Some languages have music

Others don't.

I was reminded of this the other day when writing a review of War of the Rats, a novel about the last days of the battle for Stalingrad.

I especially liked this passage where the protagonist compares the language of the German invaders unfavourably with his native Russian:

"He judged it an ugly language, a battle tongue. German was spoken in the back of the throat, bitten and chewed with the teeth. By contrast, he considered Russian to be liquid; it was a language to be cradled on the lips, swirled in the mouth like cognac. Russian could be whispered through a keyhole to an angry lover on the other side to stroke her into unlocking the door. German was the language to knock the door down. It was how you spoke to your dog or cleared your throat."

I'm not sure that Russian is the most mellifluous of languages, but it certainly trumps German, which does have far too many hard edges, too much guttural sputtering (though my German ancestors - all my maternal line - would no doubt disown me for saying so). For me, French is much the most attractive-sounding language. Italian and Spanish come trailing in behind. Most of the Slavic languages are, I find, a little too gruff and clipped. I don't really know too much about Asian or African languages; I think their 'alien' quality, their extreme unfamiliarity may be a potential obstacle to their seeming entirely pleasing to the Western ear.... although I do love to listen to Africans, for the marvellous timbre of their voices and the delightful sing-song rhythms, whether speaking a native language or heavily accented English or French. And I once spent a delightful evening listening to a couple of Fijians converse in their native language, despite not understanding - nor making any attempt to understand - a single word of it (I had in fact built up a small vocabulary of key words by then, after nearly a month in the islands; and a lot of Fijian words are recognisably derived from English; but on this occasion, I was happy to bathe in the sounds of the words and forget about meaning).

East Asian languages are harder to grasp, harder to speak, harder to like because of their use of tones. Since intonation in Western languages is largely used to convey underlying emotion rather than specific meaning, it takes us a long time to overcome the discomfiting impression that Oriental peoples are permanently inappropriately pissed off about something. But I fear this unfortunate impact of the tones is particularly severe with Mandarin Chinese. Japanese, Korean, and Thai are also tonal languages, yet what I've heard of these tongues (admittedly quite little) does not sound relentlessly shrill or grating; indeed, I think they sound quite pleasant; Japanese especially so (and I recently sat through 2+ hours of Letters From Iwo Jima, so I've had the exposure). Mandarin, I'm sorry to say, sounds just horrendous.

It is, to my ear, such an outrageously ugly language that it is not even saved by sex. Most languages can be. Polish sounds at best dull, at worst growly and surly when spoken by men; but in the mouth of a cute Polish girl it can seem like one of the sexiest languages in the world. French is such a gorgeous language that it even sounds good when blokes speak it; but when a woman speaks it, you could fall in love in an instant. We even notice the same phenomenon with accents and dialects; some (most!) of the regional varieties of British English lack intrinsic charm: Scots and Geordie, in particular, tend to sound like the blathering of a belligerent drunk when spoken by a man (even if that man should happen to be a mild-mannered teetotaller), but a soft-spoken girl can make them seem deliciously sexy.

Mandarin when spoken by a girl usually sounds even worse - strident and whiny. I don't mind listening to gruff old Beijing cab-drivers converse, but the chatter of young Chinese women can be just excruciating.

And it's not just this fingernails-on-a-blackboard quality of the tones that I can't stand; there doesn't seem to be any pleasing interplay between the phonemes of the language either. Basically, it's such a bloody indistinct language: it is mostly spoken far back in the mouth, with very little involvement of the lips - which means that, by Western standards, it sounds like mumbling. I listen to hours of Chinese every day, on TV, on radio, and in the street; and I know quite a lot of basic vocabulary; but most of the time, I couldn't begin to transcribe what I hear using the pinyin Roman alphabet spellings - I simply can't recognise the sounds people are making. And there's such a damn limited range of sounds, too (which is why they need the tones in the first place!): only 20 or so initial consonants (many of which are almost indistinguishable), a paltry 2 final consonants (almost indistinguishable), and around 30 vowel and diphthong sounds - giving a grand total (not including tones - which, if you can distinguish them, means in theory you could multipy by 4) of about 350 possible syllables. 350. It takes only a couple of minutes to count them all up in the table at the back of a 'teach yourself Chinese' book. You could scarcely begin to count the number of different possibilities in English: it must run into many thousands. In Chinese, there are only 350. And, let me reiterate, most of them sound very much the same. It's hard to discern any scope for what we think of as 'poetry' in a language like this. Rhyming and punning are commonplace, almost inescapable; but the more subtle interplay of sounds, part-rhyme and near-rhyme, alliteration and assonance, oblique reminiscences of similar words (the mumbling Myrmidons marauded for marmalade, for example)...... these are impossible.

So, this post becomes the first in a long-planned, oft-deferred occasional series on 'Why I decline to learn Chinese' - because it doesn't sound good; because it has no music, no poetry in it.