Re: Aesthetic Language Sense

(dang!  happened again!)

--- Forwarded Message ---
To: <edheil@...>
From: "FFlores" <fflores@...>
Subject: RE: Aesthetic Language Sense
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 21:28:01 -0300

Ed Heil <edheil@...> wrote:

> I'm very familiar with the phonologically expressive resources of the
> English language, and Latin; to a lesser degree, with Greek, and maybe
> just a tiny bit with German, French, and others.  But languages I
> don't know well all have the same music to me -- a distinctive music
> representative of the language itself; but very little difference in
> the music depending on what "tune" is being "played" -- I just hear
> the sound of the instrument itself.
That happens to me in my own Drasel=E9q, since I shamefully have to admit
that I'm not fluent or even able to construct complicated sentences witho=
ut
the dictionary. But the sound and rhythm of the language is something I'v=
e
grown accustomed to, and I just *know* when something is out of place.
Many late developments derive from that intuition -- like the final
discourse markers, which are there mainly because Drasel=E9q just *needs*
to have a secondary stressed word as the last thing in a sentence.

> Does anyone feel the same way?  Or did anyone look into it and have a
> very different experience of it than mine?
About languages I don't know much about, I've found some that I like
and some that I don't. For example, spoken or sung Japanese must be
about the most absolutely beautiful thing on earth, for me. English
is nice sometimes, and sometimes horrible. French, with my excuses for
Francophones in the list, I rather dislike. I think I prefer phonologies
and syllable structures where everything is clearly finished, so to speak=
...
It's rather difficult to explain.


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/pablo-david/