Re: Esthetics

B. Garcia <madyaas@...> wrote:

>This came up a bit recently, but i'd like to know more from others.
>
>How do you all determine the esthetics of your conlangs? Do you have a
>formal system of rules governing combinations of vowels, consonants,
>dipthongs, etc. etc.? Or do you just go by "feel"?
>
I tend to go more or less by what "feels" right, given the "flavour" I want
to achieve.  With Xinkutlan, for example, I wanted a vaguely Aztec/Maya
flavour (hence the _tl_ phoneme), and used that as a starting point, then
decided on adding the phoneme _ll_ /K/ and making the phoneme written as
_tl_ have allophones of /tl/ and /tK/.  With the agglutinative structure,
it all went vaguely weird from there, but I'm happy with the sound of it,
so that's what counts.

Lauranthea, my abandoned project, had a rather "light", almost elvish feel
to it: lots of /l/, /r/ and /T/ phonemes, and a massive string of
diphthongs.  But that was what I was aiming for.  Funnily enough, now I
think about it, Lauranthea stayed much closer to the original schema
of "feel" that I had set for it.

Franj, my Crusader_French_modified_by_Turkic project, has a slightly
bizarre sound, melding Old French with Turkic vowel harmony, just to see
what comes out of the mix.   I'm still toying with different sound change
schemes- the large number of Old French diphthongs and triphthongs (?
spelling) are giving me a headache!

So, like you, I tend to go more by what feels appropriate given the
eventual flavour I want to end up with than by any formal structuring, and
work out the rules as I go.

Geoff

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