Imaginary Gardens

Listen, sister, when are you going to get wise to yourself?

Purple Chimp

Clip from this video.

The video is about music but I think he explains this very well, and this can be applied to many cultural aspects.

Some days ago I was talking to a friend who works in the tourism sector and she was telling me that lots of tourists have told her that Catalan and Spanish sound the same. They asked her to say a sentence in both, and they couldn't hear it. She could not understand how anyone would say this because they sound so different from each other, she said that when she has been in Spain Spanish people have heard her speak Catalan and assumed she was speaking Italian (the same has happened to another friend of mine, where Spanish people assumed they were French because they heard her speaking in Catalan). But she was so confused how someone could think that "M'agrada menjar pomes" ("I like eating apples" in Catalan) sounds the same as "Me gusta comer manzanas" (the same sentence in Spanish), because Catalan constantly has the ə sound (which doesn't exist in Spanish), open E and O vowels (which don't exist in Spanish) and often uses the j sound (which doesn't exist in Spanish either), while Spanish has very flat closed vowels, the /th/ sound (which doesn't exist in Catalan), and we could bring up many more examples such as the aspirated hard j/h (which doesn't exist in Catalan either) but those were the things that could be clearly seen from the example she gave. She was baffled, so I tried to explain what Farya Faraji explains in this video.

Personally, when I have been abroad and people heard me speaking Catalan, I've been assumed to be from different places. Once I went to the USA (where people are more familiar with Spanish), they all assumed I was French. When I have been in Austria, everyone assumed we were Italians. And my friend from England says he can't tell Catalan and Spanish apart, but to be fair my French coworker couldn't tell apart when we were speaking Catalan, Italian, Spanish, or the girl who sometimes answered in Occitan. And my favourite case was an Italian family in Greece who heard us speaking Catalan and excitedly came to greet us (in Italian) saying "we are Italian too!" because they must have assumed we were speaking a regional language from Italy (which, to be fair, technically we were, considering that Catalan is also the language from L'Alguer which is in Italy, though we are not from there).

And I can't for the life of me tell apart USA English accent from New Zealand English accent or Australia English accent. Or Polish from Russian or Czech or Croatian or Ukrainian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

Villa Saluzzo dates back to the 1500s in Genova, Liguria, Italy. The triplex has 5bds, 7ba, 5,382sqft, $2,540,835.