Hi!
Yann Kiraly wrote:
> I think german has a bad reputation because I now a frensh family, whose
> younger son, who was about to learn german at school, ran around the house
> making weird grunts and calling it german.
I don't think you can conclude from this that German has a bad
reputation, when it is merely an imitation of the sounds that someone
(especially a kid) perceives. Imitations don't necessarily indicate
"good" or "bad" reputation.
> And what about the reputation of being hard that finnish has?
One of my colleagues at university made a joke about Finnish: "Finnish
has just one spelling rule: every word should have at least four a's."
> And actually, the germans (e.g. we) think the
> frensh are funny because they leave out h's everywhere. That's how we
> produce a frensh sounding german: leave out the h's. This looks like this:
> Ich* ge'e in das aus, wo es frischen Ammelbraten und Interschinken gibt.
> A nother example would be that the english speakers of the world turn all
> the th's into s's when imitating germans. Get the picture?
This reminds me of the television series 'Allo 'allo in which different
languages (German, French, British) were imitated by giving appropriate
accents to English. Switching languages was represented by switching to
a different accent. Neat :)
René