Thursday, January 10, 2008

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.

11 comments:

homeinkabul said...

I love scottish accents. I think I'm actually scottish. I tried to explain it to my parents but they weren't having it.

that's all i want to say now.

Froog said...

Apparently Scots and Russians sound surprisingly alike. I'm told you can fake your way through in Russia surprisingly well by putting on a Sean Connery voice.

The British Cowboy said...

Are you sure you are not just basing that on having seen The Hunt for Red October, Froog?

Froog said...

Well, that may be the original source. I got the idea from a young British traveller I met here a few months back, who claimed to have achieved outstanding results with the technique on the Trans-Siberian Express, and gave quite persuasive demonstrations of it.

cindy said...

i think mandarin can sound very fluid and melodious even, when spoken well. but then, my ears are used to the sound.

i can't imagine living in a country where the language was so jarring to me. doesn't sound like fun.

you should check out this website :

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/

he lives in shangahi and studies chinese.

Froog said...

Shanghai is different. Shanghaihua doesn't sound too bad. Bizarrely enough, I don't even think Cantonese sounds too bad - comically overwrought at times, but not jagged and grating like putonghua. It may be that Beijingers are particularly strident. And it probably is the case that the exaggerated pronunciation of tones by TV and radio presenters (in daily life the tones are scarcely detectable most of the time) is especially harsh to the ear.

I'm not a fan of Sinosplice. Some of the language-learning tips are good, but I find the blog desperately dull and not very well written - and he comes over as a bit of a smug bastard much of the time.

I have reached a state of neutrality in my attitude to the language: I don't hate it or even get irritated by it (I probably used to, a bit); but it doesn't inspire any admiration or affection in me - it doesn't have any aesthetically pleasing qualities that encourage me to make more efforts to learn it.

I find the language environment here is actually a big step up from living in London - I really hate Cockney!!

Anonymous said...

"Russian could be whispered through a keyhole to an angry lover on the other side to stroke her into unlocking the door."

Ooh, i like that quote.

lots of asian languages are beautiful and have way more potential in poetry than western languages... but it's not worth anything if you can't understand them.

As you pointed out, Beijing's attitude is more brisk and to the point -- causing more possibilities for the sounds to come off as "unpleasant".

Punjabi can be that way, too. If you didn't understand, you'd think they were all fighting all the time.

and I love scots, too. well, i don't know much about scotland, but I read a lot of stuff based in scotland when i was younger and watched a lot of shows/movies with scottish characters and that's when i fell in love, i think. I think Scotland used to be on my List of Places to Go. But then, before I came to China, almost every yuppy couple i knew was taking a holiday there or in Ireland... some tourist promotion going on, I think, with airfare quite reasonable... and seemingly exclusively marketed to "couples" (hey, what about the rest of us?) I think watching several versions of the happy-couple in Scotland/Ireland slideshow might have put me off a bit.

HiK, Scot, huh?

argonox said...

I do think you're tragically overlooking Brazilian Portuguese-- such a sexy language. And far less haughty sounding than French.

I also confess that I really love the sound of (gasp!) Cantonese. I hated it when I was first living in HK, but eventually grew to love it. There's something appealing to me about a language that so often ends its sentences with an extended "laaaaaa."

A correction: unlike Chinese, Korean and Japanese are not tonal.

Froog said...

Well, according to Wikipedia - the source of all my ignorance - Japanese does have tones.... though their use is much more limited than in Chinese. Korean sounds to me as if it does too, in a similarly vestigial way perhaps - it would be surprising if it didn't, given that it is so closely related to Chinese and Japanese. Vietnamese and Thai are the real tone-crazy languages. (Not sure about Cambodian, Lao, Burmese??)

But yes, that would at least partly explain why they are so much easier on the ear. I really like Japanese, for some reason.

I think I prefer Portuguese to Spanish, but I've never really heard the Brazilian variety (other than in films like 'City of God' and 'Pixote') - a pity, since Brazil is the country of my mother's birth (another little twist of exoticism in my makeup!). When were you there? Or do you have Brazilian friends in the States?

Anonymous said...

Paul is right when he says that chocloate chip does not translate into Chinese

Froog said...

A lot of things don't translate into Chinese. I was particularly depressed to learn that in the Chinese versions of the Winnie The Pooh books Tigger is simply lao hu.