Generally, words are used to tell what is happening. The rhythm and length of the above lines, along with the use of “hissing” sounds, create a picture of a snake in the minds of the readers. “He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloomĪnd trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over theĪnd rested his throat upon the stone bottom,Īnd where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness Lawrence, in his poem Snake, illustrates the use of this form: ![]() Phanopoeia is a form of onomatopoeia that describes the sense of things, rather than their natural sounds. Onomatopoeia, in its more complicated use, takes the form of phanopoeia. To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. ![]() I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will.” Example #5: Get Me to the Church on Time By Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loeweĭing dong! the bells are gonna chime.” Examples #6: The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe “It went zip when it moved and bop when it stopped, “He saw nothing and heard nothing but he could feel his heart pounding and then he heard the clack on stone and the leaping, dropping clicks of a small rock falling.” Example #4: The Marvelous Toy By Tom Paxton That's the example I can think of off the top of my head, but I guarantee there've been multiple occasions that I've tried to use sound-symbolism combined with what I know about similar-sounding words to guess the meaning of a word when context wasn't enough it's hit-or-miss, but if you know other words that might be from the same root, it can help with intuition about these things.And murmuring of innumerable bees…” Example #2: The Tempest By William ShakespeareĬry, ‘ cock-a-diddle-dow!'” Example #3: For Whom the Bell Tolls By Ernest Hemingway If I made up a Chinese-sounding word, using principals such as they're often two syllables long, equal stress on each each syllable never ends in a consonant other than n or ng, or sometimes m, p, t, k, no consonant clusters, then the fact that it's a Chinese-sounding word dropped into an English sentence would narrow its' possible meanings down to things that were introduced to English-speaking countries from China, quite likely.Īs a side note, I'd heard the phrase 'Limpid water' quite a bit and, based on sound symbolism had assumed that 'limpid' meant something like 'muddy'. There could also be some cultural associations, or simply knowledge about which types of words are sourced from where English gets a lot of its' scientific vocabulary from Latin and Greek, and there are quite a few 'tells' that can reveal a word as one of these languages or coined from their roots ending in -us, -ate, -ia etc. The origin of 'Discombobulate' appears to be a mangling of the word 'discompose', and I can see the use of a couple of added 'b's having sound symbolism 'b' certainly has associations for a lot of English speakers at least according to the Bouba-Kiki effect. Part of that is just words with similar meanings being coined from the same root, some of it is people making up words using sounds that fit a particular aesthetic, instead of deriving them from an existing word, and that might have been where a lot of words came from in the ancient past, too, but how would we know? ![]() Sound Symbolism is something you might hear about often its' not necessarily objective, but you do see it employed, or at least noticed in a lot of cases.
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