Beauty is truth, truth beauty–except for language

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
–John Keats, Ode on a Grecian urn

I knew that I was meant to be a linguist the day that I was listening to a Brazilian guy being tortured on the radio.  As the Portuguese-speaking police officer questioned him and the guy screamed in the background, I thought: what beautiful fricatives.  I think that this is also strong evidence that I am a terrible person, but that’s a conversation for another time.

There’s something that you need to keep in mind about this story: my judgement about the relative beauty or lack thereof of a language isn’t a professional judgement at all.  Rather, it is an entirely personal one.  Linguists think of themselves as people who study language from a scientific perspective, and from a scientific perspective, beauty is not a relevant characteristic for describing a language.  Are there people who study language from a non-scientific perspective?  Sure–poets.  Poets typically have a very deep awareness of language, and fantastic insights into it.  However, a poet’s understanding of what language is and how language works is very different from a linguist’s understanding of what language is and how language works.  I can’t imagine protesting against a poet’s description of something linguistic as beautiful.  But, that’s not a word that you would hear coming out of my mouth as a linguist.  As a civilian?  Sure–for example, Brazilian Portuguese is beautiful.  But, as we’ve seen, I’m a terrible person–so, take my aesthetic judgements with a grain of salt.

• la consonne: consonant.
• fricatif (adj.): sibilant, fricative.
• la consonne fricative: fricative consonant.
• la voyelle: vowel.