Fake English!
The answer to a question that Megan and I used to discuss pretty frequently is being answered thanks to the wonder that is YouTube! Something that we used to ponder back while we were studying at Waseda was how English would have sounded to us, were we studying it as a foreign language. Or as a foreign language we weren’t studying - whichever. Being native English speakers, we felt like this wasn’t something we’d never really discover. We knew what our mimicry of foreign languages sounded like, but were incapable of faking English. Well, some guy on YouTube called “crehnquist” has got the ball rolling. Here’s the first video I’ve seen where someone successfully (in my opinion) fakes English.
German guy fakes English (YouTube)
Dude calls for fake language exchange (YouTube)
English speaker responds (YouTube)
What’s funny to me now is that as a person who has studied Japanese for a bit now, I understand how far off the fake Japanese of the guy behind the original video is. It sounds bad to me. And I listen to real Japanese that I don’t understand everyday. In spite of that, the languages which I don’t speak sounded like reasonable approximations. Is that weird or what? The phonemes might be right, but I guess you have to fake intonation, pacing, phrasing, and sentence construction too to make the whole thing work. I really hope some native speakers of other languages respond to his video. I wonder if my opinion of his “reasonable approximations” is shared by other folks. I wonder if a person who spoke Russian would listen and say “Man, his Russian sounds like poo, but his other stuff sounds pretty accurate!” Fun stuff.
On another note - some of the interesting things that they came up with involves faked English created by native English speakers. The 3rd video in the list up there is one example of a fluent English speaker faking it, though crehnquist mentions the gibberish of comedians like Stanley Unwin (YouTube) and Peter Sellers [UPDATE: (YouTube), skip to 2:20 to hear him demonstrate an American announcer using "American sounds" in lieu of real words.]. Simlish was also mentioned in passing. Anyway, I too hope that some legitimate non-English speakers get some fake English put up soon. Knowing something about the language seems like cheating in this game, doesn’t it? For instance, I couldn’t fake Japanese at this point, because I’d be trying to not speak in Japanese…not faking it…and my knowledge of the language would shape my attempted approximations. Besides, this is about what it sounds like to foreign people, or how foreign people pretend to speak in English, not about actually accurately duplicating the sound of English. Gibberish goes a long way in that respect, anyway. Anyway, I hope you guys found that interesting.
Oh yeah, and this blip hit my radar screen thanks to Digg.com’s Videos section.