Like Weeks, I too have an inferiority complex about the sound of spoken English, as divorced from its meaning. Russian, Korean, Nguni, Dakota, Arabic, Greek, and Italian - to name just a few - are easier on the ears, for me. I think the incomparable capacity for richness and subtlety in English makes up for its (to me) auditory ungainliness, though.
The most sensual and emotionally expressive language that I like to hear (especially in song) and speak is Portuguese. I guess French is close after that… Of the former, I find that the words just flow off of my tongue after being savored in the mouth, and the New World version is a bit more open than the Old. I know that sounds weird, but Brazilian Portuguese has a very nice balance of open vowels and sibilant consonants. Italian has more of the open vowels with some percussive consonants. Spanish can sound prettier than Italian I think, but Portuguese seems to have all of the character of those two with a kind of French mouth added. Yeah, I know, weird and Anglo-centric impressions.
I’m not as good at speaking the latter (French), but its a beautiful language to listen to.
I spent a few months in India and do remember the there was a musical quality to much of what I heard, but not as sing-songy to my ears as Far Eastern tongues. Hindustani certainly lends itself to song, as the movies attest.
And yeah, English at it’s best is usually from a Brit’s mouth, tis true. It’s a cheap way to impress Americans. 
And they are overly impressed wi’ it. Chick magnet.
As a creative writing major who has taken courses in a few foreign languages (especially French, which is one of the most sterile and tightly-controlled languages I’ve seen), I am glad I am a native English speaker.
The main problem I have with people who speak English (American English, anyway) is everyone is so lazy with pronunciation. If you ever watch a French person speak, you can see how much their mouth works. Every syllable has a different shape, and they don’t half-form them. And if you hear a native French speaker who is very good at English, they form every syllable very precisely. Americans, on the other hand, do everything they can to avoid changing the shape of their mouth. I had a native French speaker tell me once that she can tell when Americans speak French because they all sound like they have gum in their mouth.
As far as vocabulary, though, the more the merrier. That’s just one more word I can put in a poem. 
As to Nano’s note, I had a strange moment regarding the sound of English when I visited England way back in 85.
To my American ears, English being spoken by Brits sounds “halfway” to the way spoken German sounds. I know I have it wrong, that it’s my way of speaking that is the departure, but I could really hear the Anglo-Saxon in the many accents I heard there. And, if we don’t think that English is beautiful, I bet we don’t think German sounds beautiful either. In this vein, Brit English sounds like smoothed-out German to my ears.
I once spent a few hours with a couple from Frisia and to me, that SEEMED to be the core sound of Brit English.. I found their accents fascinating.
Despite the various linguistic explanations of how English came to America, I still can’t figure out exactly how American English ended up sounding compared to how it started. You can poke around with descriptions of an American “character” and such, but it’s really vague to me (the process). I would romantically postulate that there is an element of Native American in the process, but I don’t know if the population numbers and actual historical mingling would support it.
I always thought Portuguese sounded a bit too nasal for my tastes really.
English can be a beautiful language though. It really can. First step in that direction is to have a beautiful voice though.
What struck me as a lovely language when I heard it was Cymru (Welsh). Now granted, I have only heard it sung, never spoken, and the voice of the singer may have had an influence on that.
Does the use of specific sounds used to speak a language have any reflection on the culture (a cultural viewpoint) that is using the language?
We so often do!
Somewhere I came across the info that Frisian is the most closely related to Old English.
Here’s an example gleaned from the web:
Thet thredde bod: fira thene sunnandei en there helche degan.
[“the third commandment: honour Sunday and the holy days”]
Seems very much like Old English, I’d say. Edit: the above was apparently Old Frisian. Saw some modern Frisian, a dialect called Sealtersk, I believe, and it seems to more resemble Dutch by comparison.
Dude, you need to hang out with some French musicians after their last set for the night.
I tend not to use a lot of doric or other colloquialisms anyway so that helps, but when I do slip into it he really struggles.
When he puts on a newfie accent it just sounds like he’s doing a bad irish impression (which he does a lot anyway as he lived there for 10 years before coming here). Apparently where he’s from is closer to Ireland than Toronto.
Couldn’t agree more, old fruit! The English upper classes were said to talk as if they had a plum in their mouth - hence the term “plummy accents”. We touched on this before. But all English speakers are casual in their pronunciation, and equally important, casual as to their listening. It explains why English is so rich in puns: it wouldn’t be a quarter as rich if the pronunciation was precise. So many jokes depend on one word being misinterpreted as another. It also serves as an explanation for why English speakers seem to come up with more inventions than speakers of other languages. It’s a habitual vagueness of mind and vagueness of approach, demanded by the language, carried forward into problem-solving.
I may be a fruit, but I am not old.
Apologies - it was the influence of the plums. But also I’m reading a Wodehouse Omnibus: “Uncle Fred”. Mannered writing tends to colour my expression. Amusing with Wodehouse, bearable under Jane Austen, painful under Shakespeare, and plain offensive under Henry James.
Here’s my favourite “Uncle Fred” passage so far. Lord Ickenham (Uncle Fred) speaks:
“It is so often the way. We start out in life with more pimples than we know what to do with, and in the careless arrogance of youth think they are going to last for ever. But comes a day when we find that we are down to our last half-dozen. And then those go. There is a lesson in this for all of us.”
I found this very readable a couple of years ago. It’s actually the companion book to a PBS series.
http://tinyurl.com/32zxev
As in most human pursuits, the quest for purity is generally the sign of some psychological malfunction.
~~
The core of english–the 100 or so words you use most–have remained remarkably stable for the entire time that english has been a written language.
English is a language which appropriates nouns and (some) verbs with abandon but hasn’t added a preposition or conjunction in centuries.
SO no matter what the language the noun was born in, if you’re ordering it about using english prepositions, you’re speaking english.
English speaking people make vowels with their tongue. French speaking people make vowels with their lips. This is the secret to faking a good french accent.
English is great because it has so many words (partly because it has borrowed so widely from other languages). This huge vocabulary makes it incredibly expressive and also helps to explain why it has become the international language in legal and political circles (you can make it say anything).
But for sensuality and emotion, I don’t think you can beat Italian. I tried learning some from a software package, even describing the taking out of rubbish sounds cool in Italian! Italians argue better than any one else I’ve heard, they sound like they’re singing. Its the only language to rival English for singing as well - and if you don’t agree itsa da concrete shoes for you!
Welsh on the other hand, my mother tongue (not really, my mother can’t speak it) sounds like a language created by people with a speech defect. Don’t get me wrong,I love my country, I just wish we spoke Italian.
Afraid I have to agree.
Congrats, dapray sktadeemec shponsk tapa bokurstay lalexagon!
(D’après ce que tu as dit, mec, je pense que tu n’as pas beaucoup resté là à l’Hexagone!)
Or Spanglish.
Man, the first time I heard Fado, in a little restaurant in Lisbon, I couldn’t imagine why opera composers felt that Italian was the most expressive language. Portuguese is really a lovely language.
If he’s really Newfy, get him to give you a dose of outport. Yes, a Newfy sounds close to a southern Irish accent at times, but try and imagine an Irish accent with all the consonants removed. Its almost Glaswegian! 
djm
Years back I read somewhere that by the year 2010 there would be more Spanish speaking people in the USA than English.
Then the internet hit.