"Language is a virus from outer space." - William S. Burroughs

Gods of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants is a 103-page thesis, published in 2009 by Margaret Magnus, one of the foremost pioneers into the theory of phonosemantics, within the field of linguistics. In simplified terms, phonosemantics is the theory that the sounds used to produce a language contain intrinsic information about words that contain those sounds. To put that another way, it is the theory that the sounds of a language are not arbitrary. Prior to the 2000s, dating back to Saussure's efforts to develop the art of philology into the science of linguistics, the arbitrariness of phonology in language was widely regarded among linguists as irrefutable and obvious fact: "dog" and "hound" sound little alike, yet refer to the same animal, as does the Japanese word "inu," and likewise the Basque word "txakur." How, a twentieth century linguist would demand, how can sounds encode for innate meanings, in the face of these obvious dissimilarities?

Magnus attempts not only to demonstrate that non-arbitrary encoding not only exists in English, but that phonosemantic theory is provably, empirically correct. To achieve this end, Magnus compiles a list of every monomorphemic (single-morpheme) word in her own English vocabulary, grouped by consonants and consonant clusters at the onset of each word, and attempts to draw parallels of meaning across every word in each grouping.

Some phonetic onsets have stunning consistency of meaning. /gl/ recurs consistently in words pertaining to light and transparency: glass, gleam, glitter, glacier, glare, glance, glisten, glow, glacier. /sn/ appears in words pertaining to the function of the human nose, and to temperature and weather conditions which can make the nose more "active:" sneeze, snuff, snort, sniffle, snow, snot. /b/ appears consistently in words expressing largeness, loudness, and expansiveness: boom, burst, blast, bomb, big, bombastic, bodacious, broad, bang, blow, bam. These examples alone do not even begin to convey the full scope of Magnus' downright Herculean effort to demonstrate phonosemantics as a real linguistic phenomenon.

Gods of the Word is a much-condensed and natural development, following on Magnus' 2001 doctoral dissertation, What's In A Word? Studies in Phonosemantics, available here, to read in full, numbering 413 pages. If the subject has piqued your interest, I thoroughly recommend the full dissertation as a companion to the later publication, as it allows you to see far more of Magnus' research in one place, presented in highly organised fashion, including extensive discussion of what data she found to be in conflict with phonosemantic theory, in the course of her research.

Whether or not Magnus' efforts stand the test of time, as linguistics continues to expand its horizons, her effort certainly shall not be wasted: if Magnus has failed to prove phonosemantics, then it will generally be agreed that it was impossible that anyone ever could have done so, for she has hardly been less than thorough. If she has succeeded, meanwhile, it shall open entirely new lines of questioning into the neurology and psychology of language, and it shall likely teach us new things about neurocognitive phenomena like synaesthesia and even questions as complicated as why poetry works, and some words seem inherently more musical, evocative, and emotive than their synonyms.


Iron Noder 2024, 23/30

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