zompist bboard

Liquids. Also /kx/.

One thing I really love but not many other people do is syllabic resonants. They're why I stuffed Pazmat full of them; gṛḥ- "to kill", jṇbī- "young", jṃcan "woman", xṛḥ- "to butcher", tṇjī- "lazy"....

Generally I like to reject the common idea that a language needs to be "simple" and vocalic to sound good. Sure, Pazmat has stuff like that with things like mataraśva [mataɹaɕva] "We (INCL) want to speak" but it also has things like danśtnīṣrātṛ [danɕtniːʂɻaːtr̟] "rural (DEF.SG.GEN) and xṛḥeraṣnīṣṣmi [xr̩ʀeɹaʂniːʂːmi] "with those several acts of butchery". Speaking of uvular trills I fucking love those, they sound so much better than alveolar ones and they aren't utterly impossible to do.

Personally, I Chibcha tops my list so far: http://globalrecordings.net/en/program/C38203 . It sounds so respectful (for lack of a better word) and soothing.

Yeah, I know it's a Christian evangelism track, but hey, it's the best I could find, given the relative obscurity of the language. And you do have to give the missionaries credit for putting the language online, at least.

Chagen wrote:One thing I really love but not many other people do is syllabic resonants.

Yes. Many Southlandic inflectional endings are syllabic nasals, and Nahakhontl and Ta-lrm-zrq-k'r have syllabic consonants all over the place - the latter moreso.

Chagen wrote:Speaking of uvular trills I fucking love those, they sound so much better than alveolar ones and they aren't utterly impossible to do.

Very much yes. Three of my languages, Salenzian, Ishdes, and Modern Zarcosian, have uvular trills. Maybe a fourth and fifth one - Ta-lrm-zrq-k'r and Dolkharezan have a voiced uvular fricative, which I'll probably just end up pronouncing as a trill.

I'll fully admit that this is mostly because I'm an English speaker, but one thing that bugs me about some languages is having too many words that end in the same sound. Growing up with a tradition of poetry and songwriting that places an importance on rhyme schemes, languages with a lot of regular suffixes sometimes sound like they've got a lot of unintentional or awkward rhymes that are a turn off for me.

how ironic that old english ran mostly on alliterative rhyme

I like ɐ, ɪ̈, o, ɛ, and the diphthong ɪə. I like aspirated consonants, devoiced sonorants, rhotics, sibilants, ð, and the glottal stop. I hate syllables that end in ŋ. It sounds good in the onset. I don't get why European languages only allow them in the coda. The one thing that keeps me from liking Mandarin.

I absolutely love [θ], particularly in Spanish. I'm also a big fan of [ɬ], [ʎ], and [ç]. One of my conlangs had [çʷ], which is great, but not before [z̩], which the lang also had. Now that I think about it, I like [z̩] in theory, but in practice it's a pain.

Hallow XIII wrote:how ironic that old english ran mostly on alliterative rhyme

Not ironic, really. Old English was an inflectional, suffixing language, so using alliteration rather than rhyme would prevent verse structure and grammar from interfering with one another.

spidermilk wrote:I hate syllables that end in ŋ. It sounds good in the onset. I don't get why European languages only allow them in the coda.

As I understand it, ŋ is unstable and shifts quite quickly. That said, I like it too.

Ryan of Tinellb wrote:

spidermilk wrote:I hate syllables that end in ŋ. It sounds good in the onset. I don't get why European languages only allow them in the coda.

As I understand it, ŋ is unstable and shifts quite quickly. That said, I like it too.

I thought it had to do with the way ŋ developed in the Indo-European languages that have it. PIE didn't have phonemic ŋ, and the sound subsequently mostly developed from /n/ followed by a velar consonant. Since PIE syllabic nasals were given prothetic vowels or lost early in the history of the various sub-families, nK clusters only occurred after a vowel, and therefore [ŋ] never occurred initially.

PIE had prevocalic *gn and *kn which could have easily changed to a prevocailc ŋ but it didn't happen anywhere as far as I know. Why? I would guess areal influence. Prevocalic ŋ is not fashionable in the IE area.

vec wrote:PIE had prevocalic *gn and *kn which could have easily changed to a prevocailc ŋ but it didn't happen anywhere as far as I know. Why? I would guess areal influence. Prevocalic ŋ is not fashionable in the IE area.

I'm not sure how common nasals assimilating to preceding consonants is in IE languages, but the areal influence is probably a big part of it, yeah.

Icelandic has that kind of assimilation. In fact, we have a couple of /ŋ/ < /kn/ situations

Latin /gn/ was pronounced [ŋn], even word-initially, but no Romance language has changed it to [ŋ]. Would be a good addition to a romlang.

cntrational wrote:Latin /gn/ was pronounced [ŋn], even word-initially, but no Romance language has changed it to [ŋ]. Would be a good addition to a romlang.

Man, Latin just gets stranger the more I learn about it.

cntrational wrote:Latin /gn/ was pronounced [ŋn], even word-initially, but no Romance language has changed it to [ŋ]. Would be a good addition to a romlang.

I hear something that sounds like a [ŋj] for French /ɲ/ fairly regularly around here. But that might be my anglo ear.