… a common error of mine.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

(though most of their stuff is still on the old system – link on that page.

By the way, there’s just been a paper given at the annual British Psychological Society conference which looked at how subjects judged attractiveness and intelligence of people whose photographs they were viewing. While looking at the pictures, some had speech in RP English, Yorkshire English or Birmingham English played to them while others heard no speech. There was no significant effect in attractiveness ratings, but Yorkshire came out top for intelligence, followed by RP, followed by silence, followed by Birmingham.

Now, we might say that showing people photographs of models is a sure fire way to swamp anything else which might be influencing attractiveness judgements, but the intelligence rating results are interesting. The authors offer a social explanation for the rise in status of Yorkshire compared to previous studies, but poor old Birmingham is bottom again.

And for the benefit of those who don’t know my background (thanks for the question, HelenHaricot) — now, incidentally, I’d say “haricot” has only 2 consonants, though we could argue that it has 2 plus two sort of half consonants at each edge of the word — anyway, I’m not from Birmingham, as it happens (though my brother-in-law is). I’m from the north-east of England originally but I’ve lived for lengthy periods on Merseyside and in York. I’m currently commuting weekly from York to north Wales, where I am a lecturer in Linguistics at Bangor University.

In French, every consonant at the end of a word disappears e.g. carnet, but this doesn’t happen in German. This means there would need to be more / harder consonants in the earlier parts of French words than in German words to even be equal overall, let alone stronger.

They use basically the same alphabet (ignoring accents), so French has no extra supply of consonant-producing characters. There are consonants in French that are or can be softer than in German e.g. c is always (AFAIK) a plosive in German, but in French can be a fricative e.g. garçon. In the French wordbillet the l acts like y in English, but German it always (again, AFAIK) acts like the English l which is a bit harder for some hand-waving definition of harder.

I know this is anecdotal and incomplete, but it’s things like this that made me state my rather bold claim earlier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6pTKQkBuYY

(The voices are from a genuine course on phonetics – indeed I was sitting next to the owner of the male voice at a conference last week!).

Delattre, P. (1965) Comparing the phonetic features of English, German, Spanish and French. page 95

It’s old stuff, and arguable in its accuracy (and relies on the existence of something called a “phoneme”, also arguable). Plus we need to know what’s meant by “hard” consonants. In “hard g”, etc, it seems to mean “plosive”, though “hard” and “soft” sometimes seem to be used for voiceless and voiced. (Hard and soft have a different, and irrelevant, meaning in Slavic linguistics).

Anyhow, Delattre’s table suggests French has 34.6% plosives while German has 29.66%. If we look only at voiceless plosives, French has 23.98%, while German has 14.8%. Mind you, if we look at voiceless sounds more generally, French has 36.28% and German has 37.07%.

I would respectfully suggest that the burden of proof rests with those who would contend that German has more hard consonants than French. The French soppy song index might be more to do with the fact that French has Sacha Distel (one voiceless plosive). while German has Kraftwerk (3 voiceless plosives).

Good grief, I really am going mad now. Sorry, Bob – I don’t mean to get at you, just to comment that many linguistic myths are a bit shaky when challenged by reality (for further examples see snow, Eskimos, words for).

Welsh, by the way, is clearly the language of the heavens and the only true medium for the singing of hymns…

But there are differences between languages – try doing heavy rock in German (easy – lots of lovely hard consonants) and in French (harder), soppy love songs in French (easy) and in German (harder). One’s not better than the other, they’re just different.

[RANT WARNING]

So much of our attitude to the way other languages do things is nostalgia/prejudice/some other more neutral word. I remember being amazed at how Spanish put together a compound like “limpiaparabrisas” which is literally something like [it cleans [it stops breezes]]. Then it dawned on me that there was absolutely no difference from its English equivalent: windscreen wiper. It wipes the thing which screens us from the wind.

The clue in the above passage is the reference to communist border guards (which I’m guessing is triggered because the German spelling includes what looks like the English word “halt”). It’s just like our attitude to accents of English – they’re nothing at all to do with the sound and everything to do with social prejudice. Studies of speakers of British English tend to put urban varieties low down on the scale of preference (with Birmingham usually bottom) but speakers of varieties of English from other countries (and speakers of other languages) tend not to have such clear-cut views. It’s not about the way people from Birmingham speak; it’s about what we think of Birmingham.

[END RANT]

Anyhow, that’s quite enough thinking about language for one day – got to get back to the day job.

Love,
BW