vijayjohn wrote:Vlürch wrote:What language sounds like Arabic and Italian in equal parts?
Maltese
Well yeah, but...
vijayjohn wrote:Uzbek doesn't sound particularly Turkic, though...even though it is.
I guess, but it has at least allophonic front rounded vowels (lol, I accidentally left out the "rounded" part in that post) and is still more or less recognisably Turkic. It doesn't have either of /d͡z/ or /ʕ/, although I suppose the former could maybe be an allophone of /z/ or /d͡ʒ/ or a dialectal feature (since Karakalpak has it), and the latter might still be pronounced in Arabic loanwords for some reason... Uzbek does probably sound most like Italian of all the Turkic languages, but still nowhere close to it... it being Uzbek would be almost as weird as it being Brazilian Portuguese, but if some dialect has [d͡z] and they pronounced [ʕ] in Arabic loanwords or something, and they simply didn't happen to say any words with [ø] or [y], and they pronounced /æ/ or /ɒ/ as [a] for some reason, it's honestly not impossible.
vijayjohn wrote:Are you sure about that and it wasn't just Japanese?
If it was Japanese, it was the weirdest Japanese ever.
vijayjohn wrote:Chechen has both /dz/ and /ʡ/.
Is the latter ever pronounced simply as a fricative or something? Wikipedia says it's a pharyngealised glottal stop, which it wasn't; it was [ʕ], although I'm not sure if it was an approximant or fricative. Definitely not a stop or affricate, though. It also has front wounded vowels and ejectives, although again it could be that they just didn't say any words with them. They didn't look Chechen either, judging by googling "Chechen women" and having seen some on TV a few times, and I don't know if Chechens would be so touristy?
vijayjohn wrote:Maltese does have [ˤː], though.
Hmm, interesting. I thought it was at the beginning of words, too, but maybe my perception of word boundaries was messed up. If there can be sequences of a pharyngealised vowel and a regular vowel in Maltese, I could've heard that as a vowel followed by a pharyngeal approximant/fricative followed by a vowel? Maybe it could've been Maltese after all...
księżycowy wrote:I thought Chechen also has ʕ too.
So did I, but it doesn't according to Wikipedia. Then again, there's an example word for /ʕ/ from Chechen, so wtf...