Le Pietre Rotolanti
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2016–2024
3:40 · 10M views · Dec 9, 2012
A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers. It is a rock and rap-flavored novelty track with a video.
It comes up whenever threads touch on fake languages, accents, or gibberish that sounds plausible, and commenters like sharing it with people who haven't heard it.
17 comments from Hacker News
Speaking of gibberish english: I know this has been on YouTube for 10 years, but there are always newcomers who haven't had their brain melted by it: this video
I call your mis-understood English song, and raise you one song purposefully written to use fake-English sounding 'words': > The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, however the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right".[8][9] Andrew Khan, writing in The Guardian, later described the sound as reminiscent of Bob Dylan's output from the 1980s.[9] > Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate how English sounds to people who do not understand the language proficiently. "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."[6] * [LINK] * Audio-only: [LINK] * M/V: this video Quite catchy.
For anyone who hasn't seen it before, here's a song by an Italian composer made to sound like American English, but since it only uses nonsense even English speakers can get a bit of a feel for what we sound like to others: this video
The song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" has a similar effect: it's meant to sound exactly like American English to non-native speakers, but is actually just gibberish. Works amazingly well. this video
There's a fantastic English-sounding song by an italian singer this video Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano. It hurts my brain when I try to pick out meaning from the phenomes.