Most beautiful language

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Avatar, Mar 1, 2007.

  1. sarafi Registered Member

    Messages:
    1
    I would say the most beautiful language is Bengali.
    It just sounds more homely and somewhat haunting:
    example:
    "tomar holo shuru, amar holo shara....emni bhabe bohe jibonero dhara"

    Plus some of the words in Bengali are simply musical: upoma, mohona, jochona, oshrootipoorbo borshopoorti
     
    Last edited: Jan 31, 2010
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  3. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    20,855
    Hard to say. I have heard Parisians and Quebecois speaking french. The former was music to my ears while the latter sounded worse than cats in a bag.
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    There's a new wave of cultural conservation sweeping the world. So it's probably safe for a while, considering that millions of people speak it at home.
    I agree that it is somewhere between them, but having some familiarity with all four my impression is that it's very close to Spanish and Portuguese and farther from French and Italian. I don't know any Occitan but it's said to be closely related, which makes sense. With my moderate fluency in Spanish and passing familiarity with Portuguese I was able to understand everything everyone said in Catalan. And my Catalonian friends said that when they went to Portugal they found that they and the Portuguese could understand each other rather easily.
    The Catalonians have a history of bitterness with the Spaniards, so it's a reflex to distance themselves from everything Spanish.
    Phonetics are not a good measure because they can change so rapidly. You would have a very hard time understanding someone speaking Elizabethan English (assuming you're American), but you can read Shakespeare with little difficulty. For that matter, you'd probably be even more bewildered by some of the modern regional dialects of England or Scotland.

    The phonetics of Spanish and Portuguese--especially Brazilian Portuguese--have diverged to the extent that a foreigner would probably not guess that they're closely related. On paper the similarity is obvious, but not in speech. Spanish siete, ocho, nueve are sete, oito, nove in print. But in Lisbon they're pronounced set, oit, nov and in Rio they're setchi, oitu, novi.
    The phonemes are more familiar. Catalan does not have the TH and KH sounds of Castilian.
    I lose my patience with linguists who labor so furiously over taxonomy at any level below the family. Of course it would be millennial news if we discovered that, say, the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic families have a common ancestor. But to argue over whether Catalan is closer to Occitan, French or Spanish may simply be judging the relative influence on the language of three powerful medieval families whose lords emigrated from three different places due to war or patronage.

    Take Modern English. A Hungarian friend looked at a page of an English dictionary and said, "It's obvious that your language was once a dialect of French."
     
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  7. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

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    Very interesting Fraggle Rocker.
     
  8. princelove Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    75
    The sweetest language of the world is Dari and pashto

    The most regular language of the world is Turkish.
    The most completeed language of the world is Arabic.
     

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