[title]Family quotes[/title] [description]Welcome to our family quotes section! Here you'll find some of the funniest (and wisest) quotes on the subject of family life![/description]
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Latest post Tue, Oct 6 2009 5:32 PM by Anonymous. 10 replies.
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coloraday  +  904237 Wed, 16 Sep 09 01:45 PM
This is not an English question but because visitors of this site are from a wide range of countries ,I ask it here.Which language has an easy listening?.I mean if you learned a good vocabulary and grammar of that language, you would recognise every word they say when you talk to them.

Thanks

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Mister Micawber  +  904312 Wed, 16 Sep 09 02:48 PM
It depends on the speaker, but some languages have a simpler array of sounds, and these, especially when they are vowel sounds, make the spoken language easier to comprehend.


Spanish and Japanese are good examples of this, and are also good examples of the importance of the individual speakers:  Japanese generally speak at more comprehensible speeds than do many Spanish speakers.

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Kooyeen  +  906193 Thu, 17 Sep 09 09:08 PM
I guess Italian. There are only seven vowels, and two of them are "allophonic" (so you have five vowels). Unlike English, there are no reduced forms: everything is pronounced the way it's written.


So I think Italian, Spanish, and Japanese might be good examples (I trust MM, although I don't know Japanese and I heard that Italian is actually easier to pronounce and listen to than Spanish).


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coloraday  +  912197 Mon, 21 Sep 09 11:47 PM
You mean that it has a few vowels but I think the less vowels are in a language,the less hard it is to hear that language.Because the consonants are mostly pronounced loose that makes it hard to recognise the words.

What do you think?

Thanks

Mister Micawber  +  912249 Tue, 22 Sep 09 12:40 AM
the less vowels are in a language,the less hard it is to hear that language”

That's what Kooyeen and I have said, I think.

coloraday  +  912268 Tue, 22 Sep 09 12:52 AM

Kooyeen
“so you have five vowels”

But English also has 5 vowels if I'm not mistaken. 

Mister Micawber  +  912295 Tue, 22 Sep 09 01:08 AM
No, it has 5 (sometimes 6 or 7 - y, w) letters to represent some 14 to 16 vowel sounds.
coloraday  +  913161 Tue, 22 Sep 09 04:05 PM
Oh,I was almost sleeping when I wrote this last night and the diversion happened.I meant to say:

If vowels in a language are few,then it is hard to understand that language.

and as I said "Because the consonants are mostly pronounced loose that makes it hard to recognise the words."

Kooyeen  +  913678 Tue, 22 Sep 09 11:44 PM
coloraday

If vowels in a language are few,then it is hard to understand that language.

and as I said "Because the consonants are mostly pronounced loose that makes it hard to recognise the words."


No, because "few vowels" means there are "few phonemes" to recognize, and that means the difference between each phoneme (call them "syllables" if you want) is smaller. That means you are less likely to mistake a syllable or a sound with another.

As a stupid example, consider the western alpabet: abcdefghijklm... there are only 26 symbols for the letters. Now consider the Chinese writing system, where there are more than 4,000 symbols. Which is easier to read? That's why a language with less phonemes is generally easier to listen to or to speak.

Ex: English simple vowels - bit, beat, bet, bat, bot, but, boot, foot = 8


Also, in Italian for example, you can't have big consonant clusters like in English. Most syllables are basically made up of a consonant and a vowel, and so it's easy to hear all the phonemes (Italian words ends with a vowel sound too). I guess the same happens in Spanish and Japanese. 

But in English, you have clusters all the time, also because words often end with a consonant and start with a consonant, and there are lots of mono-syllable words. It's often impossible to hear all the consonants in the clusters, and sometimes they are simplified. This leads to much more problems, compared to Italian.

Example: I talked to her = I talk to her

You even miss the past tense because of the cluster lkt+t, and you need to guess it's a past tense.



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