Sound and language in Middle-earth: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:16, 27 May 2022

Revision as of 22:08, 27 May 2022

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{{further|Sound symbolism}}

[[File:Booba-Kiki.svg|thumb||alt=A spiky geometric shape (left) and a rounded geometric shape (right)|The [[bouba/kiki effect]] shows that across cultures, sounds like "kiki" are linked with sharpness (left) and sounds like "bouba" with roundness (right), i.e. that [[sound symbolism]] is widespread.]]

Tolkien's point of view was a "heresy" because the usual structuralist view of language is that there is no connection between specific sounds and meanings.{{sfn|Turner|2013|pp=330–331}} Thus "pig" denotes an animal in English but "pige" denotes a girl in Danish: the allocation of sounds to meanings in different languages is taken by linguists to be arbitrary, and it is just an accidental by-product that English people find the sound of "pig" to be hoglike.{{sfn|Shippey|2005|pp=129–131}}