English would be a bit soft spoken and conceited, wouldn't it.
You might say that, but I couldn't possibly comment.
In all seriousness though, I am fascinated by this kind of thing. How
would you imagine the personality of a person who represented a language? It's also not an entirely trivial amusement. For example, why is German stereotyped in the west as a harsh, grating assault on the ears, when it can be one of the most beautiful and soft spoken languages?
Why don't we depict this instead of Hitler screaming at Fegelein?
Good video on this topic of stereotyping langues as alien or other, with a decent comments section too. Because I think it is interesting to see what kind of personality a language does have - when you manage to see past stereotypes and impressions of the language.
E.g. what sets one language apart from another? What kind of language would English be, and why?
1. English has sounds that few languages care to use. Things like the thorn or "th" sound. This is one of those things people take for granted until they become an English teacher and realise the majority of the world doesn't use this sound, and it's a hard sound to make. AFAIK the English, Greeks, Nordics, Welsh and continental Spanish speakers have this sound.
2. English has stressed and unstressed alternating patterns of speech, but can break its own stress patterns easily, compared to say Chinese where it's equal stress. English speakers will also do things with vowels, stress and contractions that they will not even be aware of, like barely pronouncing 'a' or turning 'might not have' into 'might not've,' or further still
3. Written English is alphabetic, and captures loads of information in the words through their roots, and can be modified with prefixes/suffixes and any number of verbs, adjectives, adverbs and tenses.
4. English follows very arcane and esoteric rules that every English speaker knows, even if they are not aware of them. Things like ablaut reduplication determining why it's tick tock and not tock tick, or things like adjective sequence order detailing why the "oval-headed lovely silver French small axe" is wrong but the "lovely small over-headed silver French axe" is right, because it follows the right adjective sequence, but the "bad big wolf" sounds worse than "big bad wolf" because the initial vowel order takes priority over the adjective order.
So; English is a well-traveled person of mystery, who is wide-eyed and a little bit unhinged and oblivious to their own eccentricity. They are very open-minded and come from a very mixed family background, and willingly break the laws of man whilst adhering strictly to an internal moral system even they cannot define
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Topic: If Languages were people... (Read 1062 times)