rur rur rur

Fishing for links to Greek linguistics blogs on my own Greek linguistics blog, I fell across this Catherine Tate sketch (for the second time) via Λογογράμματα:

Hominid @ Λογογράμματα‘s comment was:

Στους αγγλόφωνους, τουλάχιστον, οι υπόλοιπες γλώσσες δεν ακούγονται μόνο σαν βαρ, βαρ, βαρ…

Ho esti methermēneuomenon:

For Anglophones, at least, other languages don’t just sound like bar bar bar…

I’m sure Greeks have as good ears as Anglophones, but maybe not as much exposure; but I gotta say, this kind of parody of other languages is pretty prevalent in English, but I don’t remember it in Greek. I just remember the very lame substitute (which other languages also seem to do) of speaking Greek with an American accent.

The lame substitute is more often targetted at Greek-Americans than Americans in general; and its lameness (last sighted on the Antenna TV series Lola) is starting to get on my nerves. (I’ve linked to Antenna TV channel: *spits on his lapel*. Good thing I no longer have to watch Greek TV…)

The comment did remind me of what I found out recently from my Italian friend Gregoria: to non-Anglophones, all English sounds like “rur rur rur”. Corroborations: 1, 2, 3.

Pretty damn insightful, actually. (Then again, the Anglophone lampoons haven’t come out of nowhere either.) Two of the most distinctive sounds of English, which are damnably rare in the world’s languages, are [ɹ] and [ə]. Rarer still is their bastard progeny, [ɝ ɚ]. So putting them together in “rur rur rur” shows they’ve been paying attention to the oddities. (They wouldn’t put [θ] in, because it’s not as frequent—unlike the lampoons of Castillian Spanish. The [ð] of “the” should be frequent enough; but being an unstressed clitic, and not a content word, I suspect it’s not salient enough to insert in a two-second lampoon.)