>> For me, the most baffling thing was hearing little kids uttering 
>> complex-sounding French sentences. Now, logically, this isn't 
>> surprising. They're probably from France! What else would they be 
>> speaking? And yet, it still amazed and astonished me every time... 
>> French words seem to have such a complicated structure. And yet these 
>> kids toss it around as if it's *easy*. Which, when you're a French 
>> person, it probably is.
> 
> That's completely normal. I used to think the same seeing little kids 
> speaking English.

I think the little kids speaking German amaze me more though...

[Not many of those where I was - but I saw one in the Science Museum in 
London one time...]

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Invisible wrote:
> I think the little kids speaking German amaze me more though...
> 
> [Not many of those where I was - but I saw one in the Science Museum in 
> London one time...]

You make it sound like he was an exhibit!

:)

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>> I think the little kids speaking German amaze me more though...
>>
>> [Not many of those where I was - but I saw one in the Science Museum 
>> in London one time...]
> 
> You make it sound like he was an exhibit!
> 
> :)

._.

WAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

No no, him and his dad were walking past the Cray II exhibit. As is 
typical in England, dad was saying nothing and his son wouldn't shut the 
hell up...

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47a2f325$1@news.povray.org...

> To speak French, you have to actually speak in a
> French accent, or nobody knows what you're saying. Which actually makes
> sense, really...

Try Thai. It's a tonal language. The same sounding word has different
meanings if you say it with a high pitch, medium pitch, low pitch, rising or
falling.

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Gail Shaw wrote:

> Try Thai. It's a tonal language. The same sounding word has different
> meanings if you say it with a high pitch, medium pitch, low pitch, rising or
> falling.

...!!! o_O

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>>> You know, it's probably a *good* thing that I don't know how to say
>>> "you have a really nice arse" in French. Because that waitress would
>>> have probably slapped me for it.
>>
>> OK so I won't translate that :-D
> 
> OMG, I just had a very silly idea... Google Translate. 0;-)
> 
> (From the site that brought us "leave the impact price-increase your 
> body"...)

Hmm. I've just spent several hours translating every naughty phrase I 
can think of from English to French. Damn, this has got to the the 
silliest thing I've done in a long, *long* time... ;-)

Je me demande, cela fait un sens?

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47a3338f$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw wrote:
>
>> Try Thai. It's a tonal language. The same sounding word has different
>> meanings if you say it with a high pitch, medium pitch, low pitch, rising 
>> or
>> falling.
>
> ...!!! o_O

Or try vietnamese. Not only it's tonal (6 tones) but each vowel has several 
variants ("accents"). Add to this that the language is pretty much 
monosyllabic and the way it's pronounced varies wildly between regions.

One should better learn it as a kid: past a certain age it becomes difficult 
to tell apart some of the sounds and only very gifted foreigners can 
actually become fluent enough so that "Nice to meet you" doesn't sound like 
"Your mother's nipples smell like rotten catfish" to vietnamese ears.

OTOH the language is pretty straightforward and the grammar itself is simple 
compared to European languages.

G.


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Gilles Tran wrote:

> Or try vietnamese. Not only it's tonal (6 tones) but each vowel has several 
> variants ("accents"). Add to this that the language is pretty much 
> monosyllabic and the way it's pronounced varies wildly between regions.
> 
> One should better learn it as a kid: past a certain age it becomes difficult 
> to tell apart some of the sounds and only very gifted foreigners can 
> actually become fluent enough so that "Nice to meet you" doesn't sound like 
> "Your mother's nipples smell like rotten catfish" to vietnamese ears.

Actually, I was just thinking... What if you had some brain disorder 
that made all your words come out in the same flat tone? Everybody would 
think you're insulting them of something... heh!

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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47a33b36@news.povray.org...
> Actually, I was just thinking... What if you had some brain disorder that 
> made all your words come out in the same flat tone? Everybody would think 
> you're insulting them of something... heh!

I've been told that there's a village somewhere in the Center where people 
do talk "like foreigners", i.e. without any tone. Other Vietnamese find this 
comedy gold.
In any case, I guess that the tone differences are sometimes so subtle 
anyway (particularly given the Vietnamese habit of shouting to match the 
high ambient noise) that people are able to infer what others actually say 
from the context alone.

G.

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47a3338f$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw wrote:
>
> > Try Thai. It's a tonal language. The same sounding word has different
> > meanings if you say it with a high pitch, medium pitch, low pitch,
rising or
> > falling.
>
> ...!!! o_O

Apparently there's one combination of sounds that has meaning in all 5
tones, and you can use those 5 words to make a sentence. However, when the
tour guid sia that sentance, t sounded to me like the same word 5 times. I
could not hear any difference.

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