Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

vartapiszli, usw.

I've been looking at what various linguists have had to say about phonaesthetics or sound symbolism. It makes for a fun way to pass a Sunday morning before diving into the paper.

First, Otto Jespersen: "Shorter and more abrupt forms are more appropriate to certain states of mind, longer ones to others." He then goes on to talk about the imperative form (mainly in Latin). But, the opposite is true too: "In the same way [as the previous Danish example from Ibsen] the effect of splendid is strengthened in slang: splendiferous, splendidous, splendidious, splendacious." not too often, but at times, I tend to forget the playfulness of speakers: the plasticity of our linguistic material. These two quotations are from the twentieth chapter on sound symbolism. There's also a splendiferous section on popular terms in various languages for speakers of other languages based on terms taken from the language in question: e.g., "in Hungary German visitors are called vigéc (from wie geht's?), and customs officers vartapiszli (from wart' a bissl)." [Otto Jespersen. 1922. Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin.]

Next, a longer quotation from a master of linguistics:

Sound symbolism constitutes yet another autonomous category, of slightly controversial status. To the extent that sounds, in symbolic context (and nowhere else), are credited with conveying messages of their own, this marginal category represents a tenuous bridge to semantic change, ordinarily removed from the realms of articulation, acoustics, and auditory perception. Sound symbolism may be absolute or relative. The former category prevails if the analyst attaches, cross-linguistically, an unvarying evocative value to, say, a high front vowel or to a hissing prepalatal consonant; the problem then is to ascertain whether speakers will allow words endowed with major connotative force, through such ingredients, to participate in normal sound shifts, at the cost of heavy loss in suggestiveness. The effects of relative sound symbolism are conditioned by the given phonological system; thus, in a language generally adverse to long consonants an occasional geminate may boast "expressive" value (which it would otherwise lack). Again, the language historian is curious to learn how speakers maintain a word enhanced by such a feature in this privileged status amid the welter of pervasive transformations. At this juncture one notes a welcome contact with information theory. [Yakov Malkiel. 1968. "Historical Linguistics" in International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, vol IX, pp. 371-380. Reprinted in Malkiel, 1968, Essays on Linguistics Themes.]

Posted by jim at June 1, 2003 09:16 AM