Publication details
Experimental Linguopoetics Arises: Phonaesthetics vs Phonaesthemics – could have been Tolkien wrong?
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Linguopoetics, or a branch of linguistics dealing with creating languages (linguopoiesis), is a potentially rich field for experimental linguistic research. In our work, we have chosen and tested a hypothetical concept of phonaesthetics, originated outside of linguopoiesis, but introduced to it by John R. R. Tolkien, linguist and linguopoet himself. Phonaesthetics hypothesises that there is a universal causal relationship between the sound and meaning, i.e., the meaning of a word is determined by its sound, and vice versa. This represents so called strong formulation. Later, the weak formulation was introduced that it applies only to pairs of opposite / mutually extreme meanings. Another hypothesis to the relation between sound and meaning, the phonaesthemic hypothesis by John R. Firth, postulates ex-post mental association of a certain sound or group of sounds (a phonaestheme) with a certain meaning. We have undertaken a study probing both these hypotheses by means of asking respondents to assign different meanings to one of the pair of phonetic sequences (and other way around) in different arrangements to test as many potential consequences of these hypotheses as possible. We have applied phonetic sequence & meaning pairs from natural languages, created languages and randomly generated and attributed sequences. Our results suggest that although in the limited number of cases the respondents’ preference of a certain phonetic sequence to meaning is non-random (potentially a phonaesthemic phenomenon), in most cases, regardless of the origin, no causal relation between the two could be found, ruling thus the phonaesthetic hypothesis out. |