on Jun 3rd, 2008Linguistic Beauty Contest
Well this was inevitable, I suppose. Estonia is throwing a “language beauty contest,” evidently spurred by the urban myth that it once came in second to Italian in an Italian language beauty contest.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it gets first prize this time.
Honestly, what is the point of a language beauty contest? If ever there was a subject to which de gustibus non est disputandum applies… Every statement about how “beautiful” or “intelligent” a language is says more about the cultural prejudices of the speaker than it does about the target language.
Which, I suppose, is an interesting subject in its own right. Alright, fine, let’s have language beauty contests. But let’s do it right. Meaning, balance for male and female speakers and listeners, have naive listeners from all cultural backgrounds, devise some kind of a category rating system so that we can data crunch the results, and for Jebus sake NO GORAM “LANGUAGE EXPERT” JUDGES!!! Actually, come to think of it, this might just fall into that ellusive category of useful things Sociolinguists could do (but generally don’t).