How interesting

[gcursor]

http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2011/06/14/what-does-english-sound-like-to-foreign-ears/

 

So I ran across this article and I was in awe at the first video that is in that article. As I understand it, much of what the man is singing is "nonsense" words but that song is still great to listen to. Anyway I thought that I would post it out here and see what you guys thought of it...

gcursor

[bigvalboy]

I loved it GC !!!...Very interesting and well done I thought. It didn't matter to me that I could not understand the words, I considered it like an art 'performance peace'....thanks for posting.

[rvwnsd]

This is great! Even though the words are gibberish, they are put together as if they are real. Very well done.

[justaguy]

Fun! Now I don't feel bad about not being able to understand all the lyrics to a song on the radio. I always suspected it was actually gibberish. :-)

[rvwnsd]

Does anyone remember a band called Cocteau Twins? Never could decipher what they were singing, but I loved their music.

[Bosguy]

That was entertaining and fun. I understood every word. I think they speak the same language as my ex.

 

Thanks

 

Boston Bill

[jackhammer91406]

Pitter Patter..

 

Patter songs.

What a great staple of stage and film (I guess video now as well)

Seeing this thread today reminded me of a track I heard a day or two ago on Sirius. It was Danny Kaye doing a number from a 1941 Broadway Musical called Let's Face It . The number was titled Melody in 4F. The show was a Cole Porter show but it had two songs added that were written by Sylvia Fine and Max Liebman. Sylvia was Kaye's wife. The song was mostly rapid fire nonsense syllables that told the story of one guy's experience in the war from being drafted to winning a war medal. Although you couldn't see the performance, the audio conveyed the amazing skill of Kaye.

No one did patter songs like than Danny Kaye

[Irtwo]

Thanks for that link. You are all focusing on the song, but I found the rest of that article far more interesting. Check out that video further down explaining the way different languages pronounce animal sounds.

[MsGuy]

I recall seeing a PBS show touching on this a couple of decades ago. They recorded the locals of the westernmost Dutch province, directly across from England, chatting away in their local dialect. Listening to them, I kept straining to understand what they were saying because the vowels, most of the consonants and, most important for me, the rhythm of their speech kept telling my brain I was hearing English spoken even though the words were Dutch.

 

It was the oddest experience, to the point that it has stuck with me all these years.

[+ Italiano]

That is Adriano Celentano, an Italian singer (who did also a few movies in the 70s-80s) very famous in the pop world. This song was actually quite famous in Italy back then, and singing it it was a way for us to "sound" American.

[Midnight]

Hell, most of the time I can't understand what they are saying anyway!