Re: The beautifulest phonology

Can you have a beautiful phonology? I think a lot depends on context; I
learnt German through listening to Beethoven's 9th(!) and it has never
seemed anything other than appealing to me. Dutch is positively beautiful,
those nice pure vowels and the "ij" diphthong contrasting really well with
the "guttural" sounds. One of my favourite words is 'meegerekend'
('included'). My own conlang is based, as I suppose many are, on a personal
aesthetic, so includes no fricatives, a large array of dental stops, and a
dearth of consonant clusters. But this is a general sound aesthetic. I can't
see individual phonemes as beautiful or ugly - though having said that, I'm
not keen on /f/!
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christian Thalmann" <cinga@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 11:00 PM
Subject: Re: The beautifulest phonology


> --- In conlang@y..., Andreas Johansson <and_yo@H...> wrote:
>
> > It may be because I'ven't seen sufficiently many war movies featuring
evil
> > nazis, but I can't get into my head that [x] should be a harsh sound. I
> > mean, it's soft, nice, cosy!
>
> Yeah.  Many B-movie educated Americans don't seem able to distinguish
> [x] and [C] from [X].  While [X] sounds undeniably rough, the former
> two are actually quite smooth.
>
> I never quite understood why people call German "guttural".  Unless
> you use the Hitler-style drumroll /r/ and uvular /X/s, there is very
> little about the language that would deserve that predicate.
>
> Then again, which average American can distinguish German from Dutch?
> ;-)
>
>
> -- Christian Thalmann