Re: Music-conlangs & music

Carsten Becker wrote:
> From: "Eldin Raigmore" <eldin_raigmore@...>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 12:40 AM
>
>> Timbre is essentially what distiguishes one phoneme from
>> another, or at least one "phone" from another; at any
>> rate it is what distinguishes one vowel from another.
>>
>> But there is more to timbre than that; timbre is also
>> part of what distinguishes one person's voice from
>> another's.
>
>
> Given that there is a musical language that distinguishes
> timbre -- if you played it on, say, a recorder, how would
> you imitate the typical sound of a violin when the "word"
> requires it?
Yes, indeed. Also AFAIK no language, whether a natlang or conlang uses
timbre in such a way.

I agree with Carsten's points about tone languages, as well as pitch
accented and stress accented. All this AFAIK I know is well enough
document. I assume that conlangs that imitate these features behave in a
similar way.

[snip]

> Carsten
> ... who has always wanted to do a musical conlang
Join the club   :)

Yep - the subject line explicitly refers to 'music-conlangs'. I thought
I had made it clear that I was referring to those conlangs that use
whole ranges of a musical scale of some sort or other. AFAIK there are
_no_ natlangs that do this.

It seems to me that with such conlangs there are implications regarding
song & music. Personally I don't think tonal natlangs or pitch accented
langs are comparable in this respect.

I was rather hoping that there might be a Solresol lurker on the list.
It seems there isn't {sigh}

--
Ray
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ray@carolandray.plus.com
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
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"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
interfere with language."         J.G. Hamann, 1760

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