Re: Euphonic phonology (Was: 'Nor' in the World's Languages)

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 06:32:16PM +1000, Yahya Abdal-Aziz wrote:
[...]
> Christian Thalmann replied:
> >
> > Not at all, I absolutely love making phonologies.  Disappointingly
> > (?), I usually end up with rather simple vowel systems, and no
> > hard-to-pronounce consonants.  But maybe that's just the recipe for
> > pleasing phonologies?  It seems to work for Quenya, IMHO the
> > hallmark of pleasing phonology.
[...]
> Generally, I'd go along with Christian here.  I tend to avoid
> difficult consonant clusters or fine vowel shadings, for reasons both
> of euphony and simplicity.  I like my vowels to have a high degree of
> allophony or free variation, which limits the total number of vowel
> phonemes possible; and for consonants, I don't find using three sets
> of contrasts, eg voice, retroflexion and aspiration, to distinguish
> two phonemes terribly practical.  These are all personal preferences,
> and have nothing to do with what phonemes the world's speakers do use,
> and everything to do with my own background and the biases that
> creates.
[...]

That's interesting. Generally, I avoid consonant clusters as well, but
I'm a sucker for fine vowel distinctions and fine consonant constrasts.
My favorite vowel distinction is [E] vs. [e] vs. [@\].  I suppose it's a
consequence of my L1, which distinguishes between nasal and non-nasal
vowels, has much less tendency for vowel reduction compared to English.
It also has a 4-way consonantal distinction, e.g., /n/, /d/, /t/, /t^h/.

After I started learning Russian, though, I'm less afraid of consonant
clusters. Russian has a LOT of them... and many of them are extremely
hard to pronounce, at least for me. I think if I ever get to creating a
descendant lang of Tatari Faran, I'll introduce a lot of clusters. It's
not that hard: you just drop a bunch of random vowels, just like Russian
did, ;-) and let the consonants collide. In the process, you get some
merging and simplification (e.g., voicing/aspiration assimilation,
etc.), so it should be possible to get a unique sound flavor to the
resulting lang. I did try a similar process with Ebisédian -> Tamahí,
but (for other reasons) the resulting lang wasn't up to standard so I
abandoned it. (Ebisédian is almost completely VCVC..., but Tamahí has
syllabic consonants.)


T

--
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