Re: Woody or tinny?

En réponse à Bjorn Kristinsson <bjornkri@...>:

>
> Two words of English I particularly dislike are 'queue' and 'genre'
> (the
> latter with most sorts of American accent is appalling to my ear).
> Dunno
> why, no explanations needed :)
>
> Bring 'em if you've got 'em
>
Well, strangely enough, I don't really have any word(s) I *dislike*. It's rather
some pronunciations of some words that sometimes turn me down. For instance, I
cannot think of any French word I really dislike (apart from my own last name,
but that's another matter :) ), although I do dislike some words pronounced with
certain accents, in other accents they sound just nice (quite a strange language
which has "guillotine", such a nice word for such an awful invention...). The
only sound I can really say I dislike is the ich-laut (voiceless palatal
fricative, quite frequent in German and in some pronunciations of the English
words "human" and "humour", pronunciations that, to my regret, I learnt to
imitate...). "Mädchen" for instance is a word I particularly dislike.

I used to dislike all sounds that came past the velum, except the French uvular
/R/ and the aspirated /h/, but I learned to like them, and even though Arabic
has a little too many of them, I must say I do find the language pleasant to
hear (unfortunately, it's usually pronounced in ways that I dislike...).

As for the sounds I prefer, I must say that I have a big preference for
consonnant clusters stop+fricative (in both orders) or stop+liquid (even
stop+nasal :) ). Among them, my preferred ones are clusters with /l/ (or
consonnants with lateral release), and fricatives like /ts/ or /dz/ (I used to
like /tS/ and /dZ/ more, but I probably grew tired of them). My favorite of them
all is certainly /tl/! Guess why some of my favorite words are Quetzalcoatl or
Atlantis :)) . My conlang Moten is full of those fricatives and clusters with
/l/ :) . It also has palatalised l and n that I like a lot too. I do like the
semivowel /w/ too, especially after velar consonnants or vowels. Another cluster
that turns me on is /Gr/, found a lot in Southern Dutch. I love it! As for the
vowels, I like pure vowels or sequences of vowels, but I am not so found of
diphtongues (though a few are OK).

As you can see, it's much easier for me to say what I like rather than what I
dislike :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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