I wasn’t paying attention, so I asked him to repeat it: “Say that again …but backwards!”, I added, because I like to seem whimsical and interesting.
After a short while I noticed he still hadn’t replied. I looked over to find he’d opened a text editor and was busy figuring out how to pronounce the sentence phonetically reversed.
To which I would reply: shush, I’m having fun.
Hence followed a great evening: I hacked away in IPython Notebook, while Benjamin explained diphthongs and IPA and pronounciation.
The results were surprisingly understandable. Though there’s definitely a certain trick to it making it sound accurate: you have put the emphasis in different places. You need to lower the pitch of the first word, not the last.
It’s a weird effect, though! Foreign yet familiar. Apparently there’s a scene from a horror movie (I don’t like horror movies!) where they actually use this technique: the actors learnt their lines backwards, and then reversed the film.
You can also see the IPython notebook we ended up with.