Should Germany be forced to change its national anthem?

[Sikander]

The worst sounding languages to western ears are the tonal languages like (the many dialects of) Chinese, Vietnamese etc. This is because we are used to using the tones in our sentences to signal such things as whether or not the sentence is a question (rising tones) or a statement (even or falling tones), as well as signalling the emotional state of the speaker to an extent. Our next door neighbors when I was 6-8 spoke Cantonese at home, though we kids all spoke English when we played. I always thought their mother was mad at them, because her speech was regularly peppered with falling tones, which made her sound mad to an English speaker. Western languages are closely related enough that we don't tend to have this communication problem with each other.

As for Russian and German being militaristic gruff sounding languages, that's just an indication that you have heard more TV and Movie German and Russian than IRL. I grew up during the Cold War when the only people I heard speaking Russian were Brezhnev and Company. As for German, I probably saw 100 hours of Nazis on TV for every hour I heard real people speak the language. I learned Russian in the Army, and was truly surprised that it sounded so civilized (especially when that 6 foot tall blonde woman from Leningrad spoke it!), almost like Italian. I went to Germany for a while to work, and I found that not only was German not a completely gutteral and cruel language, but could sound very sweet indeed. I almost fell in love with the disembodied girl who robotically announced the stops on the streetcar.

[Boris Godunov]

As I said, depends on the speaker! What you hear in the movies is meant to be harsh sounding.

[markusf]

Just look at musical history to see german.

High german is brutal but its not as if anyone speaks it anymore..

[The Vagabond]

I hope we can all agree that the best sounding language is French. British English is close second. As for German, it sounds awful indeed.

[Adalbertus]

I hope we can all agree that the best sounding language is French.

No.

The German of the real-life nazi was meant to sound militaristic. And it does so, also for German ears.

[Bereta_Eder]

german does sound awful. it is a very heavy language. barbaric.
but it is only a matter of aesthetics

french sounds ok but it is too "toned down" if you know what i'm saying

my preffered foreign language though it' got to be italian i just love the way it sounds

it has a sort of playful tone in it, it is melodic to hear (although not as much as greek IMO) and i also had things going with italian girls but that IN NO WAY influenced my objective criteria.

[markusf]

Originally posted by The Vagabond
I hope we can all agree that the best sounding language is French. British English is close second. As for German, it sounds awful indeed.

English is the worst language, its just a mix of all others.
I think german is one of the best sounding ones, just look at clasical music. As for french it shares many words with german and is on the same language tree.

[Alexander's Horse]

I'm starting to feel bad about picking on the Germans now

Actually German is a very beautiful language and not harsh to the ear as it is spoken day to day.

Now Dutch, cripes, sounds like they all have bronchitus

[Roland]

Apart from the choaking nazis in movies, the way german is spoken varies a lot by region. In part it depends on the lingual substrate - for example, the devision line between celtic and raetian went straight through the state of Salzburg. Which makes the raetian side spoken harder, with sounds like "krr" (lot more exteme in the Tyrol), while on the celtic side p=b, d=t, k=g etc.

[The Mad Monk]

Back to the topic for a second:

Protestant churches in the United States have a hymn using the same tune as Deutchland Uber Alles. The first line is, "Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion city of our God".

[Victor Galis]

Now Dutch, cripes, sounds like they all have bronchitus

-That's because Dutch is more of a throat condition than a language.

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
I'm starting to feel bad about picking on the Germans now

Don´t worry, it´s very entertaining