It was really quite fluid and beautiful.
Phonaesthetics is one way to judge a language. Some folks love simple syllabic patterns that are basically CV-CV, etc. If you listen to incidents of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), this is what a lot of people do when making up a language. I've often wonder what Georgians (and other speakers of Kartvelian languages) do when they make up nonsense syllables. Their language abounds in all kinds of difficult (for us anglophones) consonant clusters, including glottalized stops (see below). One of those languages, Kabardian, is alleged to have only one vowel (with a couple of allophones).
When listening to how folks react to languages unknown to them, I've found that tone makes more of an impact than vowels and consonants. If you were in the lowlands and the language happened to be one of the Maya ones, then it probably had tone and a series of stops that are glottalized. To pronounce a glottalized 'p' for example, pronounce the voiceless bilabial stop as you would usually, but after closing the lips, lower the glottis and release. Lots of languages have them in their phonological inventory, but only Armenian in IE lgs does.
