Profanity in Russian speech WAS Re: HP in translation

[justcarol67]

> > Carol, who agrees with Steve that Russian sounds, to an outsider,
like a passionate language, and thinks that a Russian accent in a man
is either cute or sexy, depending on his age
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> Did you hear the real Russian accent, not this fake TV/movies one?
I'm just asking because the "heavy" Russian accent sounds extremely
unpleasant to me. The "light" variety is kind of nice, yeah.
> 
> 
> 
> zanooda, who doesn't think English is boring, and who loves 
everything about it, including the way it sounds, which she can't say
about some other languages
>
Carol again:

Sad to say, I *was* thinking of the TV variety. Anyone remember Ilya
Kuryakin? Played, as I now remember, by a Scotsman, David McCallum.
And the Russians in "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are
Coming!" were endearing. But now I just feel embarrassed. I'm not sure
that I've ever encountered a "real" Russian accent. (German, yes, and
I confess that I find a strong German accent off-putting.)

I agree that some languages are pleasant to listen to even when you
don't understand them (Italian, for example) and others sound harsh or
noisy. Of course, they might not sound that way if we could understand
them. OTOH, the same is true for accents in English (the only language
I can talk intelligently about in that regard, never having
encountered any ancient Romans). Some accents sound sophisticated (BBC
English); some sound illiterate but still pleasant to hear (whatever
accent Robbie Coltrane is using for Hagrid); to me, some just sound
illiterate (Cockney, certain U.S. Southern accents); some are grating
to the ear (New York City). Of course, those of us who live in Arizona
have no accent at all. <smile> (I had barely opened my mouth to ask
about overseas postage when I was in London when the postal clerk said
"To America?")

I do love English, of course, including the sound of it, though I
think it's terribly abused by people who either don't take advantage
of its versatility and are stuck in profanity mode or who want to
sound "sophisticated" or "educated" (PhD candidates, weather
forecasters, businesses, and policemen being among the worst
offenders). Why, for example, must an employee now be an "associate"?
Why must a storm be a "precipitation event"? Why must a "problem" be
an "issue"? Why should I list my "gender" on a loan application as if
I were a part of speech?

Anyway, I'm at the point in life where everything was "better" when I
was a kid--no cell phones or video games or black metal music or
grammar checks and we read or rode bikes or walked in the hills and
built forts out of pine needles to entertain ourselves and actually
learned to spell and write without a computer and do arithmetic
without a calculator--so forgive me if I sound like an old fogey.

Carol, wondering what her accent sounds like to other ears and
remembering being called a "Yankee" when she briefly lived in North
Carolina