Phonaesthetics
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Phonaesthetics is the claim or study of inherent pleasantness or beauty (euphony) or unpleasantness (cacophony) of the sound of certain linguistic utterances. Poetry is often considered euphonic, as is well-crafted literary prose. Important phonaesthetic devices of poetry are rhyme, assonance and alliteration. Closely related to euphony and cacophony is the concept of consonance and dissonance.
The phrase cellar door has some notoriety as the reputedly most euphonic sound combination of the English language (specifically, when spoken with a British accent). A more recent example of an allegedly ugly-sounding word is blog
From this meaning should be distinguished the closely related but different concept of phonaesthesia, which does not refer directly to aesthetic attributes of sound, but to phonetic elements that are inherently associated with a semantic meaning. The term was introduced by J. R. Firth in 1930 "The phonæsthetic habits [...] and are of general importance in speech." Firth defined a phonaestheme as "a phoneme or cluster of phonemes shared by a group of words which also have in common some element of meaning or function, though the words may be etymologically unrelated."
Sub-phonematic euphony
In most languages, difficult to pronounce phonetic combinations will be adopted to allow more flowing speech, for reasons of ease of pronunciation rather than aesthetics. These adaptations will be sub-phonematic at first, but over several generations will lead to phonematically relevant sound changes
sandhi ("euphonic" rules in Sanskrit grammar)
vowel harmony
assimilation (linguistics)
dissimilation
elision
epenthesis
affection (linguistics)
i-mutation
References
Ross Smith, Inside Language - Linguistic and Aesthetic Theory in Tolkien, Walking Tree Publishers (2007), ISBN 978-3-905703-06-1.
See also
cellar door
English and Welsh
inherently funny word
phonosemantics
onomatopoeia
Japanese sound symbolism
glossolalia
symphony
harmony
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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Last updated on Tuesday October 30, 2007 at 22:14:56 PDT (GMT -0700)
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