ɪ/ -- I'd guess that's probably a Southern thing. Or maybe Southern Midland; I occasionally have some diphthongization in /ɪ/, but it's nowhere close to normal for me.

[Gulliver]

I've just discovered the word "palissandre", which is French for rosewood.
Lovely.

[clawgrip]

Which is nicely balanced by "crapaud", the awful french word for toad.

[Viktor77]

Like:
Finnish
Estonian
Romanian

Dislike:
Russian
Greek
Dutch

And Polynesian languages I agree with as well. I like music best if it's sung in Finnish, Estonian or Romanian. It must be the vowels or diphthongs that soothe me.

I like how years ago I wrote I disliked Dutch, especially because then my exposure to it was minimal. Now my exposure is pretty high and I'm learning Dutch and I still dislike it, so I'm glad I knew what was up so many years ago.

I'd be more content learning an amazing sounding language like German (which of the Germanic languages is clearly the best sounding, perhaps save Icelandic). But meh, it's useful to know Dutch in Belgium and there are enough resources around and it'll be useful for my research so I'll learn it anyway. As long as I acquire a Flemish accent. That and I'd have to carry a waterbottle around with me if I were speaking the Dutch variety.

[Jonlang]

Likes
Welsh
Icelandic
Old English
Old Norse
Cornish
German

Dislikes
Russian
Polish
Hebrew
Arabic
Chinese
Japanese
Vietnamese
French
Spanish

[gufferdk]

I like:
Saami
Greenlandic
Most polynesian languages

I dislike:
Swedish
Chinese
French

[Copperknickers]

Likes
Italian: For obvious reasons. I especially like the double consonants.
Russian: It reminds me of Scottish accents.
Faroese: Sounds like no other language in the world, not even Icelandic.
Swedish: And Norwegian as well.
English: Soft Scottish accents, Home Counties accent (as opposed to the slurred London version of RP) and Australian accents, are the best. Jamaican is cool also.

Dislikes
French: I like it increasingly as I learn more but I still can't get past the R. It's just not a nice sound. At least in German it's a little smoother and more appropriate.
English: New York, Liverpool and New Zealand accents rub me up the wrong way.
Spanish Spanish: as opposed to Latin American Spanish. Have little experience with it but I just never got into it.

[Zaarin]

Likes
Icelandic
Old English
Hebrew
Syriac (I particularly love the writing system, but the spoken language is nice too)
Akkadian
Tlingit
Iroquoian languages (especially Mohawk)
Classical Nahuatl
Yucatec Maya
Standard French (the varieties with trilled R's like Edith Piaf's weird me out)
German
Finnish
(In case it's not abundantly clear, I like throaty sounds )

Dislikes
Italian
Portuguese
American Spanish (Castellano is fine)
Slavic languages

[gufferdk]

(In case it's not abundantly clear, I like throaty sounds )

Why don't you try listen to some Danish then I have heard people from elsewhere describe it as using the throat a lot, to the point where it has been called a throat disease...

[Zaarin]

(In case it's not abundantly clear, I like throaty sounds )

Why don't you try listen to some Danish then I have heard people from elsewhere describe it as using the throat a lot, to the point where it has been called a throat disease...

I have to admit I've heard Norwegian and Swedish (not a huge fan of either, though Norwegian is better than Swedish) spoken but not Danish; I'll have to look up some.

...

Hmm, interesting language. I found an interview with Viggo Mortenson in Danish. One of the comments said his Danish wasn't perfect; to me it sounded rather like he was pharyngealizing all his sounds. The interviewer sounded a bit more natural; also a bit more Swedish...

[Nortaneous]

[eə̯] is marginally phonemic for me ('can [ability]' vs. 'can [container],' 'have' vs. 'halve,' etc. with [eə̯] in the second word of the two pairs)

The first pair is [ɛ] vs. [eə] /æ/ for me.

NE: Southern English. I'm pretty sure they actually diphthongize all GenAm monophthongs and monophthongize all GenAm diphthongs...

/au oi/ are usually still diphthongs -- it's just that they end in schwa. Some older speakers have /au/ [æi̯ə̯].

(One of my IRL friends is a linguistics grad student from north of the Mason-Dixon line. The subject came up once, and she was convinced that I merged /aul/ into /æl/. I don't think I do.)

[Viktor77]

(In case it's not abundantly clear, I like throaty sounds )

Why don't you try listen to some Danish then I have heard people from elsewhere describe it as using the throat a lot, to the point where it has been called a throat disease...

Are you quite sure that Danish is actually still a spoken language? The last time I heard it I heard what must've been a full sentence uttered in about a syllable, or two if I'm being generous.

All joking aside I was quite surprised when I found out many years ago that Danish swallows more of its words than French. I was sure that no one could be worse than French. There are times when I really want to just pronounce that final letter(s) in French since not doing so can be uncomfortable. The word "laid" comes to mind. This word is really uncomfortable for me in the masculine. I feel like it won't be heard because it's so short.

[gufferdk]

Are you quite sure that Danish is actually still a spoken language? The last time I heard it I heard what must've been a full sentence uttered in about a syllable, or two if I'm being generous.

All joking aside I was quite surprised when I found out many years ago that Danish swallows more of its words than French. I was sure that no one could be worse than French. There are times when I really want to just pronounce that final letter(s) in French since not doing so can be uncomfortable. The word "laid" comes to mind. This word is really uncomfortable for me in the masculine. I feel like it won't be heard because it's so short.

Va mendu mæa dansk aværen fransk? Så slem aetda hællaik.
(Hvad mener du med at dansk er værre end fransk? Så slemt er det da heller ikke. (with slight western jutlandic dialect))
(Translation: What do you mean by saying Danish is worse than French. Surely it isn't that bad.)

[Sglod]

I don't dislike any language and I'm particulary partial to:
Anything Celtic
Anything Slavic
Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian
Japanese
Korean

[Viktor77]

Va mendu mæa dansk aværen fransk? Så slem aetda hællaik.
(Hvad mener du med at dansk er værre end fransk? Så slemt er det da heller ikke. (with slight western jutlandic dialect))
(Translation: What do you mean by saying Danish is worse than French. Surely it isn't that bad.)

More or less an observation. I have no empirical evidence to suggest that Danish has dropped more letters than French but it always feels, whenever I hear a Danish word, that the word, which may be several syllables on paper, comes out as one or maybe two syllables. Others around me have made the same remark.

[----]

I haven't really got that impression in the Danish that I've heard.

[gufferdk]

I haven't really got that impression in the Danish that I've heard.

Was the Danish you heard carefully spoken Rigsdansk* like you would hear on the news or was it something quickly spoken, mildly dialectal Danish? There is a huge difference there. CSRD has some realisaition of most of the letters. Even the <d>, often critisised for being silent in a lot of cases, often serves to mark stød**, or the vowel length (and therefore sometimes quality***) based on the double-consonant rule**** and only before and after certain letters. Not necessarily easy, but not particularly much a case of letters without sound if you know what is going on. This does not mean that there aren't a few cases where the <d> is indeed superfluous and could be dropped with no consequences for the parsing of sounds*****.

For something that are truly silent letters, the goto examples are final <-lv>, where the <v> is always dropped and inital <hj> and <hv> where the <h> is always silent.

<g> is also sometimes silent, especially before <l>. In other cases it sounds like [j̞] or [ɰ̞] depending on the vowel and for some speakers it is fully dropped even in the most careful speech. I personally still reatian a tiny bit of [j̞] or [ɰ̞] in the clusters <ig> and <ug> respectively, in careful speech.


A lot of this order despite it looking like chaos starts breaking down quickly when people start speaking less carefully, and are not deliberately trying to speak RD even though their dialect is likely to sound a lot like it******. In that case people start dropping sounds left and right and start reducing vowels or even syllables, first to schwa, then to very short schwa, then to nothing, like when <bundene> "the bottoms" gets reduced to [ˈbɔnːə̆] and a lot of other examples where things gets dropped (especially final vowels, approximants and vowels already reduced to schwa, but other things as well) to the point where i think Viktor77's joke are very valid indeed.


Footnotes:

More: show

*the prestigious, standardardised dialect, based mostly on the dialect of Copenhagen, the spread and usage of which has caused a massive decline in the dialectal divergence of Danish in recent years

**such as in <hun / hund> /hun/ - /hunˀ/ (she / dog)

*** according to the "vokaltrappe" (vowel-staircase) which i was forced to memorise in first grade, which works the way that if you hear a short vowel you have to write it as letter on one step up:
(Danish orthography-vowels, not IPA-vowels)

**** vowels before double consonants are usually short, such as in <biller / biler> /ˈbilʌ/ - /ˈbi:lʌ/ (beetles / cars)

*****such as in gård (farm) where it is likely kept to distinguish it from går (walk.PRES), with wich it is homophonic and in sidst (last) where it does not serve such a function. The <-ds> cluster could in general be written without the s and loose nothing of value.

******See *

[----]

I'm not objecting to the claim of silent letters, I'm objecting to the claim that it sounds like syllables are missing and that this phenomenon is any more markedly present than in any proper european language.

[Viktor77]

I'm relegating Danish to the ugly sounding languages category for me. It really does sound like someone talking with food in their mouth. It also pops because of the glottal stop. I love Denmark but the language is just...weird.

[mèþru]

Likes:
Arabic
Ancient Greek
Classical Latin
Danish
French
German
Hebrew
Icelandic
Italian
Japanese
Macanese/Patuá
Mandarin Chinese
Neapolitan
Norwegian
Russian
Spanish
Swahili
Venetian
Dislikes:
English
Swedish
Vulgar Latin

[Vijay]

I don't generally have preferences regarding languages with the exception that for some reason, I really like listening to the variety of Chatino spoken in the village of San Juan Quiahije in Oaxaca:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yITZeMliDe4

[Quark8]

Likes:
Irish
Hungarian
Old Norse
Old English
Arabic
Indonesian
Cree
Ancient Greek
Classical Latin
Malayalam
Sanskrit
Russian
Gothic
Tibetan
Egyptian
Mongolian
Nahuatl

Dislikes:
Spanish
French
Italian
Swedish
English
Tamil
Quechua
Hebrew
Mandarin
Salishan languages

I do not necessarily "dislike" these languages, but they do not sound as well as other languages