Re: Aesthetics

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. /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. 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!
"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.
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.
Morphology...has to be suffixing, and pleasantly agglutinative. I'd love to
go polysynthetic, but obviously aren't man enough for it yet! :-)
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Edgard Bikelis" <bikelis@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 1:56 AM
Subject: Aesthetics


> Hi!
>
> I was wondering: as we surely are guided by some aesthetic principles in
> our
> conlanging, what are those principles we use? Maybe it's not a fecund
> subject, but let's give a try : ). As it's all subjective, care is needed
> when commenting, but it would be nice to hear what other people think is
> beautiful, and about what I think... or rather feel.
>

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