In class this week, we discussed how various languages sound and how this has an impact on attitudes. For example, languages that have harsher sounds, like German, may give the impression of being more aggressive. This is similar to Arabic as well, as the language has many glottal stops. However, watching the video of someone chanting the Quran revealed the musicality and melodic nature of the language and beauty in it. Discussing the sounds in a language, particularly when examining how they impact impressions, especially interested me because my major is Speech-Language Pathology and we have spent a lot of time in my classes learning about the various places and manners of sounds in English. I am also in a Language and Culture class this semester, and this discussion reminded me of something we have been talking about in class regarding how we often make false assumptions and judgments about people purely based on the way that they speak or their dialect. Also, in many of my classes, we have talked about how problems with orthography because there are some sounds that are represented with more than one letter, silent letters, or some words sounding different than the way they are spelled. I connected this to what we talked about on Thursday regarding words such as “djinn” in Arabic word that, when translated to English, is where we get the word “genie,” and “qi,” where the pronunciation of the “q” sound is silent and instead is a “ch” sound.