Content deleted Content added
→An unconventional view: wl caption |
|||
Line 37:
=== An unconventional view ===
{{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}}
Tolkien was somewhat embarrassed by the subject of his linguistic aesthetics, as he was aware of the conventional view, due to [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] and from the 1950s strengthened by [[Noam Chomsky]] and his [[generative grammar]] school, that linguistic signs (such as words) were arbitrary, unrelated to their real-world referents (things, people, places). The Tolkien scholar Ross Smith notes that Tolkien was in fact not the only person who disagreed with the conventional view, "unassailable giants of linguistic theory and philosophy like [[Otto Jespersen|[Otto] Jespersen]] and [[Roman Jakobson|[Roman] Jakobson]]" among them.<ref name="Smith 2006">{{cite journal |last=Smith |first=Ross |title=Fitting Sense to Sound: Linguistic Aesthetics and Phonosemantics in the Work of J.R.R. Tolkien |journal=[[Tolkien Studies]] |volume=3 |issue=1 |year=2006 |doi=10.1353/tks.2006.0032 |pages=1–20}}</ref>
▲[[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).]]
More recently, [[sound symbolism]] has been demonstrated to be widespread in natural language.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Blasi |first1=Damián E. |last2=Wichmann |first2=Søren |last3=Hammarström |first3=Harald |last4=Stadler |first4=Peter F. |last5=Christiansen |first5=Morten H. |title=Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages |journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences |date=27 September 2016 |volume=113 |issue=39 |pages=10818–10823 |doi=10.1073/pnas.1605782113|pmid=27621455 |pmc=5047153 |doi-access=free }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Joo |first1=Ian |title=Phonosemantic biases found in Leipzig-Jakarta lists of 66 languages |journal=Linguistic Typology |date=27 May 2020 |volume=24 |issue=1 |pages=1–12 |doi=10.1515/lingty-2019-0030|hdl=21.11116/0000-0004-EBB1-B |s2cid=209962593 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Erben Johansson |first1=Niklas |last2=Anikin |first2=Andrey |last3=Carling |first3=Gerd |last4=Holmer |first4=Arthur |title=The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features |journal=Linguistic Typology |date=27 August 2020 |volume=24 |issue=2 |pages=253–310 |doi=10.1515/lingty-2020-2034|s2cid=209913202 }}</ref> The [[bouba/kiki effect]], for example, describes the cross-cultural association of sounds like "bouba" with roundness and "kiki" with sharpness.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bremner |first1=Andrew J. |last2=Caparos |first2=Serge |last3=Davidoff |first3=Jules |last4=de Fockert |first4=Jan |last5=Linnell |first5=Karina J. |last6=Spence |first6=Charles |title="Bouba" and "Kiki" in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape–sound matches, but different shape–taste matches to Westerners |journal=Cognition |date=February 2013 |volume=126 |issue=2 |pages=165–172 |doi=10.1016/j.cognition.2012.09.007|pmid=23121711 |s2cid=27805778 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Ćwiek |first1=Aleksandra |last2=Fuchs |first2=Susanne |last3=Draxler |first3=Christoph |last4=Asu |first4=Eva Liina |last5=Dediu |first5=Dan |last6=Hiovain |first6=Katri |last7=Kawahara |first7=Shigeto |last8=Koutalidis |first8=Sofia |last9=Krifka |first9=Manfred |last10=Lippus |first10=Pärtel |last11=Lupyan |first11=Gary |last12=Oh |first12=Grace E. |last13=Paul |first13=Jing |last14=Petrone |first14=Caterina |last15=Ridouane |first15=Rachid |last16=Reiter |first16=Sabine |last17=Schümchen |first17=Nathalie |last18=Szalontai |first18=Ádám |last19=Ünal-Logacev |first19=Özlem |last20=Zeller |first20=Jochen |last21=Perlman |first21=Marcus |last22=Winter |first22=Bodo |display-authors=6 |title=The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems |journal=Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |date=3 January 2022 |volume=377 |issue=1841 |pages=20200390 |doi=10.1098/rstb.2020.0390|issn=0962-8436|pmid=34775818 |s2cid=244103844 }}</ref>
| |||