Our conversation today with Lace about music and speech reminded me of something that I listened to a couple weeks ago about how speech has a musical sort of power. This page gives you a link to the audio (some of the episodes are transcribed as well, but I did not see the link on this one) and some of the people that they talked about as well. The main idea of the episode, or the first third of it at least, was about how any snippet of conversation can sound musical if you listen to it enough times.
It was demonstrated in the episode and is really quite intriguing – we don't realize how much of a lyrical quality our speech has because we aren't one of those languages considered to be musical. However, listening to Sexson's lectures (particularly when he's reading poetry) is a great way to remind yourself of just how beautiful our language is.
It is interesting though to think about how a child's synesthesia might be affected by languages such as Chinese, where there is no variation in pitch by word – every time a Chinese word is repeated it sounds virtually identical, unlike in English where there is no limit to what a word should sound like. Does that mean that poetry in Chinese is different from poetry in English? I don't know, but it's something worth thinking about.
I think this is a very interesting topic you're bringing up Anne. We keep hearing about the poetic fluidity of such languages as Italian and French and the manliness of German and Arabic. Then there are the languages that are peaceful and blend together into a softly flowing brook of words. Yet, we have the blending of them all at our service. Each language and tone we can adopt and use through the different words that each language has given us. I would think that other languages have certain limitations to expression which American English can get away with.
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