The most Beautiful Language?

[wit>trope]

How many language does one know? and what percentage of possible languages does that represent? How do you think one is qualified to commend as which is the most beautiful of the bunch without knowing even a fraction of all possible languages?

You don't need to know every single language or know every single language well. You can use a process of common sense elimination to determine the winner.

For example, within Indo-European languages, there's different subfamilies like the Romance family, Germanic family, etc. You can take a sample of the Germanic family -- say a sample of two, English and German -- and compare that with a sample from the Romance family -- say French and Italian -- and see that French and Italian are like 10 times more beautiful and conclude that probably the winner is not to be found in the Germanic family. You can use the same process to eliminate families and superfamilies too. Also you can eliminate lots of languages based on certain features -- the German "ch" makes it ugly and even many Germans acknowledge that German is not the most beautiful language (they say though that German makes up for this with great literature or whatever), the click sound in some primitive languages eliminates them (if you've heard it you know what I'm talking about ... it may sound novel at first, but it's certainly not beautiful or sublime).

I think clearly the most beautiful language is within the Ural-Altaic superfamily. Within that, it's probably within the Indo-European family and within that it's probably within the Romance family. There's a reason why 99+% of operas are written in Romance languages.

 

[wit>trope]

You don't need to know a language to think it is beautiful or not.

Actually, SOMETIMES, you don't need to know a language in order to say it's not the most beautiful, but SOMETIMES you do because the MEANING of words in a language often CONTRIBUTE to the beauty of a language. Shakespeare is beautiful even without knowing the meaning of any word but once you know the meanings it's even MORE beautiful.

 

[stormbind]

Well spoken standard English is devoid of harsh rasping cackles, sloppy clicks, slurred dribbles, or nasal reverb.

I thus vote English the nicest language.

Although, a stinking drunk with bad teeth will splatter one's face with spittle when they try to pronounce words containing an s, so there is definitely room for improvement.

 

[stormbind]

Actually, SOMETIMES, you don't need to know a language in order to say it's not the most beautiful, but SOMETIMES you do because the MEANING of words in a language often CONTRIBUTE to the beauty of a language. Shakespeare is beautiful even without knowing the meaning of any word but once you know the meanings it's even MORE beautiful.

As in, where some scholars believe Hamlet means brothel instead of abbey when saying "Get thyself to a nunnery!" ?

 

[luiz]

I've always liked the sound of Latin.

 

[Tank_Guy#3]

American English and the worst being the Oriental languages (Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Hmong, etc.)

 

[zjl56]

Latin being the best and English being somewhere in the middle.

 

[tossi]

Latin??? Oh my god...

---

favorite language? Espanol! I realy like that language. So fast and lively... Russian is also cool, but defenietly not nice or cute or something. I think its a very angry language where every second word sounds like a swear-word.

 

[Oruc]

english, welsh is the worst

 

[Communisto]

I love you too, emu

 

[Oruc]

I love you too, emu

huh? i didnt even mention you anywhere

 

[Gainy]

I could be wrong*, but I don't believe there is such a language as 'Welsh'
There is Gay-lic, spoken in Eire
There is Gah-lic, spoken in Wales/Scotland
Both written Gaelic, and both sound silly (to me)

French sounds nice

* and it appears I am wrong (after checking wikipedia)

 

[Oruc]

you sure? i was watching a special channel for welsh language speakers awhile ago, it could have been gaelic but i was sure it was welsh

 

[Gainy]

Well no, i'm not sure. That's why I said "I could be wrong"

 

[vbraun]

Latin.

xcl

 

[samildanach]

English is the only language I speak and that is mangled by my Scottish accent . I think French sounds pretty but I don't understand it.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Mandarin Chinese. It's a language with heavy emphasis on tones (absolutely essential if you want to be understood), so it sounds fairly musical. And a long and ancient history (written Chinese that is), so it's been polished to a high degree.

Japanese is great too - with it complex and extreme emphasis on politeness and social harmony.

 

[gmaharriet]

I enjoy listening to the languages with heavily rolled "r"s. Off the top of my head that would include Russian, Spanish and the Scottish burr, but I'm sure there are many others. I just like the sound which, BTW, I am completely unable to do myself (and I've spent many years trying).

 

[Japanrocks12]

Any North Indian language is good sounding. I guess the languages themselves have been augmented because they've been used repeatedly for cinemas (mostly in the sense of love BTW) and songs.

 

[Hakim]

Italian, of course.