Donald Norman schrijft,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tinko<\/em> and losse<\/em> are two words in the mythical language Elvish, invented by the British philologist J.R. Tolkien for his trilogy, Lord of the Rings. Which means \u201cmetal,\u201d which \u201csnow\u201d? How could you possibly know? The surprise is that when forced to guess, most people can get the choices right, even if they have never read the books, never experienced the words. \u201cTinko\u201d has two, hard, \u201cplosive\u201d sounds \u2013 the \u201ct\u201d and the \u201ck.\u201d \u201cLosse\u201d has soft, liquid sounds, starting with the \u201cl\u201d and continuing through the vowels and the sibilant \u201css.\u201d Note the similar pattern in the English words where the hard \u201ct\u201d in \u201cmetal\u201d contrasted with the soft sounds of \u201csnow.\u201d Yes, in Elfish, \u201ctinko\u201d is metal and \u201closse\u201d is snow. The Elfish demonstration points out the relationship between the sounds of a language and the meaning of words. At first glance, this sounds nonsensical \u2013 after all, words are arbitrary \u2013 just look how difficult it is to learn the vocabulary of a foreign language. But more and more evidence piles up linking sounds to particular general meanings: vowels are warm and soft: feminine is the term frequently used. Harsh sounds are, well, harsh \u2013 like the word \u201charsh\u201d itself \u2013 the sound of \u201csh\u201d in particular. Snakes hiss and slither: and note the sibilants, the hissing of the \u201cs\u201d sounds. Plosives, sounds caused when the air is stopped briefly, then released – explosively – are hard, metallic \u2013 the word \u201cmasculine\u201d is often applied to them. The \u201ck\u201d of \u201cmosquito\u201d and the \u201cp\u201d in \u201chappy\u201d are plosive. And, yes, there is evidence that word choices are not arbitrary: a sound symbolism governs the development of a language. This is another instance where artists, poets in this case, have long known the power of sounds to evoke affect and emotions within the readers of \u2013 or, more accurately, listeners to \u2013 poetry. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Donald Norman schrijft, Tinko and losse are two words in the mythical language Elvish, invented by the British philologist J.R. Tolkien for his trilogy, Lord of the Rings. Which means \u201cmetal,\u201d which \u201csnow\u201d? How could you possibly know? The surprise is that when forced to guess, most people can get the choices right, even ifRead more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1771,4],"tags":[4040,4042,1815],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64380"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64384,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64380\/revisions\/64384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}