What do you prefer/like more Romance languages or Germanic languages?

[Barnabas]

The Germanic Languages are

English



German



Dutch



And swede/danish/norwegian/icelandic






The Romance languages are

French



Spanish




Italian






Portuguese (couldnt think of anything portuguese most people would recognize, had to pick something from brazil)





What do you prefer/like more? romance or germanic languages?


(and please, romanians, afrikaans etc, dont feel offended, I only picked the biggest langauges)[IMG]

[Odin]

Italian:



BTW, you could of gotten a better pic of Bjork.

[Nubclear]

Germanic languages

[Dis]

I only speak one language. So I guess I'll have to go with the one I speak.

Tried learning spanish in school. 3 years, and I know nada.

So the poll question is kind of weird. Of course I'm going to go with my native language. Even though it is more difficult and not as easy on the ears as spanish or french.

And what about chinese, japanese, indian, or arabic? I tried to have someone explain arabic to me. I was lost. I can't figure out their alphabet.

I voted for romantic languages, and I speak the language in which I'm writing in.

[Nubclear]

Of course I'm going to go with my native language.

I voted for romantic languages,

English is kind of hot

[Dis]

yeah that was before I noticed he included special poll options just for me. How thoughtful.

[snoopy369]

Germanic/Germanic. French in theory sounds good, but the way frenchmen speak it is sort of meh. Too fast, and too ... smug.

Germanic languages are much more direct and to the point, and don't have a lot of attitude. The Future of Language

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I prefer hearing romance languages spoken, but am the kind of language learner who would prefer learning Germanic languages (except English, which is the worst of both worlds: as ugly as a Germanic language, and as irregular as a Romance language; thank God I'm a native speaker, because I could never learn it).

[Geronimo]

To my woefully untrained ears the romance languages do seem to have a strong superficial resemblence. On the other hand I'm amazed that english is supposed to be related to the other germanic languages in the same manner that the romance languages are related to each other.

German, Scandinavian languages, and dutch all sound pretty much as foreign to my ears as the romance languages while sounding a great deal more like one another than the romance languages do.

So I'd like to ask those non native english speakers to verify, does spoken english really sound like it belongs with the germanic group? Is the connection that obvious?

[C0ckney]

as i only speak english, i'll have to go with that.

although i love hearing spanish being spoken, mostly thanks to a girl a few years ago.

[Monk]

Originally posted by Geronimo
So I'd like to ask those non native english speakers to verify, does spoken english really sound like it belongs with the germanic group? Is the connection that obvious?

I would think so, although at this point I'm so familiar with English that it's hard to think of it as having any particular 'sound' to it anymore. If you think of it as a scale though, I'll agree that Scandinavian is closer to German than English.

[Adalbertus]

Germanic/indecisive
... or better, decisive on deeper levels. And always with singing in mind.

Standard German:
Perhaps too familiar to me in friendly and bad words. It is well suitable for singing because all except one (schwa) vowels are quite clear in their sound. In cases where you have to pronounce four consonants between a quaver and a semiquaver I think the problem is the composer (Bach: Schwingt freudig ...)

Kölsch (dialect/beer of Cologne):
Of course it is also feeling home, but softening of many consonants and the "Rhenish singsong" makes it even better for singing.

Of the other German dialects I like Plattdeutsch, the "superdialect" of most of northern Germany, and Saxonian ei verbibbsch!

Swiss German sounds like a serious throat illness, and the dialect of Berlin and surrounding is a bit like Kölsch after being chopped into pieces.

For some reasons unknown to me I like Dutch. I like British English, which is a odd language for an odd people. And quite suitable for singing, too.

I dislike American English, mainly because of the "r" which seems to dominate the overall sound of the language, and because it seems that all vowels converge to what is German ä. The first language which might be spoken with one single sound at all.

Danish, Swedish, Norwegian:
In a Choir we started to sing a piece in Hungarian. Someone: "Hungarian sounds like Danish". Someone else: "Any unknown language sounds like Danish". How true!

French:
The language of optimisation: First, they opimised consonants away, now the vowels. I wonder when the language will be optimised to silence. Meanwhile they do with the second worst r of all languages I know, and which they unfortunately succeeded to partially export to Germany (where it got softened a bit). And they do with the nasals which are the exact opposite of good singing education (as even many French admit). The beauty of this language is certainly the most overrated, but it is also not the worst you can do. No, you can: Once I've heard a person who spoke fluently French with an extreme Swiss German accent. It was a hard job to stay polite.

Italian:
Sign language with some acoustic support. The acoustic support goes well with music and if people are not in their aggressive mode (which to them is "normal friendly discussion"), also pleasant to listen to. Composers tend to pile up to four vowels on a quaver, which creates problems not unlike German.

Spanish, Portugese, Romanian ... they sound Danish, too.

[Adalbertus]

Originally posted by Geronimo
So I'd like to ask those non native english speakers to verify, does spoken english really sound like it belongs with the germanic group? Is the connection that obvious?

The sound of languages changes most easily, compared to the main part of the words or the grammar. Just listen to British and American English, or even Indian English . I also think that French and Italian sound quite differently. Or different German dialects, for that matter.

But in fact, the structure of English resembles German more than French, and most of the "basic" words are of Germanic origin. On the other hand, about half of the English vocabulary is Romanic.

(Example with word-to-word translations, this is neither good German nor good French):
On the other hand, about half of the English vocabulary is Romance.
An der anderen Hand, etwa halb von dem englischen Vokabular ist Romanisch.
A la autre main, environ moitié de la anglaise vocabulaire est romain.

[duke o' york]

I love the French language, and always will. Their bread is excellent too.

I learned German to the age of 16, but that is too long ago for me to be any good any more. Even then, though, I always preferred French.

[Wycoff]

Germannic.

I'm a native English speaker. I studied German and Spanish for three years each and enjoyed learning German much more. I didn't find Spanish to be particularly "beautiful."