Re: basic vocab

On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 05:02:10PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> Amen.  I have definite phonetic aesthetic prejudices.  Very bad.
Hmm. I think I have phonetic aesthetic prejudices too, but IMHO, that's a
*good* thing, 'cos it gives your conlang a distinctive flavor. Well, that
is, if you adjust your prejudices appropriately for your conlang, else
it'd sound like your native language :-)

The approach I take with my conlang is to pretend I'm learning it as a
second language, so once I coin a new word, I try my best to "assimilate"
it into my thinking, so that it becomes "natural" for me.

>  I just
> go through the phoneme-list and try to even out the distributions, though
> I do allow my prejudices to show in some areas because I figure having a
> perfectly even phoneme distribution would just look weird!  :-)
[snip]

Yep, that's quite true. Though right now, I have the problem that many of
my consonants aren't even used yet! Which isn't really a problem, since I
still have less than 30 words in my lexicon; but I better start using
those sounds soon, otherwise there would be no reason for the fine
distinction I've made in them (ie., if velar fricatives are rarely used,
then there's no reason to justify why I distinguish between voiced and
unvoiced velar fricatives).

But on another note, IMHO simple consonants like /p/, /b/, /k/ should
occur more often in elementary words of a lang, if for no other reason
than they're the easiest sounds to make in any lang. Hmmm... maybe this
isn't true, and my conlang is losing its distinctive flavor ... yikes! :-/


T