>Carsten Becker wrote at 2005-07-29 15:34:16 (-0400)
> > Hey all!
> >
> > On the Zompist Bulletin Board, Echobeats recently asked:
> >
> > > No, it's not _Dragostea din Tei_. What it is, though, I have no
> > > idea. I found it among an ocean of my sister's untagged music,
> > > the only tagging being "Words ni Spainish" [sic], which they
> > > aren't. If anyone has any clues, I'd be grateful. My best guess
> > > is Irish, but I really have no idea.
> > >
> > >
http://www.freewebs.com/mohaisis/UnknownCoolForeignSong.wma
> > >
> > > Yours, Tim.
> > >
> > > P.S. Thanks to King for hosting it.[/quote]
> >
> > On the ZBB, we didn't know which language this could be. Guesses
> > were Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Frisian, Estonian,
> > Lithuanian, Breton, Luxembourgish, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian or
> > some conlang. The Swedes said it's definitely not Scandinavian, and
> > it's also confirmed that it's not Dutch. The thread this question
> > is discussed in is [1]. I'll leave a notice on the ZBB that I asked
> > here as well.
> >
> > Have a nice week,
> > Carsten
> >
> > [1]
http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=11142
>
>I've uploaded a copy to
>
http://www.atqz73.dsl.pipex.com/language/sound/UnknownCoolForeignSong.wma
>which should hopefully download a good deal faster.
>
>Let's approach this linguistically. First of all, what can we rule
>out already? It doesn't sound Romance to me. Apparently it's not
>northern Germanic. Dutch and German speakers could probably have
>recognized a western Germanic dialect. Not Hebrew or Arabic. Slavic?
>Doesn't sound like it to me, but I'd rather have an explicitly stated
>opinion from a speaker of a Slavic language.
>
>I've been trying to compile a phonetic inventory and transcribe part
>of it, but I'm not very good at that, and I don't want to prejudice
>any more phonetically skilled listmembers. But relative to English,
>there's definitely a lot of [x] or [X] and some [G] or [R]. I don't
>hear any [T] or [D]. A lot of [S], or something like it. Not sure
>that I hear any affricates.
>
>I don't really have any idea what Persian sounds like, but it seems
>plausible based on the phones I'm getting.
>
>Anyone listening to this who knows a language not already ruled out,
>let us know.
>
>
>