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

Andræyas Yuhensun isnerq:
 > [Massive snippage ahead]
 >
 > Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <bpjonsson@...>:
 >
 >> Xriçten Talman (Christian Thalmann) isnerq:
 >>> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
 >>>
 >>>> Anyway, do others also have such a hard time finding personally
 >>>>  pleasing phonologies?  I find it awefully difficult.
 >>> 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.
 >> I'm the quintessential phonology nerd.  Indeed my conlangs seldom
and only with an effort develop beyond a phonology.
 >
 > I might not be quite quintessential (maybe "sexessential"? :)), but
I'm definitely a phonology nerd too. I can spend unlimited time crafting
the phonology and morphology of a language, but syntax tends
 >  to bore me (which, unfotrunatly, tends to lead to boring syntax :(),
 >  and I find lexicon-building very slow work.

Yes, and I'm slow even with the stuff I like!

 > I'm afraid I just can't use random word generators, partly because
they get horrid to write (one for Tairezazh, frex, would need to throw
in dental stops with higher frequency than velar ones, or the resultant
vocabulary would just sound wrong, and so on for umpteen different
variables),

Yes, weighting, as it is called, *is* a bit troublesome.
There are ways around it however.  BTW it can even be a
problem with a-posteriori langs: I once crafted an historical
phonology that made the resulting language end up with
/g/ as the most common stop.  Hardly naturalistic, as in
fact /g/ tends to be the least frequent stop, and often even
lost altogether.

 > partly because I feel a need to mentally meld form and meaning
 > together in my head. It's not that I think form should *fit* meaning
 > on some absolute sense (except for onomatopoeia) - Meghean ['anja]
 > and Steienzh [zEd_dl_d=], both meaning "girl", are hardly very
 > similar - but just that I need to find a combination that feels
 > "right" in the context of the language.

Yes.  FYI I find myself reorganizing my generated wordlists
just for that reason.

 >> Kate skrev:
 >>>
 >>> I do, although for me it's more about how the language looks than
 >>>  how it actually sounds. Since I create most of my languages for
stories, how the language looks in transliteration is important to me.
(And I'm picky about the transliteration not being too inaccurate or
ambiguous, too.) I probably spend more time trying to balance what I
consider interesting and pleasing with what's sensible and pleasing in
transliteration.
 >>>
 >>> What I wonder, is does anyone have the same problem when it comes
 >>>  to morphology, syntax, etc? Sometimes I end up tossing a whole
language because I don't think it's elegant enough, enough though
 >>>  there are at least ten different reasons that doing that is silly.
 >>>
 >>
 >> Oh yes!  I often find myself ending up with too elegant (i.e. too
regular) morphology and syntax, or even worse with what IMNSHO are
 >>  too bland phonology and syntax (i.e. too Standard Average European.)
 >
 > Those are problems I experience too. Tairezazh, in particular, is
insanely regular - not only is the frequency of regular inflections too
high, but the irregularities themselves are too regular! Luckily,
 >  Meghean's spelling is rather quirky ...

Look at Kijeb <http://wiki.frath.net/Kijeb> which is
awfully regular even for a reconstructed proto-language.
It does have some sandhi-induced weirdness in the
formation of pronominal plurals and in verbal morphology,
but the latter is in for a revamp because the underlying
morphology represents a faulty understanding of hierarchic
alignment.

 > As for SAEness, my languages show plenty of that, tho not without
some quirks. Sapir, IIRC, said that  SAE languages have a tripartite
tense division past~present~future; this isn't all that true of actual
European languages, but it's very true of my Klaishic family! Meghean,
as a conscious reaction against this, goes the other way, with a TAM
system that is chiefly concerned with aspect, secondarily with mood, and
hardly at all with tense per se.

Alas I must confess that I have trouble getting my
brain to process anything but past~present~future,
finding even what little aspect there is in Latin,
Greek and Vedic mind-boggling.  Not a good sign as
I'm currently enlisted to learn Russian! :-/
For Kijeb I tried to come up with a realis-irrealis
system instead, and with some aspect, since subordinate
clauses have a verbal noun instead of a finite verb,
and the case forms come to mean things like 'before,
after, simultaneously' WRT the main clause.

 >> Like you I'm picky about transcription/transliteration/Romanization.
I have some ingrained peeves, of which "|h| digraphs should preferably
be used only to indicate aspiration and/or voiceless sonorants, and
*not* as a fricativizer, even less as a palatalizer and *absolutely not*
as a random modifier" is the chief one.
 >
 > I've always liked using -h for fricativization - witness Meghean,
where the letter is *only* used to indicate fricativization and
phonologically related processes (such as [s]->[h], or, my favourite,
 >  [S]->[hj]).

The fact that |h| is *only* used as a fricativization
diacritic is of course mitigating, as is the faux Gaelic
look that results from it -- how refreshing with an
Elvish lang that looks Gaelic rather than Welsh! ;-)
But shouldn't it rather be [S] > [C]?  That's what
I'd expect /hj/ to end up as -- cf. Icelandic
_hjól_ [Co:wl] 'bicycle' (like German _Rad_.

 > Andreas
 >
 >
 >


--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)