Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow.

June 17, 2024 by 18 Comments

In the grand tradition of “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” I bring you Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow by the experimental poet Hans G. Helms. You can hear the author reading excerpts in this YouTube clip; as @magicmulder says in a comment, “So klingt Deutsch für Leute, die kein Deutsch verstehen. :D” I have no idea how the title is meant to be pronounced or what meaning the reader/hearer is expected to extract from the piece, but it’s fun in small doses.

Comments

  1. Stu Clayton says
    June 17, 2024 at 5:55 pm

    “So klingt Deutsch für Leute, die kein Deutsch verstehen. :D”

    Well, Chinese sounds to me like Chinese, and I don’t understand Chinese. At least when it’s spoken in Chinese news broadcasts, so that I am sure that it is Chinese being spoken. And all those stroke-heaps in the captions only increase my confidence.

    Helms is merely making German sounds flow, with familiar-sounding bits of words that occasionally pop up to the surface. Like turds in the tides.

  2. languagehat says
    June 17, 2024 at 5:59 pm

    That’s what I figured, but I don’t know why you would keep it up for so long. I mean, the famous “Дыр бул щыл” has a dozen “words” and exhausts its possibilities in that brief span.

  3. Stu Clayton says
    June 17, 2024 at 6:08 pm

    I’ve read that many Americans who don’t understand German think that Germans speak like Hitler or Goebbels. I suspect all they’ve heard is sound-bites from Nazi rallies in television documentaries.

    I learned German in order to be able to read Kant, Hegel etc. I never thought about what “sounds like this” category German could be put into. All I can say is that Germans nowadays don’t speak like Kant and Hegel wrote. Nobody speaks English like Henry James wrote.

  4. David L says
    June 17, 2024 at 8:44 pm

    I don’t think anyone spoke English the way Henry James wrote, even at the time Henry James was writing. And I include Henry James in that judgment.

  5. MMcM says
    June 17, 2024 at 8:59 pm

    If ever there was a man that talked like a book — and one of his own books too — that man is Mr. Henry James.

    — George W. E. Russell.

  6. David Eddyshaw says
    June 18, 2024 at 1:08 pm

    So klingt Deutsch für Leute, die kein Deutsch verstehen

    I’m fairly sure that that just reflects the fact that it was composed and is being read by a L1 German speaker. Pretty much anything would sound like German in the circumstances. I dare say that Helms would make Elvish sound like German too.

  7. Stu Clayton says
    June 18, 2024 at 1:46 pm

    Elvish Presley as well.

  8. languagehat says
    June 18, 2024 at 2:02 pm

    Mah name’zh Elvish Prezhley — don’ you shtep on mah blue shuede shoezh!

  9. JJM says
    June 18, 2024 at 6:34 pm

    When I first read that “Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow” up there, I assumed it was from a North American indigenous language.

  10. January First-of-May says
    June 18, 2024 at 6:38 pm

    In the grand tradition of “Prisencolinensinainciusol

    So klingt Deutsch für Leute, die kein Deutsch verstehen. 😀

    Meanwhile, via Tocharian Irredentism, I’ve recently (…OK, last year) discovered Avaram Ngalei, which is absolutely not in English and doesn’t intend to be, but does a surprisingly good job of sounding like it is.

     
    EDIT:

    When I first read that “Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow” up there, I assumed it was from a North American indigenous language.

    I thought it was either that or a Library-of-Babel-like keyboard mash project.

  11. rozele says
    June 18, 2024 at 7:20 pm

    obligatory [ancient] Log cross-link on “grammelot”, featuring 18thC fake chinese from goldoni.

  12. drasvi says
    June 19, 2024 at 7:02 am

    @J1M, wow.

    (but I would not be so sure it does not intend to sound like English. In modern Russian songs I frequently find influences from English songs which are rather linguistical than “musical”)

    (also my complaint in another thread that Arabic dunya sounds to me as a Slavic word impossible in Arabic is a bit similar).

  13. David Marjanović says
    June 19, 2024 at 9:24 am

    @J1M, wow.

    Ah yeah, that. Hallucinant, quoi.

    I would not be so sure it does not intend to sound like English

    Perhaps, but in these cases this is the entire sound system, consistently. That’s a bit much for that.

  14. languagehat says
    June 19, 2024 at 9:40 am

    The language is Tangkhul, if anyone was wondering.

  15. drasvi says
    June 19, 2024 at 9:57 am

    I also remember a certain Irish folk singer who sounds as if she is speaking with thick Russian accent. Russian and Irish are close: both phonologies have “broad/slender” contrast. But then palatalisation is a range of things, and her palatalisation sounds like Russian. I fogot her name:(

  16. David Eddyshaw says
    June 19, 2024 at 1:08 pm

    Topical, in view of the impending UK election:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UJZF5iRhNg

  17. David Eddyshaw says
    June 19, 2024 at 1:35 pm

    I’ve always felt that Kusaal sounds relatively English-like. Most individual phonemes not too exotic from an Anglophone POV, e.g. /t/ before a stressed vowel realised as alveolar and aspirated à l’anglaise … lots of diphthongs ending in [ə] … lots of very short words, strong stress on roots with most other vowels reduced …

    At any rate, it sounds more like English than Hausa or Twi do.

  18. David Marjanović says
    June 19, 2024 at 6:17 pm

    Topical, in view of the impending UK election:

    …I feel like the people in the background.

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