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Phonaesthetics

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Phonaesthetics(also spelledphonestheticsinNorth America) is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps byJ. R. R. Tolkien,[1]during the mid-20th century and derives fromAncient Greekφωνή(phōnḗ)'voice, sound' andαἰσθητική(aisthētikḗ)'aesthetics'. Speech sounds have many aesthetic qualities, some of which are subjectively regarded as euphonious (pleasing) or cacophonous (displeasing). Phonaesthetics remains a budding and often subjective field of study, with no scientifically or otherwise formally established definition; today, it mostly exists as a marginal branch ofpsychology,phonetics,orpoetics.[2]

More broadly, the British linguistDavid Crystalhas regarded phonaesthetics as the study of "phonaesthesia" (i.e.,sound symbolismandphonesthemes): that not just words but even certain sound combinations carry meaning.[3]For example, he shows that English speakers tend to associate unpleasantness with the soundsl-in such words assleazy,slime,slug,andslush,[4]or they associate repetition lacking any particular shape with-tterin such words aschatter,glitter,flutter,andshatter.[5]

Euphony and cacophony

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"Cacophony" and "Euphony" redirect here. For other uses, seeCacophony (disambiguation)andEuphony (disambiguation).

Euphony is the effect of sounds being perceived as pleasant, rhythmical, lyrical, or harmonious.[6][7][8]Cacophony is the effect of sounds being perceived as harsh, unpleasant, chaotic, and often discordant; these sounds are perhaps meaningless and jumbled together.[9]Compare withconsonance and dissonancein music. In poetry, for example, euphony may be used deliberately to convey comfort, peace, or serenity, while cacophony may be used to convey discomfort, pain, or disorder. This is often furthered by the combined effect of the meaning beyond just the sounds themselves.

The California Federation of Chaparral Poets usesEmily Dickinson's "A Bird came down the Walk"as an example of euphonious poetry, one passage being"...Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam "andJohn Updike's "Player Piano" as an example of cacophonous poetry, one passage being "My stick fingers click with a snicker / And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys".[10]

Research

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David Crystal's 1995 paper "Phonaesthetically Speaking" explores lists, created by reader polls and individual writers, of English words that are commonly regarded as sounding beautiful, to search for any patterns within the words' phonetics. Frequently recurring example words in these lists includegossamer,melody,andtranquil.Crystal's finding, assuming aBritishReceived Pronunciationaccent, is that words perceived as pretty tend to have a majority of a wide array of criteria; here are some major ones:[11]

  • Three or more syllables (e.g.,goss·a·merandmel·o·dy)
  • Stress on the first syllable (e.g.,góssamerandmélody)
  • /l/is the most common consonantphoneme,followed by/m,s,n,r,k,t,d/,then a huge drop-off before other consonants (e.g.,luminouscontains the first four)
  • Short vowels (e.g., theschwa,followed in order by the vowels inlid,led,andlad) are favored over long vowels and diphthongs (e.g., as inlied,load,loud)
  • Three or moremanners of articulation(withapproximant consonantsthe most common, followed bystop consonants,and so on)

A perfect example word, according to these findings, istremulous.Crystal also suggests the invented wordsramelon/ˈræməlɒn/anddrematol/ˈdrɛmətɒl/,which he notes are similar to the types of names often employed in the marketing of pharmaceutical drugs.

Cellar door

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The entrance of the "hobbithole ", which Tolkien devised, is a type of" cellar door ", the idea of whose phonetic beauty he popularized.

TheEnglish compoundnouncellar doorhas been widely cited as an example of a word or phrase that is beautiful purely in terms of its sound (i.e., euphony) without inherent regard for itsmeaning.[12]The phenomenon ofcellar doorbeing regarded as euphonious appears to have begun in the very early twentieth century, first attested in the 1903 novelGee-Boyby theShakespearescholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. It has been promoted as beautiful-sounding by various writers; linguistGeoffrey Nunbergspecifically names the writersH. L. Menckenin 1920;David Allan Robertsonin 1921;Dorothy Parker,Hendrik Willem van Loon,andAlbert Payson Terhunein the 1930s;George Jean Nathanin 1935;J. R. R. Tolkienin a lecture, "English and Welsh",delivered in 1955 (in which he described his reverence for theWelsh languageand about which he said "cellar doors[i.e. beautiful words] are extraordinarily frequent "; see alsoSound and language in Middle-earth); andC. S. Lewisin 1963.[12][13]Furthermore, the phenomenon itself is touched upon in many sources and media, including a 1905 issue ofHarper's MagazinebyWilliam Dean Howells,[a]the 1967 novelWhy Are We in Vietnam?byNorman Mailer,a 1991 essay byJacques Barzun,[15]the 2001psychological dramafilmDonnie Darko,[16][17]and a scene in the 2019 movieTolkien.

The origin ofcellar doorbeing considered as an inherently beautiful or musical phrase is mysterious. However, in 2014, Nunberg speculated that the phenomenon might have arisen from Philip Wingate andHenry W. Petrie's 1894 hit song "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard", which contains the lyric "You'll be sorry when you see me sliding down our cellar door." Following the song's success, "slide down my cellar door" became a popular catchphrase up until the 1930s or 1940s to mean engaging in a type of friendship orcamaraderiereminiscent of childhood innocence.[18][b]A 1914 essay aboutEdgar Allan Poe's choice of the word "Nevermore" in his 1845 poem "The Raven"as being based on euphony may have spawned an unverified legend, propagated by syndicated columnists like Frank Colby in 1949[21]andL. M. Boydin 1979, thatcellar doorwas Poe's favorite phrase.[22]

Tolkien, Lewis, and others have suggested thatcellar door'sauditory beauty becomes more apparent the more the word is dissociated from its literal meaning, for example, by using alternative spellings such asSelador,Selladore,Celador,Selidor(an island name inUrsula K. Le Guin'sEarthsea), orSalidar(Robert Jordan'sThe Wheel of Timeseries,) which take on the quality of an enchanting name (and some of which suggest a specificallystandard Britishpronunciationof the word:/sɛlədɔː/),[13][c][d][25]which is homophonous with "sell adaw."

See also

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Look upphonaestheticsin Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Notes

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  1. ^Howells attributes to a "courtly Spaniard" the quote, "Your language too has soft and beautiful words, but they are not always appreciated. What could be more musical than your wordcellar-door?"[14]
  2. ^Nunberg identifies "Playmates" as an earlier song from which "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard" was derived; in fact the derivation is the reverse.[19][20]
  3. ^In a 1966 interview, Tolkien said: "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me—'cellar door', say. From that, I might think of a name 'Selador', and from that a character, a situation begins to grow".[23]
  4. ^Most English-speaking people... will admit thatcellar dooris 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say,sky,and far more beautiful thanbeautiful.Well then, inWelshfor mecellar doors[i.e. such beautiful words] 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.[24]

References

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  1. ^Holmes, John R. (2010) "'Inside a Song': Tolkien's Phonaesthetics".In: Eden, Bradford Lee (ed.).Middle-earth Minstrel.McFarland. p. 30
  2. ^Shisler, Benjamin K. (1997).Phonesthetics".The Influence of Phonesthesia on the English Language.
  3. ^Crystal, David (2011).A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics.John Wiley & Sons. p. 364.ISBN9781444356755.
  4. ^Crystal, David (2001).A Dictionary of Language.University of Chicago Press. p. 260.ISBN978-0226122038.
  5. ^Allan, Keith (2014). "Phonesthesia".Linguistic Meaning.Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics.
  6. ^"CACOPHONY, Literary Terms and Definition by Carson-Newman University".Retrieved10 September2013.
  7. ^"Definition of Cacophony".19 August 2013.Retrieved10 September2013.
  8. ^Elizabeth, Mary; Podhaizer, Mary Elizabeth (2001)."Euphony".Painless Poetry.Barron's Educational Series.ISBN978-0-7641-1614-8.
  9. ^"Cacophony".Dictionary.Retrieved26 July2015.
  10. ^"Poetic Devices"(PDF).chaparralpoets.org.Retrieved12 April2017.
  11. ^Crystal, David (1995). "Phonaesthetically Speaking".English Today42.2 (April): 8–12. Cambridge University Press.
  12. ^abBarrett, Grant (14 February 2010)."On Language: Cellar Door".New York Times Magazine.p. 16.
  13. ^abNunberg, Geoff (26 February 2010)."The Romantic Side of Familiar Words".Language Log.Retrieved27 February2010.
  14. ^Howells, William Dean (March 1905)."Editor's easy chair".Harper's Magazine.p. 645.
  15. ^Jacques Barzun,An Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry(New Directions, 1991).ISBN0-8112-1157-6:"I discovered its illusory character when many years ago a Japanese friend with whom I often discussed literature told me that to him and some of his English-speaking friends the most beautiful word in our language was 'cellardoor'. It was not beautiful to me and I wondered where its evocative power lay for the Japanese. Was it because they find l and r difficult to pronounce, and the word thus acquires remoteness and enchantment? I asked, and learned also that Tatsuo Sakuma, my friend, had never seen an American cellar door, either inside a house or outside — the usual two flaps on a sloping ledge. No doubt that lack of visual familiarity added to the word’s appeal. He also enjoyed going to restaurants and hearing the waiter ask if he would like salad or roast vegetables, because again the phrase 'salad or' could be heard. I concluded that its charmlessness to speakers of English lay simply in its meaning. It has the l and r sounds and d and long o dear to the analysts of verse music, but it is prosaic. Compare it with 'celandine', where the image of the flower at once makes the sound lovely."
  16. ^Kois, Dan (23 July 2003)."Everything you were afraid to ask about" Donnie Darko "".Slate.
  17. ^Ross Smith,Inside Language,Walking Tree Publishers(2007), p. 65)
  18. ^Nunberg, Geoff (16 March 2014)."Slide down my cellar door".Language Log.Retrieved21 March2014.
  19. ^Nunberg, Geoff (17 March 2014)."GN response to comment by" Emma "".Language Log.Retrieved21 March2014.
  20. ^Lovelace, Melba (15 July 1989)."Words to" Playmates "Song Stir Up Controversy".News OK.Retrieved21 March2014.
  21. ^Colby, Frank (3 November 1949)."Take My Word For It".Miami Daily News.p. 45.Retrieved1 March2010.
  22. ^Boyd, Louis M. (15 January 1979)."Quoth the raven" cellar door "?".Reading Eagle.Reading, Pennsylvania. p. 5.Retrieved27 February2010.
  23. ^Zaleski, Philip; Zaleski, Carol (2015).The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams.New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. p. 25.ISBN978-0-374-15409-7.
  24. ^Tolkien, J. R. R. (1964).Angles and Britons.University of Wales Press. p. 36.
  25. ^Le Guin, Ursula K. (1968).A Wizard Of Earthsea.Parnassus. p. 64.ISBN9780553262506.
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