Today I am thoughtful. I just got out of meeting at our customer's office. And I swear that every surname on every office was a different first letter followed by "-uong". "Luong", "Chuong", "Duong". It's just kinda wierd.
Then I started thinking about how our names seem to people who speak different languages. I wonder if all our names sound the same. Since we're such a melting pot, maybe there's enough different nationalities that it's easy to differentiate, but that also means there's probably a lot of different pronunciations to remember.
Then I started thinking about the "character" of our language, and how it sounds to people of other native tongues. Y'know how you can tell if somebody is speaking Italian, or French, or German, or Japanese, or Chinese based on certain phonetic sounds that you tend to hear (or certain letter combinations you read in their writing)? I wonder what characteristics english has that make it recognizable and distinct. Like remember in that movie Friday where Smokey is mad at the hispanic guys, and he just yells some jibberish at them that sounds Spanish? I wonder what jibberish English sounds like.
I remember during my exchange year in Germany (almost a decade ago - Jesus Christ I'm old) I often asked people how my pronunciation sounded to them, and whether they could speak with my accent, or the typical American accent in German. And they could. And it was spot on. It's wierd to consider that in Germany there's an "American accent" or an "Italian accent" for their language.
I guess I just realized I can blog about useless shit like this. It doesn't have to be earth-shattering ruminations on philosophy or world politics. Besides, y'all are already used to those - thought I'd mix it up a bit.
Read this article
