Unfortunate tattoo of the day:

Getting off the Red Line train at Argyle at 10:30 at night, I noticed a very large, mottled, frizzy-haired, unkempt, 40-somethingish woman using the phone in the station.

Tattooed on the side of her upper arm, in large-lettered, fancy black script: "Earl's Bitch-4-life."

You can't tell me that was any more attractive when she was younger. In fact, I can't think of a single stage of life where that tattoo would seem attractive or desireable… even to Earl.

I'm-a feelin': mildly skeeved out

So yesterday, Cass and I ditched work to catch a matinee of the operetta The Merry Widow, starring the ever-enchanting off_coloratura, who was splendid. The troupe had created its own English translation, full of gags and zingers. Most memorably, there's a running joke about how English is "the language of love," and a comment about what an unpleasant language German is, since "no matter what they say, they sound like they're declaring war."

This got Cass and me talking about what other languages sound like in general to non-speakers of that language. For instance, to me, German doesn't sound like a declaration of war so much as it sounds like a box full of angry cats thumping down some stairs: It's all hard, thunking stops and hissing. French sounds like flowing poetry; Italian sounds like an enthusiastic recipe. Spanish sounds like the bastard child of French and Italian, neither one thing nor the other, and kind of hanging incomplete between them. Mandarin sounds like a nasal, whiny song, and Cantonese sounds like someone plucking a giant rubber band. Japanese sounds like a lullaby performed by someone with the hiccups: a lot of gentle vowel crooning with stuttering consonants interrupting the flow.

The question we both ended up asking was, what does English sound like to non-native speakers? What's the sound effect of someone speaking the language?

I know a few of you aren't native English speakers, and some of you have ties to LJ or RL communities where English isn't the first language. What do you think? And would you mind asking your friends? Cass and I are both highly curious what a cross-section of people from different cultures think English sounds like just as a set of sounds. Danke.

I'm-a feelin': curious