Re: tolkien?

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 00:31:37 +0100, Camilla Drefvenborg <elmindreda@...>
wrote:

><rant>
>I've recently discovered a danger of having done that, however. now
>that my conlang's dictionary has grown large enough, one can clearly
>see conceptual associations for some of the root's initial letters,
>even though I've made every effort _not_ to systemise it.
>
>I've unconsciously become a loglanger and I'd like some medicine.
></rant>
Why is this a danger?  Phonosemantics suggests that 'sound symbolism' occurs
in natlangs: this is the idea that to some extent individual phonemes
contribute to the meaning of morphemes, which sounds just like what you're
describing.  For more information, Wikipedia's article on phonosemantics is
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonosemantics .

You could explain a pattern like this in other ways as well.  For instance,
if these associations primarily involve nouns, you could say that an
ancestor of your conlang had a noun class system in which the classes had
semantic significance, and class was marked by a prefix on nouns.  Then if
the other morphological expressions of the noun class were lost, but the
prefixes on nouns remained, you would be left with groups of semantically
connected nouns with the same initial segments.

Alex

Replies