Sound and language in Middle-earth: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:08, 27 May 2022

Revision as of 14:27, 30 May 2022

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[[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 ishas been 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>