The Living Rockumentary

Today, I had a moment of clarity. It was like that feeling you get after staring at a "magic eye" poster for 10 minutes and then finally seeing the 3-D image. An epiphany of sorts, I suppose.

Ever since I was little I always wondered what the english language sounded like to someone who didn't speak it. Maybe it was because as I was growing up I had spent time sitting in rooms in which everybody was speaking a different language whether it was Danish or German or French or what. I remember thinking how strange these languages sounded but also realizing, of course, that English probably sounded just as strange to somebody else. While listening to other languages, you also get a feel for the general sounds of the speech that you can't hear if you understand it because you are focussing on the meaning of the words rather than timbre. To me, French is smooth, Japanese is herky-jerky, German can sound rough, Danish has a lot of "ooo" sounds, Chinese sounds nasally, Russian sounds confident but stern, but how would English sound? I assumed it was something that I could never find out first hand.

Today, though, I actually heard it. It has a lot of "s" sounds and it's really really fast for example. What happened was, I was at a staff luncheon at work. I was sitting in the middile of a table of 15 people and there were conversations all around me. Somehow they reached the exact volume and complexity for me to be able to hear a particular voice speaking without being able to understand the words. With a little bit of concentration and pretending that I was in a foreign country it suddenly all became clear. I was hearing English with the ears of a non-speaker. It was really cool. I can't really describe it besides what I already said about the speed and the "s"s but I definately distinctly heard it from a completely sound over context perspective. Finally.