Re: Aesthetics

Hi!

On 10/16/07, Michael Poxon <mike@...> wrote:
>
> Ooh, interesting!
> Aesthetics (personally) is everything. For me, it's not the sounds
> themselves but the relationship between them, though there are some sounds
> I
> just don't like.

Hm, sure. The first thing I liked in Sanskrit is the 'ta tha da dha na'
thing : ).

/f/ for instance, especially when word-final. I think a lot
> of our likes and dislikes have identifiable historical roots. For example,
> is a dislike of nasalised vowels related to a tyrannical French teacher?
> Many people say they "Don't like German" because it reminds them of...
> well,
> it's obvious.

Judging who know how many by just one is... frustrating. Some say because
German is too guttural. I think everyone here heard this at least once ; )
even my German teacher once tried to convince me that the <ch> in <ich> is
guttural... alas, not so. Funny is that French is never thought as guttural,
even with abounding /R\/.

Personally I love German, I can't help associating it with
> Beethoven's 9th! Some sounds I think are brilliant because of their
> strangeness. I remember one night last year when a couple of African
> ladies
> got on the bus and started speaking (I would guess) Xhosa, complete with
> clicks. Terrific!

Clicks are otherworldly to me : ).

"Glottal stop sounds very rude"... well, the glottal stop is a feature of
> traditionally "substandard" English dialects, but is a phoneme of
> Hawaiian,
> surely one of the world's most mellifluous languages. I guess that it
> depends on your personal exposure to these sounds.

My L1, Portuguese, doesn't have it at all. Then I heard it in English, and I
disliked. But I noted recently that when I need to emphasize word boundary
where vowel sandhi would appear, I use just that, but I never heard it
anywhere else... weird. My problem is with it initially, now.

As far as my own conlang goes, I prefer dental to alveolar, no aspiration,
> no word-initial or -final consonant clusters. Use of voiced stops in
> word-initial position.

I thought once about killing every fricative ; ). When you hear someone at
distance, /s/ screams. Voiced stops  on word-initial position are gentle
indeed. And I think word final consonants must be voiceless, or receive a
schwa just in case...

Morphology...has to be suffixing, and pleasantly agglutinative. I'd love to
> go polysynthetic, but obviously aren't man enough for it yet! :-)

Ah, me too. Let's learn Greenlandic! : )

Mike
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Edgard Bikelis" <bikelis@...>
> To: <CONLANG@...>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 1:56 AM
> Subject: Aesthetics