comparative aesthetics of language; or, is French prettier than Chinese?

From the "Nature" thread on Le Salon Litteraire

MON PAYS C'EST L'HIVER

Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon jardin ce n'est pas un jardin, c'est la plaine
Mon chemin ce n'est pas un chemin, c'est la neige
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Dans la blanche cérémonie
Où la neige au vent se marie
Dans ce pays de poudrerie
Mon père a fait bâtir maison
Et je m'en vais être fidèle
À sa manière, à son modèle
La chambre d'amis sera telle
Qu'on viendra des autres saisons
Pour se bâtir à côté d'elle
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon refrain ce n'est pas un refrain, c'est rafale
Ma maison ce n'est pas ma maison, c'est froidure
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Dans mon grand pays solitaire
Je crie avant que de me taire
À tous les hommes de la terre
Ma maison c'est votre maison
Entre mes quatre murs de glace
Je mets mon temps et mon espace
À préparer le feu, la place
Pour les humains de l'horizon
Et les humains sont de ma race
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon jardin ce n'est pas un jardin, c'est la plaine
Mon chemin ce n'est pas un chemin, c'est la neige
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver
Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'envers
D'un pays qui n'était ni pays ni patrie
Ma chanson ce n'est pas une chanson, c'est ma vie
C'est pour toi que je veux posséder mes hivers

MY COUNTRY, IT IS WINTER

My country is not a country, it's winter
My garden is not a garden, it's a plain
My road is not a road, it's snow
My country is not a country, it's winter
In the white ceremony
In which the wind to snow marries
In this country of powdery
My father had his house built
And I am going to be faithful
To his way, to his model
The friends room will be such
That we will come from the other seasons
To build next to it
My country is not a country, it's winter
My chorus is not a chorus, it's a gust
My house is not a house, it's the cold
My country is not a country, it's winter
In my great solitary country
I scream before I shut myself up
To all men of the Earth
My house is your house
Between these four falls of ice
I take my time and my space
To make the fire and the place
For all the humans at the horizon
And humans are of my race
My country is not a country, it's winter
My garden is not a garden, it's a plain
My road is not a road, it's snow
My country is not a country, it's winter
My country is not a country, it's the other side
Of a country that was nor country nor homeland
My song is not a song, it's my life
It's for you that I want to posess my winters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH_R6D7mU7M

-Gilles Vigneault

read Today, 12:43pm (top)Message 185: citygirl

Why are poems better in French? Except Emilly Dickinson.

read Today, 1:11pm (top)Message 186: copyedit52

...

But to citygirl's question: Why is everything better in French, except Emily Dickinson. Well, no, that's not what she asked, is it? My American anti-exceptionalism is showing. Why is poetry better in French? Anyone want to tackle that one? How about you, Henri, mon frere? Or you, Martin, notre homme de l'hiver? (Or should it be d'hiver?)

read Today, 2:38pm (top)Message 190: MeditationesMartini

...

>186 great question. Like most Canadians east of Winnipeg, I am a drooling semiliterate where it comes to French (although one of the joys of French for English speakers is how much easier it is to read than speak), but I would venture to wonder whether we're talking about poetry read silently or spoken aloud. Because French has a number of phonological features that I could imagine would make it conducive to recitation--the resonance of the nasalized vowels; the final-syllable stress, which I think is invariable and which strikes me as a much more powerful prosody to which to set verse than the iambic da-DA-da-DA rhythms of English. I feel like there are other things. Maybe this is a question for Le Salon des Amateurs de la Langue?
Message edited by its author, Today, 3:00pm.

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read Today, 2:48pm (top)Message 191: citygirl
Maybe the words are just prettier, and yes, they are lovely to read aloud. Isn't

c'est l'hiver
Dans la blanche cérémonie
Où la neige au vent se marie
Dans ce pays de poudrerie

just nicer? "la blanche cérémonie"..."ce pays de poudrerie"

And to be clear, je ne suis pas canadienne! (not that there's anything worng with that ;-)
f
read Today, 2:59pm (top)Message 193: EnriqueFreeque
190> Martini, if you haven't posted that question over in tomcat's group, I think it'd be great if you did ...

unread Today, 3:11pm (top)Message 195: MeditationesMartini

>191 yeah, but the question is what makes them prettier, right? Is it their phonetic qualities? Their prosodic shape? The way they look on the page and the sound-aesthetics and meaning-associations those words bring up for an English speaker (by sound-aesthetics, I'm thinking of the way most English-speakers might judge the made-up word amarathea to be prettier than the made-up word skogbort, and by "meaning-associations" I'm thinking of the way we see e.g. "blanche" and it conjures up a whole world of associations with the white skin of a thirteenth-century princess and the Deep South and blanched almonds, which is something unavailable to most of us if we're trying to read a poem in e.g. Turkish; or even the way the word "hiver" for me, even though they're pronounced differently, conjures up a sleepy hive of bees hibernating through the winter, to wake up again when the air brings the promise of spring. Whereas "winter", since I grew up with German, ties in strongly with German "Winter", and the Teutonic North and Norse gods, and is an entirely colder and more fearsome prospect, to me, than cozy "hiver".

Or maybe it's just the cultural associations we have with French, that it's beautiful and cultivated.

>193 good call! I shall.

So, what about it? What makes some words and some languages prettier or stronger or more anything than others, and why?

I think part of the appeal is hearing someone one is not familiar with and having that desire to know what it is. That desire will make anything more appealing.

Kind of like the theory of relationships. Guys and girls tend to go after the person who rejects them versus the person who is dying to be with them. The more we're rejected, the more we want to prove to that person that they are being stupid.

Same with languages.
Hearing something you don't know, but being introduced to an ounce of it's romanticism makes you desire more knowledge.

When it comes to reading aloud, I always tell people that you can make anything sounds great -- it just depends on how you say it.

Being French I would always give them this example. I would start by reciting in the most sultry of voices:
"Je t'aime mon amour,
ta peau sur la mienne,
esprit tranchante et ilumineuse,
en regardant les cannettes de sardines,
les oeufs pres des baguettes,
n'oublie pas d'acheter du papier cul."

Which translates to:
"I love you my love,
your skin on mine
cutting and radiating spirit,
looking at the sardine cans,
the eggs next to the baguettes,
don't forget to buy toilet paper."

My friends are spellbound until I tell them I just read off my grocery list.
To a foreigner who doesn't speak a nick of English, though, you can pull off the same thing.

Like I said, it's that desire to understand the unknown.
At least, that's my opinion.

And if you don't think Chinese is sexy... wow. See the movies Lust:Caution and In the Mood for Love. Holy crap. Gorgeous!

>2 MeditationesMartini: ha! That's a good trick. I do still wonder, though, whether some part of the appeal is intrinsic to French's Frenchness--whether the language itself or the associations English speakers have around it.

I agree completely on the sexiness of Chinese. I don't mean to hack on them--it's just, I live in Vancouver, and always on the bus I see people speaking Cantonese loudly (and I think speech volume certainly varies culturally) and other people making passive-aggressively sour faces at them. Replace with "Is Chinese sexier than English?" as necessary.

There was a study a few years ago that looked at average pitch in male and female speakers across a bunch of languages, and the results were striking in that if I recall pitch didn't tend to vary linearly across genders (high-voiced women going with high-voiced men), but rather inversely--so German, with the lowest-voiced women, had the highest-voiced men, and Japanese, with the lowest-voiced men, had the highest-voiced women.

Isn't "In the mood for love" in Cantonese? Cantonese sounds lovely to me--far lovelier than Mandarin.

#1

Well, Martin, I suppose it depends on whether anyone agrees first that language A "sounds better" than B. How could anyone say, for instance, that Trakl sounds better in French than German?

All I know is, there are some languages that sound prettier than some other to me, but I can't generalise from that. It's like asking whether key lime pie would be better "translated" into apple...

5 -
Yes, it is in Cantonese.

And Lust:Caution is as well with some Shanghainese in it. Interestingly enough in this movie there are some scenes where they discuss the ugliness of other languages. ie. When Mai Tai Tai goes into the Japanese district with Mr. Yee and they comment on the "shrill" singing of the Japanese shamisen player.

In any case, as you state, it's all subjective.

I find Japanese to be very sexy but I've also been quite involved with the culture so there are other parts of the generic Japanese culture that trigger that thought.

OT -
Watch the movie "La Haine" (Hate), a French movie, and I'd say there is nothing sexy about the French they are speaking. The only part that had some oratory appeal was the quote: "C'est l'histoire d'un mec qui tombe d'un immeuble de cinquante étages au fur et à mesure de sa chute il se réte sans cesse pour se rassurer: jusqu'ici tout va bien, jusqu'ici tout va bien, jusqu'ici tout va bien... mais l'important, c'est pas la chute, c'est l'atterrissage."

But the actor changes his voice on that one so it sounds different.

The ugliest French I ever heard is Québécois. Cajun is another ugly contender, except it is so anglicised it hardly counts as "French".

Anglification=Uglification

This may be a chicken-or-the-egg question: is France associated with sexiness because of its language, or is its language considered sexy because of the French stereotypes? It is very pleasing on the ears, that's to be sure. We're also taking about a language that has committed to retaining its "Frenchness," to ensure it continues sounding, well, French.

Compare to English, which is an adaptive language, and takes what it wants where it wants. As such, we're full of words from the German tribes, the Native American languages, words from Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, the African nations, Greece, from the Arabs and Jews, etc. etc. A lot from France, too, thanks to the Norman Conquest.

As such, English is a tossed salad. You'll get a vinaigrette that's nice on the ears, but inevitably there is the crouton that crunches loud. But any language can be beautiful in the right hands.

full of words from the German tribes, the Native American languages, words from Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, the African nations, Greece, from the Arabs and Jews, etc. etc.

This is not an exclusive characteristic of English by any means.

Back in the sixties when I did a three month tour of England, most of it in Rye (I went to see the Lamb House and pretty much didn't leave until it was time to go home) I loved to hear the accent of those around me, however, they were all busy tryiing to get me to talk because they wanted to hear my "accent". They had accents, I didn't, but that's another story.

I don't care much for the sound of French, too nasal. German, on the other hand, is too gutteral. I consider English to be the Goldilocks of languages. Of course the fact that it's the only one that actually sounds like people communicating helps, too. The others are just so much air being blown past the vocal chords and out the mouth/nose.

9: I don't recall saying it was.

>5 LolaWalser: well, of course. I can't imagine anyone would make objective arguments about anything aesthetic in this day and age, at least not without tongue in cheek. But I'm interested in what makes different languages subjectively take on aesthetic qualities. Is it all just cultural associations? The early Dutch settlers, encountering people speaking Khoisan languages (with the clicks), found them appalling, unspeakable, "akin to cries of beasts". Would that have been the case if the Khoisan peoples had been living next door to the Netherlands, white, and worshipping a Protestant God? Would it be the case if they had not had clicks, which are present in no European language? Would either thing have sufficed? It's worth noting that even when Europeans were wiping out natives in the Americas and enslaving West Africans, they never tries to give their languages animal-call status, at least not by and large.

>6 lilisin: I've always found Japanese wonderful, but like you, lilisin, I have spent a lot of time there, and now studied the language quite extensively, so my perceptions are no longer fresh. It gets synaesthetic--Japanese, with its small phonemic palate, simple syllables, and many vowels, is sweet and limpid like hot water and honey, whereas Halkomelem (our local native language) is more like tea made of sticks. Which is also wonderful.

>7 LolaWalser: hahahaha! I disagree completely, and love the French spoken by my Quebecois brothers as I love the English I myself speak. All these years I've been hoping to get a chance to take advantage of the free federal $ for people who want to go to Quebec and learn French, and I haven't yet but I'm hoping when I do I come back with the thickest Joual accent imaginable. But, question: I was watching Clint Eastwood's film Hereafter, and one of the main characters, the news andchor who gets caught in the tsunami, she speaks with what sounds like a Parisian accent to my ignorant ear, but she also says "yes" with what sounds to me like a perfect ouin. Is this a France-French thing too? Or is it catching on? I always thought it was one of the main distinguishing features of Quebecois.

"yes" with what sounds to me like a perfect ouin

Ouais. It's slangy, informal.

>14 LolaWalser: aha. Thanks!

>7 LolaWalser:. The ugliest French I ever heard is Québécois. Yes, I've heard others say that too. Having been in both places a few times, I can't see that much difference. Is it the dialect? Is it something on the order of how we New Yawkers sound to the rest of the country? And especially tea party territory? Poisonally, I nominate Swiss German as the ugliest thing I've heard. But then, I'm from Brooklyn.

SWISS GERMAN IS AWFUL.

#16

If you can't tell the difference between Québécois and Continental French, you can't possibly be a speaker of French! Perhaps it takes being a speaker to have variations grate on the ear...

By the way, I said Québécois was the ugliest French I've heard, not the ugliest "thing" absolutely. (I don't think of any language as absolutely ugly.)

#17

Austrian is worse!

> red ned so deppat! Swiss German is the closest thing I've heard in real life to the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show.

:)

But the Swedish Chef has his own certain je ne sais quoi, doesn't he?

I love all the languages I have been fortunate enough to learn, and consider a bunch of other languages to be beautiful, if the right person is speaking them.

Re Japanese, I don't know the language aside from some phrases I learned from the Shogun miniseries, but I notice that in old Kurasawa films, it's a beautiful gentle pretty language when spoken by women, and it sounds like angry barking when spoken by men, but probably that's because those films are so highly stylized.

I think Quebecois is to French kinda like Appalachian dialect is to American English. I love the MacGarrigle sisters, but then again I love bluegrass too so it's understandable.

Written French, on the other hand, Lola--which I admittedly speak (and read) in what might well be considered an ugly manner--enchanted me, as it did in France, when I was tooling around Quebec (though not Montreal), eating in Tim Horton-like places and looking forward to the oefs a la whatever, which sounded delicious, served with fromage and patates and so on, and was invariably disappointing. As if I could eat the words!

The Québecois seem to be treated by the French how the British treat Americans -- how dare they butcher the "purity" of the mother tongue.

I only began to understand the Québecois when I stopped thinking of them as French. They're no more French than I'm English.

I have two answers. Neither is specific to any dialect of French or Chinese.

One is, like music, your ear sometimes needs to be educated to appreciate the form. When you don't know how to listen you don't like the same way.

Two is, for me, poetry often improves in translation because it is released from what is often a tiresome rhyme and meter, but it still benefits from those original-language constraints in that the poet was forced to employ additional creativity and that further creativity is reflected in the translated poem, if it is well-translated. The flip-side of this is that I find a lot of blank (?) free (?) verse in English, whatever it is termed, loosed from the formal constraints of some kind of poetic scheme, too often consists of lazy, prosaic, even clumsy, expressions of emotions or ideas that are artificially chopped into a non-prose format.

You see, I rather like Quebecois. It may have to do with regularly summering in the Laurentians. Ah, I can hear it now, so sweet, so beautiful, so idyllic!

I think Slick is very much on target about the education of the ear. A conductor I know well is fond of talking about a study on the body's reaction to music that he said showed that there is a blissful reaction to the familiar that does not kick in until the third or fourth hearing of a piece. He says its always harder to introduce a new piece: you can inspire excitement or energy, but inspiring bliss is very hard. I've not seen the study, but it sounds right to me.

I also think Slick has (as do I) an English language ear for poetry.

And copyedit, try the poutine AFTER you've spent a couple hours on the ice playing hockey. It will taste better then.

>25 A_musing: this was a recent first-listen bliss reaction for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25lzp61UNvA

but in general I will be interested to consider that from now on when I'm listening to new music and see whether it's right.

Poutine is one of those things I won't do, along with heroin and macaroni and cheese.

>27 copyedit52: Lumping those three things together is a travesty. It's more of a travesty than Travesty, by John Hawkes.

Yes, I was being cute, Marx brothers' style. But seriously, I've had plenty of opportunities to eat poutine, but my stomach ain't what it used to be. The notion of eating french fires and feta cheese smothered in gravy flat out scares me.

>28 MeditationesMartini: yeah, French fires indeed!

Travesty by John Hawkes, who was a veritable rock star in France, is no travesty, you dirty Martini!

God I could use a dirty martini and some poutine right now. As a matter of fact, pardon me for a minute.

That should have been fries, of course. I must remember to put my glasses on before posting.

Potato, cheese and gravy scares you?

Try stopping by the Montreal Insectarium for brunch some day. That's the craziest food north of the border.

My general rule for eating is to seek out former French colonies. New Orleans, Vietnam, Cambodia, Algeria, some of the Carribean Islands, even Quebec - all have French inspired cuisines that I like much more than the French version. Adding spice and fruit flavors and a bit more of the rustic element really makes all all those butter and reduction sauces much more digestable. Poutine aside, which tastes a lot better with a healthy dose of good Cajun tobasco.

But I stick to the Bordeaux to accompany them.

Hi, everybody. Ugh, no sleep last night, but I'll try to sound semi-intelligent even if the word "prosody" doesn't fall readily from my lips (fingers?).

French is prettier than English, imo, for a few reasons: the liaisons between spoken words, so that speaking is somewhat musical. In written french, I like the lovely vowel combinations: eaux is better than oh, something which may annoy people who feel that simpler is better. Certain sounds (maybe like MM says, the nasalized vowels, too), like the endings of hiver, envers, and the subtle difference between those and terre. I think the "sh" sound is used more, making it sound softer.

Try this.

Another language I really love to hear spoken, and whose accents I always enjoy, is Russian.

Also, Greek and Welsh. Both beautiful

So, does language shape a people, and their culture; or is it something in the people, and culture, that creates the language?

Paging Drs Sapir and Whorf!

Whorf was a sleepy candy-striper at best.

>7 LolaWalser: Maybe this is in the ear of the beholder. I love the sound of Cajun French, especially when it's backed up by an accordion. Of course there are people who consider the accordion the ugly contender of the instrument world.

what's this?

I maunder in here to check the parquet and find LIFE, PEOPLE, CONVERSATION, POUTINE and BORDEAUX and nobody invited me?

I am shocked, shocked to discover that my own salon is in session without my knowledge.

Also delighted! We should get it going again in 2011 on a regular basis, no? non? nein? duei bu duei?

regarding the question, I think it's entirely subjunctive, subjective, I mean (what did you guys put in the bordeaux)?. I find French gorgeous to listen to, German as well. in fact I love the sound of nearly all languages, and agree with A_musing especially about Greek and Welsh.

The ugliest languages in my view are Arabic, which completely makes me vomit when I hear it, and Taiwanese, which sounds like the made up languages we used to invent when we were kids. it has almost no consonants and what consonants there are are mostly guttural plosives, wo gally gong.

I'm interested in to what extent our aesthetic judgements about languages are formed by the people we know from our lives who speak those languages, and how we first encountered them in our biographies.

I think we definately need a discussion on Sapir Whorf, one of my pet theories.

Where's tommyb27?

Ah, Tom Cat, some interesting questions in there. I haven't read Sapir Whorf, so I may need a remedial in here somewhere.

But, to riff off your own dislike to answer your question, I rather like Arabic, and it may have to do with my encounters. In college, I was a history major with a focus on the middle east, and so met up with Arabic (though never really learned it) in the course of those years; much of it was poetic - the course that first sucked me in specifically began with the pre-Islamic Arabic odes and moved on from there.

Now, the language that may sound worst to my ear is German, which was a language my father grew up with. The words that remained in his vocabulary tended to be things like "Hinaus!" when he was upset. Though, I somewhat think the language would sound harsh even without that association.

interesting point amusing. German underwent a huge change during the Nazi era. The beautiful sonorities of Schiller, Goethe, Heine, the amazing precision of Kant and Hegel and the mad riffing of Nietzsche was reduced to a gutteral bark with awful officially decreed portmanteau words like Rundfunkgapperat and so on. George Steiner wrote a wonderful essay about this somewhere. I can dig around and find it if you're interested.

41: Oh gracious, you think Arabic sounds ugly???? Wow. There are so many different dialects and they are so different from each other. I am prejudiced in favor of Egyptian but in general even if we're just restricted to classical/Modern Standard, I think Arabic is beautiful. It has some of the best poetry on the planet.

43: I guess the Nazis had the German equivalent of "Newspeak".

Arabic (broadly speaking) is beautiful to my ear too. The harshness of the aitches and glottal stops throw those not used to it, but it is amazingly musical.

>43 tomcatMurr: I'm interested--although I'm not sure how much effect the Nazi era actually had on German as she is wrote; it doesn't seem like twelve years of hell would be enough to completely efface the habits of generations. I need to read more in German for that to not just be talking out of my ass, though--think the newest thing I've actually read auf Deutsch was by Brecht (and prewar), and he's obvs a special case in stylistic matters.

>44 anna_in_pdx: I am working with a Kuwaiti client on her dissertation currently (on child phonological development in Kuwaiti Arabic), and she had a Jordanian friend come over to bring her some pastries, and listening to them talk was fascinating--my client's vowels were way further back and I think her emphatics were more emphatic--or perhaps there were just more of them? Anyway, not speaking the language, I heard her speech as this sort of "glub glub glub" whereas her friend's speech was lighter, airier, and also more sibilant. It made me wonder how Americans hear me, as a Canadian with strongly backed vowels. (I always get excited at the rare person who picks up on America-Canadian differences besides the notorious "aboot".)

Anna, speaking of emphatics, as an Arabic speaker how long would you say it took you to perceive/produce them reliably? I am not an Arabic learner, but I have been talking about Arabic extensively with Hadeel of late and I often find the difference between emphatic and non- difficult to get.

>42 A_musing: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity principle, is basically the idea that the languages we speak strongly affect the cognitive framework with or within which we perceive the world--in its simplest form, if e.g. the Japanese view green as a shade of blue (which they do), then they will have as much trouble reliably determining what is blue and what is green as we would deciding whether a range of shades are, say, indigo or violet. Or again e.g., that if a language only has numbers for "one", "two", and many (as Piraha is purported to), that people who speak that language will have more difficulty remembering whether there were five or six people around the fire. (In practice the answer seems to be that sometimes this is true, sometimes not, often somewhere in the middle, depending on the language and the category.)

Whorf, who I seem to recall was some kind of dodgy tabloid journalist who ended up writing papers with Sapir somehow, had some really poor examples and in general they stated their case much too strongly, and so after a vogue in the early 20th century (you can see how easily this work would fit in with the structuralist anthropology practiced by e.g. Boas and Levi-Strauss, or Skinnerian behaviorism, or Bloomfieldian emergentism in linguistics on which Sapir was a big influence, it fell out of favour partly due to its own internal contradictions and partly because after Chomsky it became really really uncool to suggest differences between languages meant anything or were more than surface noise over a platonic ideal of uniform linguistic models in the mind. It's been rehabilitated in recent years, though, with more of a focus on pragmatics and metaphor. (I think we should ban people from studying syntax, myself, if only because--from the prescriptive grammarians of the 18th century through Chomsky to the horrors of sentence diagramming, they always seem to ruin everything.

Sapir-Whorf is often confused/commingled with the idea that sense-perceptions of the physical world exert an influence on language and through it on perceptions (and that this necessarily varies with culture and geography--it's probably most famous in the form of the idea that the Inuit have 40 or 200 or a bilion words for snow). Here, since we're talking about the perceptions of the speakers of certain languages that other languages have intrinsic aesthetic qualities, we're really talking about a kind of meta-Sapir-Whorf, I guess; the idea that a certain sequence of sounds perceived through the fine mesh of a disparate sound system will reliably be perceived in certain ways. That's if we're actually talking about sounds, and not gesture or how cute French girls are or how Latin made us feel in Mass before Vatican II (the end of Latin Mass is why my mum never goes to church anymore--she thinks the vernacular kills the magic).

Here is a discussion on the Piraha and Sapir-Whorf, and some responses:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/001364.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001373.html

As a French (or should I say Quebecois?) and Arabic speaker, it looks like I hit the jackpot in stumbling upon this post - what a lovely array of stimulating discussion and unabashed prejudices!

I would, however, be interested to know more about the aberration that some of you have attributed to French that is spoken in Montreal. In my humble opinion, one may need to clearly distinguish between joual, valois French, or the more formal international standard, though with a definite Canadian slant.

Although both French-Canadians and les français may use anglicized words in their vocabulary, it is important to note that many French speakers do not do so despite what Lola et al have declared.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the beauty in various dialects and forms of speech in the French language though they may be removed from my own understanding and interpretation of this beautiful language. Indeed, this may even include joual Quebecois which is characteristic of the blue-collar working class, particularly of the yesteryear.

Saro

Oh no! What a cruel and thoughtless bunch we must seem to a Québécois & Arabic speaker! Thankfully you obviously also speak God's Own Language. We can still assemble harmoniously around a nice tea and crumpets. :)

Although both French-Canadians and les français may use anglicized words in their vocabulary, it is important to note that many French speakers do not do so despite what Lola et al have declared.

I was thinking not so much of borrowed words ("le weekend"), as of the assumption of English usage. I've no Québécois resources to look up, but here's a recent example (a Moroccan friend's anecdote)--a confusion between "chauffer" and "chauffeur" because the Québécois speaker used the latter as a verb, while pronouncing it as the former. "To chauffeur", for those who don't follow, isn't Old World French usage.

I'm less familiar with Québécois, but for Cajun speakers anglicisms, English usage and abundant traces of English pronounciation, most of the time aren't a matter of choice. That's simply what the language has come to be like.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the beauty in various dialects and forms of speech in the French language...

Whereas I think even some babies are ugly!

Another crumpet?

Hi Lola,

I just wanted to bring another perspective into the fold, not make you feel bad! ;) Besides, I'm not a native French speaker, though my own interpretation of the language is a mix between Parisian French (minus the accent) and Quebecois. In fact, French is my fourth language and native speakers somehow mistake me for an anglophone while English speakers think my francophone accent quite charming. I don't have the heart to tell them that it's actually Middle-Eastern influenced by Canadiana.

Cheers,
Saro

Well, there can't be a definite conclusion, as the beauty of a language, like art, rests in the ear of the listener. Obviously, westerners will tend to be in favor of French (maybe because of French influence over West civilization) while Asians might find better Chinese (because they're more familiarized with it, without considering the millions of Chinese speakers of course). The thing is, you can't really say. My mother tongue's Spanish, and I never actually found it "aesthetically pleasing" as someone told me once. You see, sometimes you don't get to appreciate what you have because you're just too used to it. I've talked with French people who tell me they don't find their language pleasing in terms of phonetics. One French girl even told me she didn't like it because it was too nasal! There are, of course, sounds are more appealing to our ears (too guttural or too nasal sounds are, by statistics, sounds we tend to dislike). The more a language uses them, the more we're going to find it distasteful. French has nasal sounds, but the combination of many phonetic elements doesn't allow us to perceive them as clearly as we would. Chinese combines many short and long vowels, nasal sounds, and add the fact that we (not Asian people) find it exotic, you can guess which is going to be considered fairly more beautiful. As I said, all these data is highly subjective, and the reality is that there's no most beautiful languages, we all love our mother languages, and I personally, love all other ones and their cultures as well.

Adopting "foreign" words is not exclusive to English, but speaking English is an agglutinating activity; one cannot speak this mongrel without the carrier pigeon fluttering in.

Would you rather have a gorgeous full-blooded hound with splayed hips and no strength with which to accomplish things, or a mongrel, with the best of many breeds, a good strong, companion and work mate? I'll take the mongrel over the full blood any day. Beauty in the extra-ordinary is fleeting and fragile. Beauty in the ordinary, however, is born from utility with the robustness found in the thing itself. Make mine as ordinary as they come.