#phonaesthemes

[aeniith]

Phonaesthetics and sound associations (pls reblog!)

I am going to do a small experiment. 

Below are some words that are licensed by the phonology and phonotactics of Karkin. I’ll give IPA next to it but if you can’t read that, let me know and I’ll try something else to describe the pronunciation. I am also able to an audio recording. If you wouldn’t mind taking a coulple of seconds just to give your immediate aesthetic impression of the words, I’d really appreciate it! Something simple is fine like: “sharp, angular, uncomfortable”. Or if you have a specific meaning in mind, that works too: “sounds like a word for a tool,” “could be a name of a person,” “sounds like the word for hit, strike, or beat” or something like that is cool too. You can respond to one word or some or all. :)  I want to try to get as high as response to this as possible (I’m currently studying phonaesthemes), so if you’d be so kind as to reblog this, I’d be really appreciative. <3  Here are the words: (Vowels are similar to Spanish or Japanese vowels unless otherwise stated.) - tke /tke/ - molsi /ˈmolsi/  - zgerin /ˈzgerin/ - rrëmlë /ˈʁəmlə/ (’rr’ is like a French ‘r’, ë is a schwa like the ‘a’ in ‘about’) - mniti /ˈmniti/ - culki /ˈculki/ (c is like English ‘ch’ sort of) - tseshong /ˈtseʃoŋ/ (’sh’ as in ‘she’, and ‘ng’ as in ‘song’) You can respond to the post to answer, reblog it, send an ask, send a message, anything :)  Thank you so much for your help with this project!!

[amyoosh]

re: smarties post, in canada (probably elsewhere too?) we have a different candy called smarties that're candy-coated chocolates really similar to m&ms! the coloured coating is thinner than m&ms and they come in different colours, but hopefully that clears it up lol

ohhhhhhhh thank you, that makes more sense! i was really confused lol. so what are the candies in the picture called in canada, if not smarties?

[aeniith]

Thanks!

I have gotten some great responses to my word phonaesthetics post! Thanks y’all. Please feel free to respond still if you haven’t, I’m definitely still interested in more people’s thoughts :)

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

tendrilsofreality said: Ooh! I reblogged this for being interesting before finishing it. Then I got to the sounds correspond to meanings part. I’m thrilled that this research is being done; that sounds were arbitrary always seemed wrong to me. Phonetic qabalah is possible.

Yes, this is totally a thing that people research!  One keyword is "sound symbolism", which is a special case of crossmodal correspondences.  You may also want to look up the "kiki bouba effect" (though I probably already told you about that).

From the little I've read, crossmodal correspondences seem to encompass both "inherent" connections between sounds and meanings (like the sort the article discusses, where the meaning arises from how the sound is made in the mouth), as well as semantically mediated connections (where a sound comes to be associated with a meaning because words with that sound often have that meaning).

The latter kind of connections are also called "phonaesthemes", and if you google that word you'll find a lot of cool examples.  They mostly come into existence for etymological reasons, I think.  Anyway one example is that words beginning with "sn" often have to do with the nose or mouth, e.g. sneer, snout, sniff, snarl, and so on.