No Accounting for Taste (was: Re: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences))

On 4 April, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

<snip>

>Yeah, I know.  There's no accounting for taste.
>
>Which, BTW, would be an interesting idiom translation project.  How do you
>express the idea given by the English phrase "There's no accounting for
>taste" in your conlangs or various natlangs?
     In rtemmu, it would be:

"rtemmu auag br`rtem!"

Note 1: technically,  there should be rate of change markers
             before "rtemmu" and "br`rtem", not to mention an
             initial marker with various bits of info, but for slogan
             purposes, where no info is implied beyond a general
             idea, I am thinking that it might be possible to drop them;
             ie, not to kill the "catchiness" of the phrase with needless
(?)
             morphological overload.
Note 2: notice the sequence "br`rt": "b" and "t" as expected;
             "r`" is a rhotic midcentral vowel, as in the first part of
               the word "Earth", pronounced in Midwestern American
              English. The "r" following it is an alveolar trill.
              Interesting combo. I like it. :-)


rtem  =  word
-mu  =  suffix denoting dynamic system (rtemmu is thus "language")
auag = assertion that the next process-word  is somehow
            connected with the previous process-word
br` =  prefix denoting the possibility of selection

"There is no accounting for taste" thus comes out:

"rtemmu auag br`rtem!"  =  Language has selections of words

the idea being that everyone can select his own way to describe
something; but since they're all using the same language,
all the words are (grammatically at least) valid.


    As for natlangs, in Israeli Hebrew, the idea is expressed in a rhyme:

/en lehitvakeax
al taam veal reax/

There's no use arguing
over flavor and fragrence.


Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.