Re: Esthetics

>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"?
First, I tend to develop phologies, grammars, and semantic systems
seperately and spontaneously while I should be paying attention to other
things.  Then, those pieces float around in my head for a while until I find
two or three I like and have them mate to produce a language.

As such, my phonologies tend to be very formal, although if there isn't a
strong aesthetic from very early on, the system won't survive natural
selection.  As such, I have at least one "gimmick" for each conlang.

-Þewthaj has central vowels and glottal-stop-initial consonant clusters
/'w/, /'l/, /'y/, and /'h/.
-Xom Bej has a backed /e/ and pulmonic/ejective/implosive stop distinctions,
rather than distinctions by voice onset time.
-Be'danoon has voiced/voiceless distinction in all of it's glides, and a
very Athapaskan phoneme set.
-Patanggwe has a minimalist vowel harmony system that interacts in
interesting ways with consonants (some consonants occur only before one
class of vowels, and some can act as pivots).
-Pakili has three vowels and six consonants.

Then there are Tinga and Neushar, the phonologies of which are designed to
elicit intuitively obvious pronunciations from English speakers, in the
first case because of pragmatic reasons regarding it's use, and in the
second case, because I was tired of using so many diacritics.  Both of them
very definitely have a "feel", but they are still abherrent among my
conlangs.

That being said, I should note that naturalism is ALWAYS a requirement with
me.  I have on occassion invented unnatural phonologies, grammars, or
semantic systems, but they bore me and generally disappear unnamed.  In some
cases, they mutate into something natural.  The minimalist Pakili phonology
above, for example, was just a thought experiment until I began to see it as
an extended pidgin.  Now it makes much more sense.  I'm still debating
whether to add tonal distinctions.  The idea of tones in a pidgin is funny,
but it also violates rather grandly the minimalist intention of the language
to begin with.  Of course, all I have is a phonology at the moment.  In
another example, a friend of mine requested that I design an Enochian
language for a comic he wants to write.  This allowed me to take the
unnatural grammar I was cooking and apply it to a scenerio where it made
sense.  (Verbs are inflections on nouns, and there are less than a dozen of
them.)  Of course, things got a little more naturalized, so that--while
there is no noun/verb distinction at the categorical level--I can now speak
of verbal roots and nominal roots, similar to some Austronesian languages
and North-Pacific costal American languages.

Anyway, I may have digressed wildly from the original intention of the
question.  I appologize for any bodily injury that might thusly result.

Athey

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