phonetic intensives
Feb. 15th, 2004 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheSomething mentioned in Perrine's Sound and Sense is this term: phonetic intensive. The paragraph wasn't very informative, so outside research was necessary.
This outline of ideas explored in Sound and Sense describes the phonetic intensive as "certain sounds and sound combinations that seem to be associated with certain images or ideas". It's helpful to view the list on the page; the groups of words will give you a fuller sense of the definition.
This page calls phonetic intensives "examples of sound matching sense".
It goes on: "Naturally, there is no absolute connection between these phonemes and meanings (e.g. "thick" is hardly a word used to denote smallness), but there are enough examples of these phonetic intensives to make us wonder."
We don't seem to know why these phonetic intensives work the way they do, but they do work.
Just something to keep in mind (and, perhaps, to use to great advantage).
This outline of ideas explored in Sound and Sense describes the phonetic intensive as "certain sounds and sound combinations that seem to be associated with certain images or ideas". It's helpful to view the list on the page; the groups of words will give you a fuller sense of the definition.
This page calls phonetic intensives "examples of sound matching sense".
It goes on: "Naturally, there is no absolute connection between these phonemes and meanings (e.g. "thick" is hardly a word used to denote smallness), but there are enough examples of these phonetic intensives to make us wonder."
We don't seem to know why these phonetic intensives work the way they do, but they do work.
Just something to keep in mind (and, perhaps, to use to great advantage).
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-15 06:14 pm (UTC)Meaning we associate the 'sl' in sludge and slobber with goopiness because it reminds us of other such words, not the other way around.
It would be rather easy to check by looking at other languages with very distant (or nonexistant) shared roots and seeing if they use the same constructions. Dollars to donuts, they don't.
For instance, the Japanese word for slime is 'hedoro'. Slippery is 'nurunuru'.
So I think there's a couple of things going on here. One, there is a real process internal to a language which is initially arbitrary but eventually self-reinforcing such that when neologisms are developed, they are conditioned by the phonetics of pre-existing analogues in the language, and second the incidence is exaggerated, because people going out to look for these will inevitably find them, while they ignore all of the non-complying terms ('slanted' is not goopy. 'Goopy' is).
Not to say that as a poet you couldn't exploit those same associations. . and I think the phonetically strong poets consciously do. . but I think it goes too far to say that it's any case of phonology following semantics (and 'it makes us wonder' is a cop out that asserts 'it is' without being held accountable. Je t'accuse, author of second page!)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-15 06:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-15 07:43 pm (UTC)*wanders about in a childlike fashion*