Re: Woody or tinny?

On Tue, 15 May 2001, Bjorn Kristinsson wrote:

> Hi
>
> I've noticed most asked seem to say that they're building of a vocabulary is
> generally done on an aesthetic basis; either by using 'nice' or even
> 'beautiful' words for 'beautiful' meanings and 'ugly' words for 'ugly'
> meanings, or vice versa. Or just one of these (probably more common, we all
> want out conlang to sound beautiful, don't we? :)
Actually, there are things about Dalmatian I don't like, like all the [dz]
and [dZ] sounds...

>
> This made me wonder, people on this list generally seem to have a preference
> for how a word should sound, and then I presume there must be a preference
> for how they should NOT sound. So, can you name me some words (natlang
> probably, conlang if you've got them) that you find particularly ugly?
Most beautiful words to me are from Finnish 'laulu' and 'lyhyt' [lyhyt]
and from Hungarian 'lehet' [lEHEt] (H = pharyngeal fricative) and the name
'Leah'. /l/ in all of its varieties is probably my favourite phone of
all...also front rounded vowels like [2] and [y]

Ugliest words (as they pop into my head)

most any non-germanic word in English...
Serbian [kr=tSma]
Icelandic 'hamingja'
palatalised consonants in general but especially [c]
Hungarian 'madzag', 'magzat'

probably many others...

-------ferko
Ferenc Gy. Valoczy

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