I've just stumbled across a very substantial website by Margaret Magnus.
She's fascinated by language, especially by the sounds of language.

Her basic thesis is... [quoted from her website]

Each consonant and vowel in a language has a meaning, in the sense that
every word containing that sound has an element of meaning which words not
containing that sound do not have. What underlies this sound-meaning is the
form of the sound, i.e. its pronunciation - a sound means what it is. For
example, to pronounce a stopped consonant [b, d, g, p, t, k], you completely
block the flow of air through the mouth. Consequently all stopped sounds
involve a barrier of some kind. The nature of that barrier varies depending
on whether the sound is voiced [b, d, g] or unvoiced [p, t, k], whether it
is labial [b, p], dental [d, t] or velar [g, k], and so forth. This meaning
is different from the referent, which is what we normally think of as the
meaning of a word. Reference is a separate process from sound-meaning, and
is layered on top of it. Reference is less central to word semantics than
sound-meaning, although it is much more obvious to the casual observer. This
aspect of meaning which is determined by sound lies much closer to what we
call the connotation than the denotation. Sound meaning does tend to
predispose referents, but does not largely determine them. That is, you
can't predict what a word will refer to based on its sound, but you can
predict that a high percentage of words beginning with /b/ in every language
will involve explosions, birth and loud noises. You can also predict that if
a word referring to a sound begins with /b/, the sound will either begin
abruptly or be very loud or usually both. Sound affects meaning in every
word in every language. However, because of the way reference interacts with
sound-meaning, its effect is not as obvious at first glance in concrete
nouns and other words with very inflexible referents. What all the various
referents or senses of a word have in common is their sound-meaning. Thus by
virtue of its sound, the 'get' in 'get up' is the very same word to the
English-speaking ear as the 'get' in 'get away', 'get involved', 'get
through', 'get fat', 'get a Lamborghini'. The glue that holds all these
senses together is the meaning of the /g/ followed by the meaning of the /e/
followed by the meaning of the /t/. All of this can be and has been verified
empirically by simply cataloguing the relationship between sound and
referent and taking statistics.


I like the extemism of her position that "reference is less central to word
semantics than sound-meaning" and I wonder how far others on this list would
go in the relative importance of reference and sound in word meaning.

I'm rather intrigued by her body of work and not sure whether it is more
like a kind of numerology applied to letters.

Her URL is http://www.conknet.com/~mmagnus/

What a fascinating creature the human being is!


Regards,
Gillian Savage
OZpoet: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~gbsavage/ozpoet.html




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%