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Post by onlymark on Sept 13, 2011 12:37:39 GMT
Have you ever listened to, what is to you, a foreign language and thought how fast they seem to speak it? Ever thought how some languages seem faster than others? I find listening to Spanish to be far faster than listening to German for example. It seems that it is true. It all depends on how much meaning is put into the syllables and, obviously, the amount of them. For example in English - "A single-syllable word like 'bliss', for example, is rich with meaning — signifying not ordinary happiness but a particularly serene and rapturous kind. The single-syllable word 'to' is less information-dense. And a single syllable like the short i sound, as in the word jubilee, has no independent meaning at all." So, if you have a language where there is not a lot of meaning in each syllable then you have to say a lot of them to convey the information. The converse is that if there can be a lot of information communicated then you don't have to say so many of them. Apparently Japanese conveys little information per syllable and thus sounds, and is, quite fast. More - www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html#ixzz1XS4YoYCV
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Post by bjd on Sept 13, 2011 14:27:07 GMT
I read that too. I had always thought that languages whose words ended in vowels like o (like Italian or Spanish) sounded fast because the words sort of rolled into each other. Unlike words with a lot of consonants at the end where youhave to pause between words.
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Post by rikita on Sept 14, 2011 6:35:36 GMT
so, in other words, what they are taking a lot of time in saying is: if a language who uses longer words and/or more words with purely grammatical meanings, you have to speak faster to bring across the same meaning in the same time, and that's why those languages sound faster?
(i don't know if i would call "to" less information-dense than "bliss" btw. - it's just that the meaning of "to" is grammatic rather than semantic, but it is also a lot more multifaceted... the meaning of "bliss" is basically very precise - somehow i find describing that as "rich in meaning" a bit confusing though)
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Post by Deleted on Sept 14, 2011 7:25:30 GMT
It's obvious that if a language doesn't have a word for snow and has to say 'water-that-has-become-solid-because-of-the-cold-and-falls-from-the-sky' it is going to complicate communication a bit.
Of course, people often take shortcuts from official words that are too long. The French 'pomme de terre' (apple of the earth) for potato is shortened in many uses to just 'pomme' (pommes sautées, pommes frites, pommes dauphine...) and then it was decided that 'pommes frites' was too long and it became 'frites.' By the same token, french fried potatoes became 'fries' in American English. This is fine except when people arrive from a different planet and have no context. "What the hell are fries?" The word makes absolutely no sense unless you have the elements to revert back to its original construction.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 14, 2011 19:00:29 GMT
But but but .........
I realize they're talking about averages, but people from different areas might speak the same language so differently that the speed is noted even by other native speakers.
Mark cites Spanish in the OP. A speaker from Madrid not only sounds impossibly fast to me, but Mexicans comment on that as well. Speakers from the NE and southern US think each other speak too fast and too slow, respectively.
And depending where you're from, you'll add or drop syllables in your native language.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think somebody got a research grant then came up with a conclusion that I reject.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 14, 2011 19:16:18 GMT
People always ask me if I am Belgian or Swiss because I speak more slowly than most French (and have a faint unusual accent). However, just last week someone who had lived in Longwy on the Lux-Belgo-French border for several years (but who was not from that area himself) was able to guess that my version of French was from Lorraine.
I do not have a good ear at all for the various French accents, but I can identify most Australian, New Zealand, South African, Scottish or Irish accents immediately -- and yet I know nothing about all of the regional English or even London accents, except for maybe the most caractural cockney accent like in My Fair Lady.
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Post by lagatta on Sept 15, 2011 0:13:26 GMT
Of course I am thought Belgian by Français de France, or else they do a caricatural "Québécois" accent badly, then sometimes wonder why the hell there are Italian and anglo influences in my speech. And then a Dutch guy correctly identified my English as Canadian.
Also, I dunno. Since I speak Spanish a lot better than I speak German (and Spanish is relatively close to Italian, which I speak fluently) to me Spanish sounds "slower" than the various strands of German. I can pick out Austrian/Bavarian from the more standard varieties, though it pretty much ends there, though obviously Swiss German is an entity unto itself, and has the same lilt as Swiss French and Swiss Italian.
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Post by rikita on Sept 16, 2011 19:59:04 GMT
yeah i was wondering a bit about how it is when people of the same language speak different speeds, too... but in that case i suppose they actually end up needing longer to express the same thing...
as for the difference, it doesn't need to be "water-that-has-become-solid-because-of-the-cold-and-falls-from-the-sky" - "nieve" is already longer than "snow", and even longer is "zapada" (romanian for snow)... and those are words for snow, not descriptions...
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Post by Deleted on Sept 28, 2011 18:42:10 GMT
Aren't Bavarians famous for speaking more slowly than northern Germans?
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Post by rikita on Sept 28, 2011 19:38:28 GMT
they speak funny... and i suppose more slowly... though i don't know them being famous for it... i thought the swiss are famous for speaking slowly?
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Post by ninchursanga on Sept 29, 2011 0:08:48 GMT
Interesting theory. It makes me wonder about Turkish speakers, who I always perceive as very fast speakers. In one way the theory makes sense but then it also doesn't cause the language is agglutinative and when pronounced fast a language learner misses out on the important affixes.
On the other side, a big part of understanding Turkish seems to be knowing the context.
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Post by rikita on Sept 29, 2011 20:22:00 GMT
ah that's like japanese... it seems to be all about context there...
btw, i always thought malayalam sounds really really fast. i was there for half a year, and still i couldn't make out the words i knew when someone was speaking...
hm now it doesn't sound that fast... maybe that clip is slow? or because most of them say only short phrases? still don't understand a word though. just some suffixes sometimes, and sometimes "ente" (my)...
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Post by hwinpp on Sept 30, 2011 4:46:23 GMT
I think Northern Germans speak the slowest form of German. They have a plodding, stubborn, somewhat dull reputation because of it and beers from the north occasionally make jokes about it in their advertising.
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