Margaret Magnus Comments on Bioaesthetics and Phonosemantics
Links:
http://www.conknet.com/~mmagnus/
http://www.trismegistos.com/IconicityInLanguage
(I wrote to Margaret about her work on Phonosemantics – correlations between different consonants
and consonant clusters and deep archetypal meaning. Here are here comments on the connections she
sees with Bioaesthetics)
I do immediately associate some of the forms with sounds.
The
specifically sinister tenor is primarily in /s/ (sly, sneaky, slip,
smirk, etc.) The sinister /s/ also occurs disproportionately with /k/.
[sleight, slide, slimy, slippery, slit, skeleton, skulk, snake, snarl, snatch, sneak,
sneer, snip, etc]
There's an evil quality in both /v/ and /m/ as well. The evil in /v/ is
very similar to the one you display. The evil in /m/ is more violent and
malformed than the ones in your images... it's less foreboding than that
of /s/, /v/ and /k/. A semantic domain as broad as 'badness' is spread
throughout all the phonemes... but the nature of the badness varies.
Badness in /b/ is a bullying, tough guy sort of feeling.
In /d/ it's a back alley sort of feeling, depressed and sad.
In /g/, it's greedy.
In /p/, the evil takes the form of policing or priests -- those who do evil
by being too identified with rules and order at the expense of the
heart.
The evil in /t/ is big and titanic... tornadoes and vast
forces... trolls.
And so on and so forth... The effect of the form of a
word on its meaning does not determine what the word IS, but what it is LIKE.
The cozy sort of coves and corners you describe can't be found in all
the letters. The main one is /k/ (cozy, cuddle, caress, close, cover,
etc.), but to a certain extent you get something similar in other sounds
pronounced at the back of the mouth such as /h/... The coziness of /h/
is not so intimate and closed away, however. It's the warmth of the
hearth... home. The correlate to this feeling in sounds pronounced at
the lips is little bubble-like things, the correlate for sound
pronounced behind the tongue is tiny, tender, timid in /t/ and dear or
dainty in /d/.
As I read your accounts of the
spreading and constraining archetypes, of course associated sounds come
to mind. /bl/ is an explosive sort of radiating with a membrane or
barrier surrounding the word and /fl/ is like a fountain. /bl/ is before
and during the explosion and /fl/ after as I think of it.
I think this /bl/ vs. /fl/ is universal. It's intrinsic in the form of
/b/ (which is blocked in the mouth) vs. /f/, through which air is
allowed to pass. I had in mind words like this:
* ball, balloon, belch (ch in final position has a rupture), bell,
belly, bilge, billow, bladder, blimp, blister, bloat, blob, blouse,
blow, blubber, boil, boob, bosom, bubble, bulge, bulk, bum, bun/s, buoy,
burl, burst, bust, bustle
* belch, bellow, billow, blast, blizzard, bloat, bloom, blossom, blow,
bluster, (breath, breathe, breeze), bubble, build, (burp, burst, bust)
* faucet, flap, flue, fly, fount, fountain
* flap, flee, flight, fling, flit, flitter, float, flurry, flutter, fly
/k/ and
especially /kl/ has this containment and clustering. /h/ is home or
belongingness. The fact that the first two (/b/; /f/) are labials and the last two
velars is not coincidental.
A huge percentage of /k/ words are about containers, lids, corners,
coming, catching... I had in mind words like (in no particular order).
All this stuff is in the dictionary (http://www.trismegistos.com)
*come
*dock, park, stack, stick, stock, tuck
*cache, catch, cage, claim, clamp, clap, clasp, claw, cleave, clench,
clinch, cling, clink, clip, cloister, closet, clutch, coffer, comb, con,
coop, collar, corner, corral, coup, cull, cumber, keep, kennel, quarry, queue
*scalp, scan, scoop, screen, squeeze
* eke, frisk, hawk, hock, hook, lick, milk, peck, pick, pike, pluck,
rake, sic, soak, stock, suck, take, tax, tweak, whisk, yank
* clay, clod, clot, clump, cluster
* block, brick, bulk, chock, chunk, hank, hunk, pack, quark, rock, thick
* cable, call, coo, crew, crow, cry
* ask, bark, beck, hark, hawk, honk, knock
* cajole, campaign, cant, canvass, coax, con, court, covet, crave, cue
*comb, scan, scope, scour, scout, screen, scrounge, skim
* flick, gawk, look, lurk, peek, seek, wink
* clash, cross, kern
And so on and so forth.
The images you include make your point about verticality very clear... I
have to work more with visual images. Verticality occurs in many places
in the sounds, but the first consonant that comes to mind is /t/
followed by /p/. The two are actually very similar sounds. /h/ has
'height' in it, but it is planar - already located in heaven (or
helle), so to speak (high, heaven, hell). The /t/ is directed toward a
goal which we usually think of as vertically upward. The combination t-p
(t-b) often concerns tips and tops, or losing one's balance vertically
(steep, step, stoop, stub, tip, tipsy, topple, trap, tumble, tipple,
trip, ...) The p-t points downward into the ground rather than from on
high to the ground (crypt, pit, plant, pot, punt, put, putt, spit). (An
intervning /r/ or initial /s/ makes the p-t combination have a spouting
effect... spurt). And when there is no initial /t/, the word goes 'up'.
/t/ goes up to something in the beginning (to, toward, til, tend), and
at the end is already 'at' the location without actually being in it
(seat, sit, put, mount,...) or else is being sent away from it (out,
punt, rent, went, sent, oust,...)
What follows is what I wrote in the book about what got me into
it... Please forgive me for quoting it, but if I reworded it, it would
just turn out worse and be more time consuming:
"In 1993, as part of a computer project I was working on, I found myself
reading an English dictionary and parsing all the words into prefixes,
suffixes and roots. I had read work of linguists Dwight Bolinger, John
Lawler and Richard Rhodes which suggested that the initial consonants of
a word had a set of meanings, and the remaining rhyming part also had a
set of meanings. One ‘sense’ of ‘str-’ is linearity: string, strip,
stripe, street, etc. And one sense of ‘-ap’ is flat: cap, flap, lap,
map, etc. If you put them together, you get a flat line: ‘strap’. The
idea fascinated me, and since I was marking all these words anyway, I
decided to keep an eye out for these classes which have similar meaning
and pronunciation both.
I will follow Firth (1930) in calling a sound sequence and its
associated meaning a phonestheme. An example of a phonestheme is /gl/
which refers to reflected light:
/gl/ - shining, mostly reflected or indirect light - glare, gleam, glim,
glimmer, glint, glisten, glister, glitter, gloaming, glow
The phenomenon turned out to be astoundingly general. Not only did every
group of initial consonants have a very limited set of ‘meanings’, but
the meanings were all interrelated, and each word on average fit into
several of them. For example ‘str-’ is not only linear; it also begins
many words of ‘straining’: stretch, stress, struggle, etc.. Some other
classes for /gl/ which are related to light are:
/gl/ Looking (usually indirect) - glance, glare, glazed, glimpse, glint, glower
/gl/ Reflecting Surfaces - glacé, glacier, glair, glare, glass, glaze, gloss
Just to give you a sense of how general this is, these three /gl/
classes I have just mentioned contain over half the common words
beginning with /gl/ which don’t have prefixes or suffixes.
Once I had considered all these classes of ‘str-’ words, I was left with
an image which unified all the distinct ‘senses’ of /str/. The image was
that of a rubber band which you stretch into a line, but which has a
relaxed state that it would return to were it not under ‘stress’. Hence
also the ‘strangeness’ in /str/ – that which deviates from the norm.
If you know only one phonosemantically based class for a word beginning
in /str/, you can’t from that predict what other /str/ classes will
contain that word. For any given consonant sequence, various senses of
words are randomly scattered all over the phonesthemic classes to form a
tightly interconnected and unified web. For instance, the nouns ‘strip’
and ‘strap’ are very similar and fit in a ‘linear’ class with ‘stripe’,
but the verbs are very different. The verb ‘strip’ fits in the class of
deviant behavior (unlike its synonym ‘undress’), and the verb ‘strap’
fits in the stretching and straining ‘str-’ class.
As I proceeded I realized that not only every sequence of consonants,
but every single consonant behaved this way. That is, /b/ inhabits a
deep and multi-faceted, but also a unique and very specific world with
which it infuses every word which contains it. Moreover, it is the
pronunciation of /b/ which lies at the heart of this world.
So, wonder of wonders! Socrates was right! The major semantic classes of
/b/ words were ‘bulging’ (with /l/) or ‘brushy’ (with /r/), blocking,
booming and bursting. Since these classes are directly related to the
pronunciation of /b/, form does affect meaning, and on some level, we
are indeed all speakers of one and the same Language.
I have been working on a dictionary which outlines this data for English
in much more detail rather formally and scientifically. But I also have
many thoughts which I seem to express more openly and cheerfully when I
voice them in a separate book. My purpose here is therefore not to prove
anything, but to summarize my most important findings in plain English
and to philosophize freely and naively on their significance."