Re: What's your favorite sounding word in any language?

To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
Subject: Re: What's your favorite sounding word in any language?

At 20:26 18.12.2003, Isidora Zamora wrote:

>My favorite is probably the Danish word "marmalade" for the way that it
>shows off the intervocallic allophone of /d/ in the Danish
>language.  Sorry, no transcription available, because the sound is so
>unusual that there isn't any standard (nor, prehaps, any non-standard)
>transcription of it.
Actually it's [D_o], where the diacritic indicates
a 'lowered' articulation, in this case an approximant
rather than a fricative.  I would be tempted to
transcribe [4_o], but that ain't what the Danish
phoneticians do.  Personally I think the sound
merits its own sign, which should be an upside-down
voiced dental fricative character (i.e. upside-down ð).

Incidentally that Danish word, together with
_chokolade_, are among my favorites too.
Something with quintessential Danicity, like
Dirk's quintessential Shoshoni word.

Otherwise I'm wild about the sound of Icelandic.
If I have to pick a favo I think it'd be _kalt_
'cold' (adv.) which sounds what it means: [k_haKt].

Then there are others in other tungs...

And my favorite sound sequences are [ndr] and
[ndl] for reasons I don't really understand.
I even designed the historical phonology of
Sohlob so that these combos should occur, but
then I ruined it again by inserting svarabhakti
vowels, so that *rini-anra became *linandra and
then became _linandar_, but the -ndr- still
occurs in oblique forms.  It means 'western
river' and is probably my favorite Sohlob word,
BTW, although Sohlob isn't usually that melifluent.
The reason for the initial l- is a dialect
pronunciation: it would be _rinandar_ in pure
classical Central Sohlob, and _linal_ in the
Western dialect, if the Westerners called the
river by that name, which they don't.



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To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
Subject: Re: What's your favorite sounding word in any language?

At 19:04 19.12.2003, Shreyas Sampat wrote:

>I'm a particular fan of the Gujarati /aNr`i/, "finger."
So that is what they made of Sanskrit _aNguli_!

Now go fig what Angulimala means!  It was the name
of a bandit who was converted into a monk by
the Buddha.



/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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