During a 1955 lecture noted linguist J. R. R. Tolkien, better known today as the author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, claimed that ‘cellar door’ was more beautiful sounding than ‘sky’ or ‘beautiful’. In this he joined a long tradition of colleagues who held that ‘cellar door’ is among the most beautiful sounding words/phrases in the English language. Wikipedia tells me that some who hold this viewpoint assume a “specifically British pronunciation of the word: /sɛlədɔː/, which is homophonous with ‘sell a daw.'”

Ursula K. LeGuin and Robert Jordan later took this to heart in their respective fantasy novel series by naming locations Selidor and Salidar. Tolkien did note that in Welsh, “cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.”

In Khmer, the word for morality is សីលធម៌ which could be romanized as seilothmr. Phonetically, សីលធម៌ is pronounced sei-la-tawl. The last syllable, tawl, is pronounced hard and almost sounds like the word tar in English. There many sounds in Khmer that operate in the space between English letters which is to be expected from an alphabet that has almost 50 more letters than the English alphabet.

So there you have it. What has long been considered one of the most pleasant sounding word phrases in the English language is very similar to the Khmer word for morality or ethnics. I think that’s beautiful.