Re: Fave Conlangs WAS: Silindion

In a message dated 3/24/02 07.11.45 AM, ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:

>Nothing inexplicable - Tolkien kept ugly sounds like /Z/ for things like
>Sauron's 'Black Tongue'   :)
    Purely subjective that. I like that sound a lot. & /dZ/, too... Asian
languages have a lot of similar sounds (i.e. /^"z/ and /!t'dz`:/) and, in
some minds, sound like nature sounds (the rush of wind through bamboo...
vigourously applied ink brush on rice-paper... etc.)

>>- Klingon is dead ugly and uses an exceptionally stupid notation
>
>But wasn't Klingon meant to be dead ugly and weird?
    I wonder if Okrand was partly inspired by Tuvan/Tibetan throating singing
besides supposedly ugly & weird aspects of the so-call "gutteral-languages":
German, Arabic, etc.

    OBCONLANG: Maybe a better conlang-ish question regarding aesthetics is:
how an orthographic spelling system can be stylistically adaptable
(user-friendly) and what is - subjectively - the most intriguing?
    Of course this list has already covered scripts. I am talking more about
the merits of various spelling systems in alphabetic languages, i.e. Spanish,
Finnish and urban, creolized Tok Pisin being very close to phonetic, while
English and Gaelic (esp'ly Gaelic! ::wince::) are very, very much otherwise!

<ZNiP> /z_h nIp/ of remarks on Esperanto

>I find the language kludgy.
    Kludgy is the the best way to describe it. I am tryin' very hard to avoid
kludginess in my conlang & that means actually learning basic linguistic
concepts and applying them so my conlang efforts are not Zamenhof kludgy
(Esperanto) or Schleyer ugly (Volapuk... "bowl o' puke" IMHO).

    I can't recommend David Crystal's _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_,
2nd Ed. enough for people with little-to-no knowledge of linguistics.
    And for a practically in-depth "linguistics cookbook," one can not go too
wrong with Thomas E. Payne's _Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field
Linguists_.

    As to books on phonology, IPA, etc.... I have none specifically on
phonology and thus I hand the floor over to some one else... any one?

Hanuman Zhang {HANoomaan JAHng} /'hanuma~n  dZa'hN/
            __ __   _   __  _  __   __  __  _   __ _    ___  ___ _

CENTO: twinkle twinkle lil stars

Un COUP De DéS ... JAMAIS ... N'ABOLIRA ... Le HASARD
<>
    I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
    O! Notte stellata... matematica...
les astres sont le silencieux orchestre des mondes in connus
OM ... m'illumino d' immenso... OM

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