Re: Aesthetics

--- Scotto Hlad <scott.hlad@...> wrote:

> I come to conlanging as an artlanger.
[snip interesting list of languages]

>  Anything
> that I do is strictly by "instinct" only with
> everything done based on how
> it "feels" and "looks."
This is sounding tremendously like what I do.  I have
an idea for the sort of "feel" I want, then evaluate
almost solely by what seems to fit.  It's an almost
instinctual thing, though often as the corpus of the
language develops I will get more of a handle on what
works and what doesn't.  Some of my early Franj words
look very strange and ugly now.

As far as my actual aesthetics go, I like vowel
harmony, I tend to find unvoiced consonants more
euphonious than voiced, and front vowels than back,
and I have a tendency to shy away from really unwieldy
clusters when I want a language to sound beautiful.
But having said that, I like Kazakh, which has a lot
of more guttural sounds in it.

As far as structure... well, as long as it flows.
Franj started out as SVO and somehow morphed into VSO
except for topic-fronting for emphasis, and several
other languages and attempts were VSO too.  Hmm.

I tend to design regularity and then insert deliberate
irregularities.  Like when the regular forms of the
Franj verbs "to be", "to see", and "to say" became too
long for the amount I was having to use them...

This is an interesting thread.  I've never really
analysed my own aesthetics of language before.  It's
tended to be "I know what I like when I see/hear it".

As far as realism goes, well, I try to keep it withing
the reasonable.  Though Franj is probably unrealistic
in that I kept both the French gender system and the
Turkic vowel harmony when I was creating it.  I doubt
a "real" language derived from both French and Qypchak
Turkic would do that.  But I've gone too far to change
it, and anyway, I happen to like the result!

Geoff

=====

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