Re: Esthetics

B. Garcia wrote:

> This came up a bit recently, but i'd like to know more from others.
>
> How do you all determine the esthetics of your conlangs? Do you have a
> formal system of rules governing combinations of vowels, consonants,
> dipthongs, etc. etc.? Or do you just go by "feel"?
I don't much go by rules, except in the case of what-if langs,
where what comes out of the mix is much determined by what goes in.

With Sohlob I had the general idea of a Persian-sounding phonology,
then somebody suggested vowel harmony, so in a way it got influenced
by Turkic too, although Sohlob VH is rather different from Turkic!
At the initial stage the aesthetic of a conlang is almost all about
phonology -- though very much phonotaxis and not only inventory.

One change that IMHO much changed the aesthetic of Sohlob to the better
was the introduction of /K/.  Middle Persian had something written
|hr| descending from Old Iranian */Tr/, and so I let the original
Sohlob -- which was called Sahrab! -- have /r_0/, but then I found
that I had difficulties distinguishing [r_0] from [S], so I changed
/r_0/ into /K/, which is one of my favorite sounds.

This goes to illustrate that my conlangs take on an aesthetic of
their own often quite different from my original intention.
Basically if it "feels" right I will include something new -- whether
it goes with or against my "macro-aesthetic".  I do want historical
depth in my conlangs, so a big part of the aesthetic of Sohlob has
been to devise a proto-language, which should have a working
aesthetic in its own right!, and then develop the sound-changes
to bridge the gap between the proto-phonology and the
daughter-phonology, the changes also preferably having an
aesthetic coherence, so that in the course of the work these
three "tiers" also influence each other.

It is rule-bound in the sense that I want naturalism in all three
tiers, but to achieve that I go mostly on feel.  One aspect of
historical-depth-conlanging is that if you can't decide what
features to include or reject you can always develop a new dialect.
The backside of this is of course the risk to end up with an
unmanageable dialect proliferation.  One example of how dialect
development can lead to unforseen aesthetic developents is when
someone thought that my |tj, dj, sj| transliterations were
alveopalatals rather than palatoalveolars and I accepted that.
Suddenly the problem of distinguishing [r_0] and [S] was gone,
since I have no problem distinguishing [r_0] and [s\]!, so I
reintroduced /r_0/ into the Kidilib dialect of Sohlob.  In many
ways Kidilib phonology is closer to my innate aesthetic and
less Persianate than Classical Sohlob, with the /K/~/r_0/
distinction, voiceless nasals and a proliferation of /i/.
This all goes on feel, but is restricted by my knowledge
of universals and what is naturalistic changes.  This doesn't
mean that I never break those constraints, but I want to have
an explanation when I do.

--

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)

Reply