Language is musical

I watched a TED talk a few weeks ago where the guy claimed he was going to make me fall in love with classical music, or if not fall in love with it, at least learn to appreciate it, or if not learn to appreciate it, at least learn to love classic rock. Except for that last part. He failed completely in his objective. I already have a good relationship with classical music: I listen to it very rarely but I can appreciate it. Classic rock on the other hand...

Despite his failure, the lecturer made a very interesting point that I carefully catalogued and put to use today when showing someone why normal English sentences sounded stilted in their rendition. The point that Mr. Classical Music made was that when you start out with music, you don't know what to stress, other than the mistakes. So the beginner will stress every note or at least every beat in a measure. When the beginner gets a little better (given the odds, chances were that this story would be about the 99.9% who quit, but did I mention I have incredibly good luck? The fictional beginners in my stories stick with it!), he/she starts putting accents every other beat, and then just at the first beat of the measure, and then eventually, according to Mr. Classical Music, the former beginner and now accomplished musician puts only a single accent in every phrase, or perhaps even in the entire piece, and the music magically stops sounding like an exercise and starts to sound like the classical music that everyone knows and loves and listens to at rave parties.

Jia Yan (female), one of our mutual friends, asked me today to listen to her read a few English sentences and tell her what was wrong with her pronunciation because she found it inexplicably abhorrent. I listened. To my own thoughts of course, not to a word she was saying. And after she was done, I pronounced a diagnosis based on no data whatsoever. I felt like an accomplished psychiatrist. I told her that the English language is like music, and like music it...and then I gave her the spiel on accents. She thought it was brilliant. Just kidding, she didn't understand what the hell I was talking about. But I felt quite intellectual. If I knew anything about wine, I'm sure I would have poured us both a glass and then lectured her on the proper way to drink it. I'm more of a Coca-Cola guy, so instead I taught her how to clean a toilet with it.