Re: Harsh vs. Soft Sounds

Quoting Herman Miller <hmiller@...>:

> On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:36:13 -0700, JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
> wrote:
>
> >Sebastian Adems sikyal:
> >
> >> Well, for instance, French would be considered soft, where as a more
> >> guttural sounding language (can't think of anything right now, maybe LotR
> >> Orc tongues?)
> >
> >Please quote the material you're responding to, as I'm doing.
> >
> >I think French is one of the most unaesthetic languages I've ever heard.
> >But in any case, "harsh" vs. "soft" is a pretty subjective distinction,
> >and you haven't really defined it. I prefer "soft" sounding languages, by
> >which I mean languages dominated by voiceless sounds and without too many
> >velars or other "gutterals". Nonetheless, I've made languages that weren't
> >like that at all, and a poll of the languages on Conlang reveals plenty of
> >"harsh" languages by that criterion.
>
> Hmmmmm... I'd rate voiced sounds as "softer" than voiceless ones,
> especially in the case of [s] vs. [z].
Dare I guess that that's more a feature of the German phonemes /s/ and /z/
than of the phones themselves? At least in the variant of German they've been
teaching me, there's a strong fortis-lenis difference between those two.

                                                 Andreas