The worst sounding natlang ever

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Shrdlu
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Shrdlu »

I always thought it was a good thing to never mix feelings and decisions, but apparently not... [O.o]
Personer som i lägre grad blandar in känslor i sina beslut, till exempel personer med Aspergers symdrom, tenderar dock att välja likadant oavsett hur problemet är formulerat.
So in effect: If I had taken this test I would have fucked it up.... fun.

Also, generally speaking, the more vowels a language has the "softer" it tends to sound.
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zelos
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by zelos »

Chagen wrote:It's more that I don't think any language sounds bad out of respect for its native speakers. Plus, I still think that not liking a language is one step from racism (sue me if you want, a ton of racists also hate the language of those they hate).
Thats a non-sequitor.

And I know from experience that it is false :P

I don't like how chinese sound but I have no problem with chinese and my favourite teacher at my university is chinese and I have had classmates and much more that are chinese and japanese and I love most of them because they are great people! :D

So there is no correlation between not liking how something SOUND because thats a personal taste, it is like saying metal music sounds aweful, and your oppinion about the people in question.
Chagen wrote:I have no problem with positive opinions on a language. I have a problem with negative opinions on languages.
Thats retarded, move the scale slightly and less positive is negative.

I think Japanese sound like a broken record, and guess whats, thats my OPPINION, it has no basis in facts or anything just my PERSONAL perception of it. THere is no way you can disprove it. Just like you cannot disprove that metal music sounds shit or whatever else that is taste based.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by zelos »

Xonen wrote:
Chagen wrote:Well, I just see disliking a language is highly disrespectful to the people who speak it.
You may be overestimating how much value people in general place on their languages... Plenty of Finns have told me they don't like the sound of Finnish. And most have probably never even considered the matter at all, and would pretty much just shrug if someone told them Finnish was ugly. (Although Aszev telling us it sounds "silly" would probably get him killed, since he's a Swede, and Swedes don't get to laugh at us. Ever. Even if a Swede were in any position to call other people's languages silly-sounding. [:P])

And even the people who do sort of care about the language - like me - generally understand that this is a matter of taste, for fuck's sake. It's nothing to get that worked up about.
Thakowsaizmu wrote:Why is it disrespectful? The language a person speaks in no way defines them as a person.
Well... Language might actually have some influence on thought patterns; the jury's still out on that one. But it's no decisive factor in someone's personality, of course - and even if it were, we're still talking only about making aesthetic judgements on how different languages sound to us. As I said before, I simply cannot see how someone would see a connection between that and making judgments about the speakers as people.
All of this, I agree with. Well put.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Aevas »

Xonen wrote:(Although Aszev telling us it sounds "silly" would probably get him killed, since he's a Swede, and Swedes don't get to laugh at us. Ever. Even if a Swede were in any position to call other people's languages silly-sounding. [:P]).
Tbh I got away with it quite well when I was there! As long as I also mentioned that I found it interesting and showed I was trying to learn it, together with a reminder of the Russian threat [>:D]
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Xing »

arilando wrote:
Xing wrote:
"All languages are equal" can mean different things. It can mean that all languages are capable of expressing the same kind of information. This is a scientific fact.
That's not true, not all language can express the range of numerals english ca, some dont have higer numerals than 3.
Of course some languages lack vocabulary for certain areas. I wrote the same kind of information, because I wanted to emphasise that languages can handle information of roughly the same complexity, and that if they don't have vocabulary for certain areas, they can borrow or create such, and incorporate it in the language. It's possible that there may be counterexamples to this theory. But the main point of my post - which was directed towards chagen - was to point at the distinction between science and aesthetic/preferential judgements.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by eldin raigmore »

Xing wrote:
arilando wrote:That's not true, not all language can express the range of numerals english ca, some dont have higer numerals than 3.
Of course some languages lack vocabulary for certain areas. I wrote the same kind of information, because I wanted to emphasise that languages can handle information of roughly the same complexity, and that if they don't have vocabulary for certain areas, they can borrow or create such, and incorporate it in the language. It's possible that there may be counterexamples to this theory. But the main point of my post - which was directed towards chagen - was to point at the distinction between science and aesthetic/preferential judgements.
[+1]

And, in addition:

Languages without high-numeral words can nevertheless express high numerals precisely; it just takes more-and-more-complicated phrases to do so.

Suppose a language's highest numeral is "four".
It can still express 1,048,576 as
four fours of fours of fours of fours of fours of fours of fours of fours of fours.

Clearly the speaker of such a language would be less likely to care to be precise, (and/or would likely care to be less precise), about numbers that big, than would a speaker whose language had words for all numerals less than or equal to twenty, for all multiples of twenty up to four hundred, and for all powers of twenty up to, say, the sixth power.
That's simply because the bigger a number is the less need there is to be precise about it, and also the lower the highest numeral-word is the more effort it takes to be precise about a big number.
But they could be precise if they wanted to.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by smrk »

It must be said: the worst sounding natlang has to be the Anal language, which, as Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is not to be confused with the Anus language.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Xing »

smrk wrote:It must be said: the worst sounding natlang has to be the Anal language,
It's apparently part of the Kukish language family... [xP]
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Shrdlu »

You think they will understand that? Also "lol".
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by thetha »

smrk wrote:It must be said: the worst sounding natlang has to be the Anal language, which, as Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is not to be confused with the Anus language.
The first sample vocabulary on the "Anal" page is 'deep hole'
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Shrdlu
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Shrdlu »

Someone at wikipedia has humour.
Theta wrote:
smrk wrote:It must be said: the worst sounding natlang has to be the Anal language, which, as Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is not to be confused with the Anus language.
The first sample vocabulary on the "Anal" page is 'deep hole'
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by eldin raigmore »

For both of those languages, I imagine sandhi is quite uncomfortable.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Lambuzhao »

Not to mention sphincteral trills, coccygeal taps, and rectosigmoidal fricatives.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Ilaeriu »

Shrdlu wrote:Someone at wikipedia has humour.
Theta wrote:
smrk wrote:It must be said: the worst sounding natlang has to be the Anal language, which, as Wikipedia helpfully tells us, is not to be confused with the Anus language.
The first sample vocabulary on the "Anal" page is 'deep hole'

I think I'm actually tearing (as in /ti:rɪŋ/ not /tɛrɪŋ/, lol) up from laughing so hard.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

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.
Last edited by Click on 22 Sep 2012 22:16, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Zontas »

Rioplatanese Spanish gets on my nerves quickly.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Micamo »

I don't really hate any languages as such, but my least favorite language has to be Yapese.

Why? Well, I habitually read through grammars of random, obscure natlangs just for fun. It always teaches me new things about how languages work and gives me lots of new ideas of things I want to do in conlangs.

Except Yapese. I read the only Yapese grammar I could find, and it did absolutely nothing for me. Like sex that gets interrupted before the end. This may have more to do with the writer's awful, unprofessional writing than the language itself, but the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by thaen »

Micamo wrote:Like sex that gets interrupted before the end.
Well...that's one way of putting it, I suppose.
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Xing »

Micamo wrote: This may have more to do with the writer's awful, unprofessional writing than the language itself
Did it say "a as in father" in the phonology section?
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Re: The worst sounding natlang ever

Post by Solarius »

Micamo wrote:I don't really hate any languages as such, but my least favorite language has to be Yapese.

Why? Well, I habitually read through grammars of random, obscure natlangs just for fun. It always teaches me new things about how languages work and gives me lots of new ideas of things I want to do in conlangs.

Except Yapese. I read the only Yapese grammar I could find, and it did absolutely nothing for me. Like sex that gets interrupted before the end. This may have more to do with the writer's awful, unprofessional writing than the language itself, but the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
What was wrong with it?
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