Cellar door

[Nortaneous]

I'm probably in the minority but I love rhotic accents and hate non-rhotic ones. Non-rhotic accents always feel as if the end of the word just trails off: "sellaah daaah" is just ugly as hell.

That's only if you have the cot-caught merger, so only applies to the US: in the UK, the standard pronunciation would be more like "sella daaww", with not much variation dialectally.

does anybody in the US merge /or/ and /A/

[Mike Yams]

I for one find Classical Nāhuatl to be a "cellar door" language.

[Max1461]

I for one find Classical Nāhuatl to be a "cellar door" language.

By which I assume you mean you find it's entire phonology inherently pleasing (as opposed to it having an usually high number of "nice sounding" words)? I would certainly agree, I absolutely love Nāhuatl.

[Vijay]

Personally, I'm more partial to the Chatino of San Juan Quiahije that way.

[Mike Yams]

I for one find Classical Nāhuatl to be a "cellar door" language.

By which I assume you mean you find it's entire phonology inherently pleasing (as opposed to it having an usually high number of "nice sounding" words)? I would certainly agree, I absolutely love Nāhuatl.

Yeah, that.

[syzithryx]

I don't know about cellar door languages, but I positively despise languages with lots of short syllables, like Italian and Spanish (both of which are for some reason called beautiful by most people ???). I like consonant clusters far better, like in German or English - really any Germanic language. Japanese I can handle but still too many syllables. Esperanto is just foul. French is relatively sane, fewer syllables. Generally, the fewer syllables you need to pronounce in order to say something, the more I like the language. I have a real hangup about that. This is why Ithkuil seems amazing to me, albeit hard to speak.

In terms of the phonological sounds I find aesthetically pleasing... well, like Tolkien presumably did, I prefer laterals to rhotics, always, though I'm not against rhotics. I don't use the English rhotic /ɹ/ much in languages, but I like the tap /ɾ/ and the French rhotic /ʁ/. I like fricatives of all kinds. I don't like labial sounds much at all except /m/ and /v/ (but then I have a degree of grapheme to color synaesthesia and both the symbols "m" and "v" look various shades of purple to my mind's eye, and purple is my favorite color so...). I prefer voiced sounds to unvoiced ones usually, though this isn't universal. I LOVE dental fricatives. For some reason I take slight offense at /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ under some circumstances but like them in others. My favorite phone is the unvoiced lateral fricative /ɬ/. I have in recent times been developing a relationship with the unvoiced palatal fricative /ç/ which is going nicely, and I'm almost ready to take him to dinner.

In terms of vowels, I prefer front and high over back and low, though schwa is always welcome, and I find vowels with the "wrong" amount of rounding (like /y/ and /ɯ/) oddly beautiful. I like languages which incorporate pitch even though it's harder for me to pronounce.

I guess if I had to come up with a word which is like "cellar door" to me (and that's a pretty good phrase by itself), it would be /θwy:meɾɪx/ which means "dream" in my language Saolikc. For an English word, I would choose "mystery" /mɪstəɹi/.

[LinguistCat]

Speaking of synesthesia, while it doesn't affect overall whether I like a sound better, I see unvoiced consonant sounds as "brighter" and more saturated colors, and voiced consonants are either darker or less saturated. Does anyone with synesthesia have some similar pattern, whatever the actual correspondence is?

[Pole, the]

I mean the phrase "gweithio'n galed" is beautiful when you disregard its meaning, so is "Ynys Môn", "noswaith"

So was it a conscious decision to make a fluttery sounding language have such a brutish looking orthography? Half the words look like Klingon to me.

For me, it's the opposite. It looks just like a stereotypical elvish fantasy conlang, one that has an appealing orthography but actually sounds boring.

[syzithryx]

@vampyre_smiles I associate vowel sounds with shapes and directions of motion, but that's the only direct relation between sounds and other senses that I can name. For instance /i/ feels like a flat object moving downward to me, like someone slapping a table or a piece of paper floating to the ground. /o/ feels like a long thin object moving upward, like a rocket ship. /ɛ/ feels like a flat object moving across a horizontal or down a slightly sloped surface, like someone sliding their hand down a ramp. Literally, my entire life I have associated vowel sounds with those physical shape + motion complexes, I have no idea why. It's not full synaesthesia - nowhere near - there's no hallucination anywhere, but in my head they feel like equivalent concepts. Oddly, all "vowel motion" is upward, downward, to the right, or some combination of those - never the left. Maybe it's because I'm right-handed.

[LinguistCat]

@vampyre_smiles I associate vowel sounds with shapes and directions of motion, but that's the only direct relation between sounds and other senses that I can name. For instance /i/ feels like a flat object moving downward to me, like someone slapping a table or a piece of paper floating to the ground. /o/ feels like a long thin object moving upward, like a rocket ship. /ɛ/ feels like a flat object moving across a horizontal or down a slightly sloped surface, like someone sliding their hand down a ramp. Literally, my entire life I have associated vowel sounds with those physical shape + motion complexes, I have no idea why. It's not full synaesthesia - nowhere near - there's no hallucination anywhere, but in my head they feel like equivalent concepts. Oddly, all "vowel motion" is upward, downward, to the right, or some combination of those - never the left. Maybe it's because I'm right-handed.

So would you say that generally front vowels are flat objects doing X while back vowels are long thin objects doing X? (since from what little you described that seems to be the thing /i/ and /ɛ/ shares that /o/ doesn't, but this might be too small of a sample.) Or maybe I'm mistaking a rounded/unrounded pattern for the front/back pattern? Or is there no real pattern that you can tell?

[Qwynegold]

I have a list where I write down beautiful sounding words that I happen to come up with. But I never get to use that list because a) I'm always deriving languages from parent languages, b) none of the words fit the phonology of whatever language I'm working with atm, and c) I don't remember to bring up that list when I need new words. :/

[Nachtuil]

I think it is all subjective. I for instance like the word sky even if they don't follow seniority hierarchy.

[Curlyjimsam]

So was it a conscious decision to make a fluttery sounding language have such a brutish looking orthography? Half the words look like Klingon to me.

For me, it's the opposite. It looks just like a stereotypical elvish fantasy conlang, one that has an appealing orthography but actually sounds boring.

I find these observations interesting. I was first exposed to Welsh at the age of five or so, before either Klingon or any Elvish fantasy languages, and I never really made the connection between them. Welsh doesn't much look like Klingon to me. And I knew that Tolkien's Sindarin was inspired by Welsh, and could even tell you how, but I'm not sure I've ever looked at anything Welsh and thought "that looks Elvish" - though I can see why people think so!

[Jonlang]

So was it a conscious decision to make a fluttery sounding language have such a brutish looking orthography? Half the words look like Klingon to me.

For me, it's the opposite. It looks just like a stereotypical elvish fantasy conlang, one that has an appealing orthography but actually sounds boring.

I find these observations interesting. I was first exposed to Welsh at the age of five or so, before either Klingon or any Elvish fantasy languages, and I never really made the connection between them. Welsh doesn't much look like Klingon to me. And I knew that Tolkien's Sindarin was inspired by Welsh, and could even tell you how, but I'm not sure I've ever looked at anything Welsh and thought "that looks Elvish" - though I can see why people think so!

There are absolutely no similarities between Welsh and Klingon:

English: Where's the bathroom?
Klingon: nuqDaq 'oH puchpa'' e'
Welsh: Lle mae'r ystafell ymolchi?

And whereas Tolkien did take inspiration from Welsh for Sindarin, there are a lot of things about Sindarin which are nothing to do with Welsh. For instance, Sindarin has no gender; the Sindarin Y sounds like /y/, which he borrowed from French; Sindarin has /ʍ/, Welsh does not; Tolkien's consonant mutations are more complicated than Welsh, if Salo's analysis of them is accurate; and the Sindarin verb is more like that of Literary Welsh rather than colloquial, so many Welsh speakers probably wouldn't see a similarity there either. And on top of that Sindarin generally follows Old and Middle Welsh more closely than Modern Welsh which also helps to blur the line.

[Pole, the]

And whereas Tolkien did take inspiration from Welsh for Sindarin, there are a lot of things about Sindarin which are nothing to do with Welsh. For instance, Sindarin has no gender; the Sindarin Y sounds like /y/, which he borrowed from French; Sindarin has /ʍ/, Welsh does not; Tolkien's consonant mutations are more complicated than Welsh, if Salo's analysis of them is accurate; and the Sindarin verb is more like that of Literary Welsh rather than colloquial, so many Welsh speakers probably wouldn't see a similarity there either. And on top of that Sindarin generally follows Old and Middle Welsh more closely than Modern Welsh which also helps to blur the line.

In fact I only said it *looks* like Elvish, not necessarily *sounds* like it. (In fact, I have noted I expect it to sound just like a regular language, nothing Cellar-door-like.)

[mèþru]

<y> is /i j/ in /french. /y/ is <u>.

[Jonlang]

<y> is /i j/ in /french. /y/ is <u>.

No one said otherwise.

[syzithryx]

@Vampyre_Smiles I think the pattern is that any compression in the mouth (either labial or palatal) feels like "flat" to me, and otherwise it feels "thin". So rounded vowels feel flatter than unrounded ones, and vowels closer to /i/ feeler flatter than those further away. The "flattest" vowel is /y/ which feels to me like a flat object being thrust straight forward, away from the body, like the gesture of stopping someone with a flat hand, or a Spartan thrusting his shield forward. This is because /y/ is both palatal (the tongue is "flat" against the roof of the mouth), and rounded (the lips are "flat" against one another though I know that's not physically accurate, but in terms of mouth feel).

In terms of angle, I think palatal sounds feel horizontal (like /i/ which is like someone patting a horizontal flat surface), labial or rounded sounds are more vertical (/u/ feels like a flat object thrust upward), and dorsal sounds are sort of in between. It's hard to explain... maybe I should draw it on a vowel map or something.

[Max1461]

Sindarin Y sounds like /y/, which he borrowed from French

<y> is /i j/ in /french. /y/ is <u>.

No one said otherwise.

You did.

[Zaarin]

Sindarin Y sounds like /y/, which he borrowed from French

<y> is /i j/ in /french. /y/ is <u>.

No one said otherwise.

You did.

He obviously meant the sound /y/, which occurs in French and Sindarin but not Welsh: Welsh <y> is /ə i/.

[Jonlang]

Sindarin Y sounds like /y/, which he borrowed from French

<y> is /i j/ in /french. /y/ is <u>.

No one said otherwise.

You did.

No I said that Tolkien borrowed /y/ from French. I didn't say that French writes /y/ as <y>. And this is known because the IPA didn't exist in Tolkien's day and he simply described the Sindarin <y> as "French U". But my point also serves to show that there is even a difference between Sindarin <y> and Welsh <y> Sindarin being /y/ and Welsh being /ə/ or /ɪ/ in final syllables.

[mèþru]

The first version of the IPA was actually made before Tolkien's birth. Every draft has used <y> for /y/

[Jonlang]

The first version of the IPA was actually made before Tolkien's birth. Every draft has used <y> for /y/

Maybe he was familiar with it then. I've definitely seen somewhere where he wrote something like "French u for Sindarin y" but for the life of me I cannot remember where. There are so many books!

[mèþru]

He definitely doesn't use IPA in his appendices, but those were written for lay people under the mistaken assumption that they would read the appendices.

[Jonlang]

He definitely doesn't use IPA in his appendices, but those were written for lay people under the mistaken assumption that they would read the appendices.

I read them