Tuesday, January 22, 2013

On foreign languages and music.

I've managed to get Mike Doughty's cover of Ta Douleur stuck in my head.  (Yes, this is just a crappy Last.fm snippet, but it's not on YouTube and Grooveshark's being a dick.  If you want to listen to it, I suggest Spotify.)  I'm not sure why, but I've always been a sucker for music sung in French - from Edith Piaf to Les Wampas, songs manage to worm their way into my earballs even though I can barely pronounce the lyrics, much less understand them fully.  And yet I love listening to them.  But why is that?  Am I attracted to the lyrics because I can't understand them?  Does the loss of meaning translate to an increased appreciation for the mere sounds of the words?

I have a hard time thinking of English as a beautiful language.  Don't get me wrong, beautiful things can be said in English, but it's a matter of sentiment and meaning.  Because let's face it, our language is a battered mass of words stolen from anywhere we could find them, glued together by mispronunciation and self-contradictory syntax.  It's the Ke$ha of languages.  But then again, I was raised speaking it.  I know all its dirty little secrets and shitty origins.  Who's to say English isn't beautiful to non-native speakers?  K- and J-Pop certainly seem to be having fun with it.

Anyway.  I didn't really have a fully-formed thought going into this post; I was just struck by one of my more esoteric preferences and postulating on the root of it.  Maybe when we can't comprehend something in its entirety, we enjoy the aspects we do understand all the more.

Or maybe French is just one sexy-ass language.
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2 comments:

  1. Kelly LJanuary 22, 2013 at 11:33 PM

    Everything sounds better in French.

    I have a deep, abiding fondness for the English language, but I'll admit it's a crazy clusterfuck of letters and sounds. Some of the most poetic phrases are, I think, are those that have been translated from other languages. The literal interpretation always ends up worded in such a way that it actually sounds pretty good.

    I'd hate to have to learn it as a second language, though. I've been speaking it my entire life and there are STILL nuances that I am learning. Plus all the fake words that people make up. People being myself. I love making shit up. It's the best.

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    1. Warmonger SmurfJanuary 23, 2013 at 11:41 AM

      That's what I love most about English - our ability to make shit up on the fly and still have it make sense. We haven't had that kind of adaptability since Latin.

      But who's to say other languages don't do it, too? I have a friend raised in Moscow who swears native Russian is like a flooded labyrinth.

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