The Sounds of Foreign Tongues
Short film idea: several people (maybe kids?) of different languages doing impressions of what foreign languages sound like to their ears. Wendy was driving me to the ferry this morning and we were listening to an NPR report about the embattled Italian Prime Minister and they used a clip of one of his speeches, where Wendy could make out the words "...constitutionale, no morale." She started mimicking the 'al-lay' sound of the words, and that's what got me thinking about the way different languages sound to our ears. To Italians, I'm sure, it sounds completely normal. How would a Chinese person reproduce the foreign language of Italian? I had heard somewhere that Chinese children mimic English by saying words like "Mock mock mock" the way we might say of their language, "Ching chong ching."


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