Re: The beautifulest phonology

Oh well, as others are joining  in........

At 12:09 am -0800 19/3/02, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>...in my opinion, regardless of whether it's likely or not, would be this:
>
>Vowels:
>
>i y 2 E a
Ooooh - /2/ is not merely not beautiful, but downright ugly IMO.  No thank
you.  /y/ is OK on a good day, but IMO Sindarin would've been better
without it.  In view of Cambricity, the north Walian [1] would've been
better.  Presumably [y] was an 'import' fro Old English.

I'm afraid I've discovered nothing better than the 'classic' /i/, /e/, /a/,
/o/, /u/ - with the latter two definitely rounded.

>Consonants
>
>t_j d_j n_j F T D S Z h x K K\ l L w j
>
>Naturally, it would be written in Cyrillic. :)
Why?  Surely a beautiful phonology deserves a beautiful script.  Cyrillic
is so boring with most of the letters being the same height.  At least the
ascenders & descenders of the modern Roman and Greek alphabets lend them
some attractiveness.

The Arabic script is IMO more beautiful than any of the above; but not
well-suited to non-Semeitic languages.  The only solution I would
countenance is to give the phonology its own beautiful script.

But what about the consonants?

I'll have /p/, /t/ and /k/ (I don't much mind whether /t/ is alveolar or
dental, but think dental is preferable) - these would weaken to [b], [d],
[g] or even [B], [D], [G] medially (a bit like Tepa or Tamil :)

I find voiceless fricatives particularly unlovely.  I'll keep only /s/ - no
others please.

I'll have the two nasals /m/ and /n/, with latter as [N] before /k/.

I like the lingual trill and might have /r/ and /l/ as separate phonemes;
but I'm not sure that the trill is really beautiful.  No, if its aesthetic
beauty one's after, then I'll probably have /l/, which would tend towards
[r] medially.

I think [j] and [w] will only appear in diphthongs.

There must be no initial consonant compounds; the only consonants that may
appear in word final position are /s/, /n/ and /l/.  Consonant gemination
as in Italian & Finnish is IMO quite a beautiful feature - so consonants
maybe geminate in medial positions.

Apart from gemination, the only consonants that may be in syllable final
position before an initial single consonant are the three permitted word
final consonants (with /n/ + /p/ >> /mp/ of course).
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At 10:57 am +0100 19/3/02, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
>....................... I would add clicks for good measure
>(even though I have difficulties to pronounce them)
Yep - if I were designing an artlang, I'd almost certainly include clicks.
But I'm not sure that I'd class the as 'beautiful'; so if it's beauty, as
Frank said, I don't think I can include them.

But then, although much art has beauty, I don't think great necessarily has
it, e.g. Guernica  ;)
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At 9:51 am -0800 19/3/02, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
>Yes, it is X-SAMPA, and yes, I do like fricatives, especially the ones
>produced further forward in the mouth. As for the bilabials, I don't know
>if it's related to the absence of back vowels, I'm just not very fond of
>them.
..all of which goes to prove how subjective aesthetics are  :)

Ray.

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                     [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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