do Americans have the worse accents when speaking Latin?

Maybe it's the phenomenon known as


or maybe it really is the case that an american accent objectively does not fit well with spoken latin. Having a master's in philosophy I cannot help explain what I mean by objective. What I mean by objective is that if you're a human and you experience sound x and if sound x is objectively ugly then it is highly likely that you will dislike sound x. Back to my point, there is strong though not universal agreement that Italian is the most beautiful sounding language so it's quite possible that there is something objectively beautiful about Italian. Whereas even the greatest German writer, Goethe, railed against the barbaric sound of his own language. And I've heard plenty of other Germans admit that their language doesn't sound all that fine. So my point is that it is quite possible that there is something objectively jarring about listening to Americans speak Latin. I've heard a ton of spoken Latin, probably an average of 30 minutes per day over an 8 month period. I can tolerate speakers from all over the world, but when I hear Americans speak Latin I just truly cringe and Brits are only just a little bit better. Does anyone also feel this way or is it that because I'm an American myself I'm experiencing some form of voice confrontation.

In any case, I make a lot of recordings of spoken Latin and I've almost gotten rid of all the Americanness in my voice such that you can't really tell what nationality I am, I hope, but there are still a few things I have trouble with, most notably the way Americans pronounce vowels followed by 'm' or 'n' or 'l'. But there is still another problem, by trying to expel the Americanness from my voice I tend to sound like an old man.
 

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
I'm going to guess that since you're American, when you hear an American pronounce Latin, it sounds too similar to your own speech and therefore not foreign enough. When I hear Americans mispronounce French it makes me cringe more than if I hear a German or Russian mispronounce it, for example.

I don't think it's possible to say one language is objectively beautiful and another isn't. It's more likely entirely subjective and has to do with your native language and how you perceive the sounds of another. Many people think Arabic sounds harsh and guttural, but I find it quite attractive, especially formal Arabic (or Najdi Arabic, but that's personal bias). We also absorb cultural norms about what's beautiful and tend to find things beautiful that we are taught are beautiful.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Some sort of "voice confrontation" very possibly plays a role in what you experience, Kyle. I also agree with Clemens that you can't really call a language "objectively beautiful" or "objectively ugly". Yet I believe you can say that native speakers of language A tend to sound objectively worse than others when speaking language B—if by "sounding worse" we mean, basically, mispronouncing things more strikingly. Perhaps English speakers (both American and British, but maybe Americans even more so) are among the people who'll tend to mispronounce Latin in some of the worst ways because English and Latin phonetics are so different, especially when it comes to vowels.

By the way, I love the sound of both German and Arabic. They do sound "harsh and guttural", but that's probably part of why I like them, in fact. They sound harsh and guttural in a pleasant way, somehow.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Re "voice confrontation": I, a native French speaker, cringe rather hard when I hear things like this. Will native English speakers have a similar reaction, or is it just all "voice confrontation"?

 
 

cinefactus

Censor

  • Censor

  • Patronus

Location:
litore aureo
I definitely note this phenomenon with Americans speaking foreign languages. The same with English. I wonder if it is a product of growing up in a monolingual environment.
 
 

cinefactus

Censor

  • Censor

  • Patronus

Location:
litore aureo
The other thing I notice on youtube videos is speaking pace. For Australian speakers I normally listen on 1.25 or 1.5 x speed. British at 1.5x and Americans at 2x. When I listen to German news they speak very quickly, likewise in Chinese.
 
Pacifica, I think your post sort of does provide evidence that what is possibly going on is probably a form of voice confrontation. I don't cringe when I hear French speaking English so long as the obeying all the grammar rules and speaking fluently. Though, admittedly, that speaker you just mentioned was worse than usual. As an anglophone we hear so many non-native speakers speak our language that we get used to it from an early age. I think a minor foreign accent in no way inhibits the perception of a speaker as intelligent in the anglophone world.
 
Cinefactus, since you're from the Gold Coast (I'm guessing in Australia rather than Africa) do you mean that Americans speaking a foreign language are often more clumsy than, say, Brits or Australians or do you mean all anglophone speakers?
 
 

Dantius

Homo Sapiens

  • Civis Illustris

Location:
in orbe lacteo
Whereas even the greatest German writer, Goethe, railed against the barbaric sound of his own language.
Quintilian on the sounds of Latin compared to Greek:

Namque est [lingua Latina] ipsis statim sonis durior, quando et iucundissimas ex Graecis litteras non habemus (vocalem alteram, alteram consonantem, quibus nullae apud eos dulcius spirant: quas mutuari solemus quotiens illorum nominibus utimur; quod cum contingit, nescio quo modo velut hilarior protinus renidet oratio, ut in "Zephyris" et "Zopyris": quae si nostris litteris scribantur, surdum quiddam et barbarum efficient) et velut in locum earum succedunt tristes et horridae, quibus Graecia caret. Nam et illa quae est sexta nostrarum paene non humana voce, vel omnino non voce potius, inter discrimina dentium efflanda est: quae etiam cum vocalem proxima accipit quassa quodam modo, utique quotiens aliquam consonantium frangit, ut in hoc ipso "frangit", multo fit horridior; Aeolicae quoque litterae, qua "servum" "cervum"que dicimus, etiam si forma a nobis repudiata est, vis tamen nos ipsa persequitur. duras et illa syllabas facit quae ad coniungendas demum subiectas sibi vocalis est utilis, alias supervacua: "equos" hac et "aequum" scribimus, cum etiam ipsae hae vocales duae efficiant sonum qualis apud Graecos nullus est ideoque scribi illorum litteris non potest. Quid quod pleraque nos illa quasi mugiente littera cludimus, in quam nullum Graece verbum cadit? At illi ny iucundam et in fine praecipue quasi tinnientem illius loco ponunt, quae est apud nos rarissima in clausulis. Quid quod syllabae nostrae in b litteram et d innituntur adeo aspere ut plerique non antiquissimorum quidem sed tamen veterum mollire temptaverint, non solum "aversa" pro "abversis" dicendo, sed et in praepositione b litterae absonam et ipsam s subiciendo? Sed accentus quoque cum rigore quodam, tum similitudine ipsa minus suaves habemus, quia ultima syllaba nec acuta umquam excitatur nec flexa circumducitur, sed in gravem vel duas gravis cadit semper. Itaque tanto est sermo Graecus Latino iucundior ut nostri poetae, quotiens dulce carmen esse voluerunt, illorum id nominibus exornent.
(For one thing, it is harsher in its actual sounds, because we lack the two most pleasing of the Greek letters, one vowel and one consonant, the sweetest sounds in their language. We borrow these when we use Greek words, and when this happens, the language at once seems to brighten up and smile, as in words like zephyrus and zopyrus. If these words are written in our letters, they produce only a dull barbarous sound. In the places of these two letters, we have instead two grim and uncouth ones, which Greek lacks. The sixth letter of our alphabet has to be blown out through the teeth, and the voice is hardly human, or rather not a voice at all. Even when it is followed by a vowel, it is somehow jagged, and when it fractures (frangit) a consonant, as it does in the word frangit itself, it is more uncouth still. As for the Aeolic letter [digamma], the sound of which we have in servum and cervum, we have rejected its written form, but its force is still with us. Syllables are made harsh also by the letter which is useful only for linking vowels following it, but otherwise superfluous: we use it to write equos and aequum, and these two vowels then produce a sound which does not exist in Greek and cannot be written in Greek letters. Again, we often end words with the “mooing” letter, with which no Greek word ends. In its place they put the pleasing letter nu, which makes a ringing sound, especially at the end of a word, and which is very rare in this position in our language. Again, our syllables based on b and d produce such a harsh effect that many older writers (though not the very oldest) have tried to soften it not only by saying aversa for abversa, but by adding the equally discordant letter s to the b of the preposition ab. Our accentuation also is less attractive, on account both of its rigidity and of its very regularity, because the last syllable is never acute or circumflex, but words always end with one or two grave accents. Greek is therefore so much more agreeable than Latin that our poets adorn their verse with Greek names whenever they have wanted to achieve a dulcet effect.)
 
 

Dantius

Homo Sapiens

  • Civis Illustris

Location:
in orbe lacteo
For what it's worth, I like the sound of Latin better than that of Greek. So I think it's hard to say that there's really any way to objectively measure the quality of different languages' sounds.
 
Many people think Arabic sounds harsh and guttural, but I find it quite attractive, especially formal Arabic (or Najdi Arabic, but that's personal bias). We also absorb cultural norms about what's beautiful and tend to find things beautiful that we are taught are beautiful.
I speak Jordanian Arabic fluently so I'm going to go off on a tangant here. I wouldn't say that Fusha is more objectively beautiful than the Arabic dialects, Jordanian being the only one that I'm familiar with. Rather I think the dialects are so rarely spoken in formal or official settings that there isn't an opportunity to hear them spoken by speakers who are careful with their words.
 

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
I speak Jordanian Arabic fluently so I'm going to go off on a tangant here. I wouldn't say that Fusha is more objectively beautiful than the Arabic dialects, Jordanian being the only one that I'm familiar with. Rather I think the dialects are so rarely spoken in formal or official settings that there isn't an opportunity to hear them spoken by speakers who are careful with their words.
Again, I don't think there's anything objective about beauty. I lived in Saudi Arabia seven years, by the way, and I had an opportunity to hear many dialects of Arabic as well as fusha every day. My opinion is just that, an opinion, and not objective, which I think is impossible.
 
 

cinefactus

Censor

  • Censor

  • Patronus

Location:
litore aureo
Cinefactus, since you're from the Gold Coast (I'm guessing in Australia rather than Africa) do you mean that Americans speaking a foreign language are often more clumsy than, say, Brits or Australians or do you mean all anglophone speakers?
LOL. I am not sure I know enough Australian anglophones who speak a second language ;)

seriously though, when I was in Hong Kong the Australians I knew learned Cantonese and were fairly good at it. My daughter on the other hand has an overpowering Australian accent in Cantonese and to a lesser extent in Italian.
 
 

cinefactus

Censor

  • Censor

  • Patronus

Location:
litore aureo
It is funny when people come to the forum and post about what a beautiful language Latin is (although they have never learned it). To me it just sounds like Latin.
 
 

cinefactus

Censor

  • Censor

  • Patronus

Location:
litore aureo
FWIW, if someone had asked me about Charles Michel, I would have said his English was excellent. Most people I know find a French accent appealing anyway.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
FWIW, if someone had asked me about Charles Michel, I would have said his English was excellent.
Really? Maybe it's excellent for grammar and stuff (though he's probably reading from a prompter in that video) but the pronunciation (which was the point here) leaves somewhat to be desired in my view. But well, maybe I'm being harsher for the reasons previously mentioned.
 
Last edited:
 

cinefactus

Censor

  • Censor

  • Patronus

Location:
litore aureo
But well, maybe I'm being harsher for the reasons previously mentioned.
I think so. I have the same reaction when I hear Australians speaking English ;)
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
I too have a French accent when I speak English but (unless I'm deluded) I don't think it's quite as strong as Michel's. At least I manage the "th" sounds, which he doesn't seem to.
 
 

cinefactus

Censor

  • Censor

  • Patronus

Location:
litore aureo
Are you bothered by the Australian English accent while having that accent yourself?
Yes :hysteric: If you go to County Cork you won't here many th sounds either ;)

I think your accent, and the accent of the speaker are both quite pleasant. From what I can recall your accent is not strong, just enough to know you speak French.
 
Top