Sorry, but now I just *have* to ask...
In some quarters, correct pronunciation is deemed either effete intellectual snobbery or .. Commyunist-inspired [don't ask].Come now -- after that titillating invitation, how could I not?
I mean, "correct pronunciation is ... Commyunist-inspired"?!? Where the FUCK would they get THAT from???
In contrast: Surely the French possess one of the more euphonious languages extantActually, no -- IMO, it's really rather ugly. And I don't say this lightly or jokingly; I used to unthinkingly subscribe to the same "common knowledge" prejudice, but feel somehow vaguely bothered about it... Until a few years ago, when for the first time I really sat down and thunk about it. OK, so y'all'll (if that isn't a legitimate contraction, it *ought* to be! :-) probablly think I'm totally bonkers when I say I think German, for instance, sounds better... But that can't be helped, 'coz I do.
BUT - my experience in France (and Quebec) is that, any earnest attempt to speak.. is rewarded with goodwill (and the occasional whispered translation!). And if you do a pretty good job, on some oft needed phrases.. you might get a genuine smile of appreciation. Vivent longtemps la diff\ufffdrence!Fuck yeah -- and it works everywhere, not just among Francophones.
Heinlein observed, in one of his "juveniles" (can't recall precisely which one -- perhaps _Podkayne of Mars_?), that just learning to say "Thank You" in the local language was likely to give you a huge leg up on anyone who couldn't even be bothered to do that. An approximate quote of his young protagonist learning a few: "In Finnish, they say 'Key Toss'; in Danish it's 'Money Talks' -- perhaps they're a very mercenary people..." (The sentence as a whole is almost guaranteed to be wrong, but I'm 100% sure the homophonous English phrases are the correct ones.)
So what do the Finns generally fuck-upHey, they're human -- so what *don't* they...?
Are elections as stoopid-based but with better language enroute?Not quite as bad as yours; for one thing, they have more than two parties. It has interesting contrasts to the (much more similar than the American) Swedish system -- some in its favour, some not.
Cold climate more conducive to cerebral exercise than er temperate one?Isn't that the Other Hoary Olde hypothesis, akin to the one about how the harsher conditions in the European climate made people by necessity more industrious, and thus just logical candidates to conquer and own the world? In some ways, it just seems to stand to reason -- in other, it smacks heavily of "White Man's Burden" justifications for, basically, racism.
(Maybe the sauna improves the specific pericosity of neurons, too ??I'd speculate more along the lines of stimulating the flow of blood to the head (a cooling reflex), and thus more or less incidentally to the brain... Actually, I think there *is* such an effect -- it certainly *feels* as if there were! -- but if that's so, any such intellectual stimulation is probably only temporary, not permanent.
PS IMhO your "awr devr(uh)" example is a sufficient clarificationEucharisto! :-)
and.. eventually eliding the 'uh' comes with just a few days of Listening to Others speaking..Well, to be perfectly honest, I think even the French have *some*, albeit micro-minuscule, sound there. For one thing, it's just physiologically easier to pronounce v-r *in that order*, even for them, if you have *some* amount of aspiration after them; for another, remember that "silent" vowels were actually fully pronounced, once upon a long-ago -- maybe they just never went *completely* away? (And when they finally do, wouldn't it be about fucking time to eliminate them from the spelling too?)