saturday matinee

So, when I first saw this video, it came with the following explanation:

We’ve all heard examples of fake Chinese or German from speakers who lack familiarity with either language. While typically cringe-worthy, these examples do raise interesting questions regarding our own language. What does English sound like to non-English speakers? After more than 40 years, Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol” remains one of the most illuminating examples.

The entire song is nonsense verse, neither English nor Italian, but the sounds are meant to resemble English. Linguist Mark Liberman wrote an interesting post about this sort of thing over at Language Log discussing yaourter, the French word for an attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that one doesn’t know all that well. This often involves trying to sing a foreign song with nonsense or random words filling in the blanks. Liberman shares this wonderful quote from a random Internet user:

"Just for the story, in France, when we don’t speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it 'yaourter'(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the 'cowboy' accent."

Remember this video the next time some idiot goes "ching chong chang" as a jokey attempt to sound Chinese.

via

Actually, now that I think about it, this reminds me a bit of Elton John's song "Solar Prestige a Gammon".

Also, here's another take on the English thing, this time by actual English speakers!