Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 December 1

= December 1 =

praise words
great excellent terrific incredible phenomenal brilliant wonderful outstanding magnificent marvellous amazing perfect superb splendid awesome

got any more? -- 07:22, 1 December 2007 59.189.62.79


 * Why not just use a thesaurus? AnonMoos 09:07, 1 December 2007 (UTC)


 * ... such as this one..--Shantavira|feed me 17:20, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

English accent in other languages
Hi, I've been wondering about how people who have a native langauge of English sound like in other languages. What I'm specifically looking for is how an English-speaking person sounds like when speaking German. I'm assuming that a speaker of English is indistinguishable from a speaker of American English when speaking in a foreign language. I'd like to know what some characteristics are and also what their accent is like (eg is it "soft", "funny", "weird", "ugly"?). I would welcome, though, any other experiences of English accents in foreign languages.


 * I'm not sure for German, but for Spanish I'd say the most suitable adjective would be "unmistakable". When you hear a native speaker of English, nothing comes to mind apart from "OK. English is their first language". The way English speakers pronounce Rs and the noticeable puff of air they produce after the P and T sounds are certainly unique. They also tend to incorrectly pronounce Vs as labiodental fricatives although that sound was lost long ago in Spanish. --Taraborn 11:31, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I asked a Swedish friend what she thought English looked/sounded like, and she thought it was full of "th" and "ing" sounds --Bearbear 11:33, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, as I just posted above in a different thread, you can hear the difference between a British accent of German and an American accent of German. I don't really know how to explain how it sounds though, without imitating it. What they really notice is the American r, since it sounds so different from the German r, and doesn't sound like any sound that German has. I think in general, Germans find the American accent of German cute and funny, not necessarily ugly, but of course some Americans have stronger accents than others. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 11:36, 1 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm English and when I tried speaking German in Switzerland someone thought I was Dutch. TheMathemagician 12:08, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm Welsh usually speaking English, and when I tried speaking Swiss German in Switzerland the shopkeeper thought I was fluent. Ouch, that's fast! :) -- Arwel (talk) 12:21, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Qualifications like "soft", "funny", "weird", "ugly" are very subjective, and opinions may vary from person to person, or be socially conditioned. (An Anglophile will react differently from an Anglophobe.) However, there are differences between a British accent and an American one, and theymay usually be spotted by a keen observer:
 * Britons tend to diphthongise certain vowel sounds much more widely (the glide is longer) than Americans: əʋ, ɛɪ, and especially than Continentals.
 * The r-sound, very broadly speaking, distinguishes Britons (fricative) from Americans (retroflex), and especially distinguishes them from most Continentals, who may use uvular ʀ or another variety.
 * Very often, lip rounding and lip movements in English (both American and British) are less energetic than in some other languages, which may give the impression that the speaker is mumbling or slurring his words.
 * Intonation, of course, differs from language to language, and since intonation habits are hard to change, this may make for an "English accent" which is hard to define but easy to spot. Bessel Dekker 13:50, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I heard Ricardo Montalban say in an interview that English sounded like barking dogs to him. The only link I could find for that is as anecdotal as this reply is. --Milkbreath 14:35, 1 December 2007 (UTC)


 * To my ear English speakers seem to tend to speak in what might be considered a "lazy" way when they talk in other languages. This is actually what we do when we speak English itself, too. What I mean by that is that English speakers tend to shorten and soften consonents - making T's into D's, K's into G's, P's into B's, etc. Also, English speakers push words together - and this is actually officially recognized in the language - CAN NOT becomes CAN'T, SHOULD NOT becomes SHOULDN'T, etc. Americans are even more like that than the Brits. In American English you may hear several words jammed together while spoken, for instance WHY-ON-CHOU for WHY DON'T YOU, or YOUBETCHA for YOU BET YOU, etc. This all started when the Anglo Saxons landed in Brittain. I have a pet theory that the indigenous Celtic Britons actually contributed to the English language by giving it these softening tendencies, since so much of Welsh sounds very aspirating and mushy, with softened consonents and lisping vowels - just what English tends to do. SO if you take the old Anglo Saxon language before they came to Brittain, it had crisp clean consonants, and then shortly after arriving in Brittain, it began to soften the consonents and become more mushy sounding - just like Welsh speakers do. In the present day when English speakers are speaking in another language, they sound like they're not cleanly articulating the consonants, and tend to mush the word together. At least this is my experience. The other noteworthy thing is that I could always hear when an American was speaking English no matter where I was - the American "sound" cuts above and through a crowd of people speaking some other language due to the fact that it is so twangy and nasal. Saukkomies 03:21, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks guys for your answers, keep them coming :). Just in response to the person above saying that describing accents vary from person to person, while I do sort of agree, I do think that a lot of "foreign" accents can be categorised to at least what many people think, or it least what is stereotyped. For example, and I'm not being racist here (I'm merely stating some stereotypes... I disagree with many of them), Italian (and Spanish?) people are said to be in a hurry, German accents are said to hard, agressive and are said to be ugly or unpleasant (even though I actually like it), French accents are said to be romantic and pretty, people with U.S. Southern accents are said to be uneducated and so on. So what I'm really asking, I guess, as well as my other questions, is what are people with English language accents perceived to be like, or what impression does it give?


 * And also, a follow-up question, if the English and Americans can be told apart when speaking a language other than English, what about Australians? Or New Zealanders? Or South Africans? Or Canadians? You get my drift ;) I would assume it would be harder seeing as they could each be categorised as derived from either English English or American English.


 * I heard an Australian speaking Italian yesterday, but he still had an Australian accent, that was interesting to hear. Adam Bishop 14:55, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

After edit conflict:
 * It has little to do with derivation, more with fine-tuning. It might be more difficult to distinguish between Australian and South African than between each of the major US accents — and then, it might not.
 * As to the characterising of foreign accents, you seem to overlook one factor: perception depends on the language and other habits of the recipient as much as on the language of the producer. This brings in interferential as well as sociolinguistic factors: if citizens of X-land despise the denizens of Y-ia, then they will dislike their accent.
 * This is on a par with (rather meaningless) statements like "$#@ is a difficult language", which beg a host of unanswerable questions. Difficult to native speakers of what language(s)? Difficult in which stage of the learning process? Difficult in what respect?
 * Again, it is sometimes claimed that certain languages are unfit for poetry. Other languages are said to be difficult to translate from — or into. Reasons, let alone proof, are seldom given.
 * When teaching adult classes, I used to be told by my students: "English is the world language, but French is a beautiful language". They neither spoke nor understood French or (at that stage) English, but this they knew to be a self-evident truth.
 * At what moment does one decide that French is a romantic or a beautiful language? Before or after one has guessed (which is not that difficult) that the speaker is in fact speaking French? Again, there are those to whom Southern US sounds courteously old-fashioned rather than uneducated.
 * Should we really want to find out whether there is no prejudice at stake, we ought to expose a group of listeners to a language which they don't know, which they know nothing about, which they cannot place etc. It would be interesting to see whether perceptions then would be unanimous, would depend on the listener's own native tongue etcetera. Bessel Dekker 15:17, 1 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I remember reading years ago that when the movie Sophie's Choice came out, Meryl Streep did the dubbing of her lines into German, because an English speaker and a Polish speaker speak German the same. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's what the article I read claimed.   Corvus cornix  talk  00:03, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I highly doubt that - I'm native German, and a Polish accent is very easily distinguishable from any kind of English accent (although, as others have noted above, I could not explain in quantifiable terms how a Polish accent sounds as opposed to an English or American accent - I just "know" it when I hear it). It is of course possible that the movie execs thought it wouldn't matter, but I don't think you could seriously fool any native German with that substitution -- Ferkelparade &pi; 03:26, 2 December 2007 (UTC)


 * As noted below, Meryl Streep has an excellent ear for accents, and she is also prepared to work very hard on getting them right, so it is just possible that she could pull off German-with-a-Polish-accent, especially if she learned German from somebody with a Polish accent. SaundersW 17:51, 2 December 2007 (UTC)


 * When I was speaking Chinese, people said I sounded like I dragged things out a little. In Chile, speaking Spanish, apparently I sounded Mexican. This [] is a conference paper referring to different accents in Swedish, and people imitating foreigners speaking Swedish. Very interesting. Steewi 00:29, 3 December 2007 (UTC)


 * When I, an Englishman from the north of England, was in France speaking French, everyone thought I was Dutch. When I was in Holland, speaking Dutch, they thought I was German. When I was in Germany speaking German, they thought I was Dutch. When I was in Ireland, speaking English, they thought I was Dutch, too. --ChokinBako 04:15, 4 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Related to this is the question of how regional accents sound to people who have never heard them. There was a recent study (sorry to be anecdotal but I haven't got the reference) in which researchers presented average Americans with samples of various accents of British English and asked them what they thought about the speaker, how they sounded.  The Americans had no preconceptions or prejudices about British accents and so did not make the assumptions that British people tend to about, for example, Brummie (Birmingham) or Scouse (Liverpool), that these accents sound ill-educated or working class or whatever. There was no problem in comprehension, as I believe the study had been constructed to eliminate dialect variations of lexis and syntax, so the listeners reacted purely to the accent. BrainyBabe (talk) 22:13, 4 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I actually heard about that study, and it was a few years ago. It is on the Internet. It was interesting to note that even though the list of 'better sounding ones vs. not-so-nice ones from a British perspective' was as I expected (being a Brit), the list from the American perspective was completely jumbled up, with Cockney, Scouse, Irish and Scots all very close to each other up top, and the rest completely random (to a Brit).--ChokinBako (talk) 02:09, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

How you talk to people
I noticed when I talk to people and dont give them a choice, they are more likely to go along with what I want and I was wondering it there were any studies done and any statistics for this, I looked but could not find anything. Heres an example of what I mean:

Method 1: Me: I'll call you later Method 2: Me: Can I call you later?

If I dont give them a choice like method one, I'll get what I want more often, like in this example, I will be able to get off the phone.

Thanks


 * This is certainly true. Another trick is the well-known hint, "Before you go, let me..." The more choices you provide, the more people will choose.
 * In fact, your language may suggest a choice that does not really exist, as is sometimes done in street interviews subsequently televised to doubtful benefit: asked "What should be the maximum price for a pound of sugar?" will certainly elicit an answer, but it will have little or no relation to reality. The question gives people the illusion that they have a say in the matter. After you have left, they will step into the nearest supermarket and fork out the asking price, whatever it may be.


 * This is in fact a matter of language as social control. Studies abound, especially in the fields of discourse analysis and conversation analysis. Another approach is framing or interactive framing, an anthropological-linguistic approach studying expectations in speech interaction.
 * As for statistics, I am not sure what you are thinking of. However, it seems to be clear that certain speech acts are effective (and usual) in certain settings (therapy, teaching...).
 * Bessel Dekker 13:48, 1 December 2007 (UTC)


 * No idea about studies and statistics, but in sales jargon this technique is known as an assumptive close. Gandalf61 13:26, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
 * This reminds me of the preschool teacher's technique of fake choices: Do you want to clean up this mess alone or shall we do it together? Lova Falk 14:22, 2 December 2007 (UTC)