What do you associate with SOUNDS?

[Domanisch]

Hello there!

Recently, I have been thinking about sound inventories. And one thing that came to my mind was onomatopoeia. The interesting thing about onomatopoeia is that the created words phonetically imitate, resemble, or suggest the sound that they describe.

In German, a cat says "Miau!" [mjau]. Or when an explosion occurs, Americans hear a loud "Boom!" [bu:m]. What fascinates me here is that those words imitate other sounds and in doing so, evoke certain associations.

So I wondered, what if I sat down, look at the international phonetic alphabet and try to associate some of the sounds found in there with qualities or concepts or things that come to mind when hearing each one of them on their own. The associations might derive from their similarities to sounds occuring in nature, from the organs being involved in making them or be based on the position in the mouth where the sound occurs.

And here are some of the associations I came up with so far :

CONSONANTS
[ m ] "Soft sound. Calm. Cozy. Warm. Embracing. Delicious. Pressing. Soft warmth. Comfort."
[ n ] "Neutrality. Nasality. Exhalation."
[ p ] "Hard sound. Grounded. Earthy. Abrupt stop.(Clashing water?) Stony. Shallow. Falling rocks. Throbbing. Beating. Pumping. Hardness. Hollow."
[ b ] "Not quite hard. Softer than [p]. Dull. Blunt. Drums."
[ t ] "Hard sound. Abrupt stop. Stony. Shallow. Sharp. Dot. Lifelessness. Inanimateness."
[ d ] "Softer than [t]. Drumming. Beating. War."
[ k ] "Hard sound. Abrupt stop. Clashing water. Deep. Crawling. Insect chirps. Interior. Internal. Wheezing. Thunder."
[ g ] "Softer than [k]. Depth. Palate. Cave. Shelter."
[ s ] "Less hard. Less soft. Hissing. Sharp. Line. Waterfall. Steamy. Hissing. Growling. Aggressiveness."
[ z ] "Warm sound. Vibrating. Buzzing. Insects."
[ ʃ ] "Waterfall. Windy."
[ f ] "Less soft. Airy. Windy. Flight. Flap of wing. Light. Obstructed air flow. Up in sky. Thoughtful. Mind."
[ θ ] "Softness. Lisp. Wind. Hissing of a snake."
[ h ] "Soft sound. Faint. Airy. Breathing. Weak. Lively. Light. Almost silent. Free air flow. Coming from deep within."
[ r ] "Vibration. Activity. Energy. Growling."
[ l ] "Soft sound. Liquid. Watery. Round. Flexible. Slimy.Fleshy. Moisture. Hard to grip."

CLICKS
[ ʘ ] "Kissing."
[ | ] "Ticking. Attention. (Dismay?)"

VOWELS
[ a ] "Low sound. Grounded. Heavy. Big. Slow. Resting. Flat. Open. Warmer. Animalistic. Strong. Center."
[ o ] "Deep sound. Centered. Balanced. Imposing. Round. Organic. Interior."
[ i ] "High sound. Call for attention. Small. Lively. Colder. Weak. Altitude. Exterior."
[ e ] "Wide sound. Centered. Balanced. Exterior."
[ u ] "Less high than . Interior. Back."

What do you think? Would you agree? Would you disagree? Could those sounds be associated with other ideas or things? Do you have suggestions for the other sounds found in the IPA? Let me know.

[Khemehekis]

I have some phonaesthemes that I keep coming back to when building Kankonian words.

One is the /ts/ affricate. /ts/ is hot, like hot red sauce, or sour -- acid, maybe. I use it in ve*itz, my word for lemon, and tziyim, my word for hot -- just off the top of my head.

/f/ is very grainy and bread-like -- like pampas grass.

/l/ is yellow, while /w/ is watery, wet, and blue. /u/ is also blue, and /k/ is black.

I agree with you about /m/ being delicious; /k/, on the other hand, is a "gaggy" sound, indicating disgust. Cf. the English "yxm" and "yxk", which differ only in /m/ vs. /k/.

I find /n/ to be neat, conservative, and businesslike at the middle or end of words, but twilight-y and oneiric at the beginning of words.

In English, /l/ is loose, liberal, libertine, lax, laissez-faire, and lenient, while R-words indicate rigid, repressive, restrictive, Religious Right Ronald Reagan Republicans. Combining the R with the sexual /p/ gives us words like "prudish", "prim", "proper", "priggish", and "puritanical".

[Khemehekis]

More thoughts on this:

Upon thinking about my word salemta (classical), I've realized that phonemes like /s/, /l/, and /d/, give a very classical, marble-and-ivory aural appearance to a word, as if I'm eating the meringue on a lemon meringue pie, or imagine Cookie Monster in Don't Eat the Pictures singing of the white statues: "They look just like ice xxxxx, me long for a bite" -- think of the aesthetic of Bastille's song "Pompeii"!

We actually have a thread wherein onetime CBB poster Veris challenged us to tell him what five "words" sounded like to us synaesthetically. You'd probably find it interesting -- it's here: viewtopic.php?t=637

[Creyeditor]

Let's try this
[m] is soft and warm
[k] is hard and edged
[t] is small and spiky
[ s ] is snake-like, quiet, and wavy in an agressive way
[ b] is pretentious and dizzy
[d] is heavy and positive
[g] is gagging and gulping, somehow disgusting yet natural, like eating a lot of food or drinking a lot of water
[l] is soft and poetic
[r] is hot and agressive
[w] is cool and insecure

Hm, I don't think any of these is stable in my head so I might as well stop here.

[lsd]

I don't believe in cratylism...
in 3SDeductiveLanguage(1Sense=1Sign=1Sound)
the sounds have been randomly linked to the senses...

I'm more of a believer in alliteration...
3SDL could be the start of new chains of associations for me...
but this equality is the weakest for me,
who most often uses language in a silent way...

[Khemehekis]

Let's talk about /x/.

I represent /x/ as KH in Kankonian. It can be the sound of:

*cookies
*sizzling and hardening, like an omelette
*crackling or crumbling
*dryness
*sand
*disgust or gagging
*ancient or timeless things like pyramids
*tearing or ripping apart
*hard drinks -- or soft drinks

[Ahzoh]

I always described [x] as a "crisp" sound, and nowhere near as harsh and gutteral as [X] which sounds to me like an attempt to clear up phlegm in the throat.

[Khemehekis]

I always described [x] as a "crisp" sound, and nowhere near as harsh and gutteral as [X] which sounds to me like an attempt to clear up phlegm in the throat.

Crisp! That's a great way to put it!

[Solarius]

I don't have too many strong associations with sounds, aside from some moderate color associations for a few graphemes, but I do have a bit of synesthesia with linguistic features. The most prominent is that I tend to think of SOV languages as being blue or purple, while SVO and VSO languages are brighter colors, like red, light green, or orange, but I also have some color associations with some other features (i.e. more complex syllable structures are darker colors, while simpler ones are lighter colors.)

Synesthesia tends to get romanticized, but I find it tends to make my conlanging lower quality and less enjoyable, because it means conlangs spoken in similar types of fictional places tend to be similar based on my color associations (i.e. the languages of colder regions tend to have "dark" color features). It also makes conlangs that aren't very similar to each other seem more similar, which frustrates me.

[LinguoFranco]

[t͡ʃ] is tasty, associated with food like chicken, chimichangas, and chalupas. It makes me think of Mexican food.

is spicy, hot or warm.

[l] is soft and euphonious. Like wind or water, it just flows well.

[k] is abrupt, but not as abrupt as [p] or [t]. It kinda has a stony sound to me, like the association with rocks or the Stone Age.

[f] is feminine and flowery.

I don't have associations for any of the vowels aside from /i/ which I think sounds kinda screechy like the cry of an eagle.

[WeepingElf]

[t͡ʃ] is tasty, associated with food like chicken, chimichangas, and chalupas. It makes me think of Mexican food.

[ s ] is spicy, hot or warm.

[l] is soft and euphonious. Like wind or water, it just flows well.

[k] is abrupt, but not as abrupt as [p] or [t]. It kinda has a stony sound to me, like the association with rocks or the Stone Age.

[f] is feminine and flowery.

I don't have associations for any of the vowels aside from /i/ which I think sounds kinda screechy like the cry of an eagle.

Fixed.

[LinguoFranco]

[t͡ʃ] is tasty, associated with food like chicken, chimichangas, and chalupas. It makes me think of Mexican food.

[ s ] is spicy, hot or warm.

[l] is soft and euphonious. Like wind or water, it just flows well.

[k] is abrupt, but not as abrupt as [p] or [t]. It kinda has a stony sound to me, like the association with rocks or the Stone Age.

[f] is feminine and flowery.

I don't have associations for any of the vowels aside from /i/ which I think sounds kinda screechy like the cry of an eagle.

Fixed.

Grazie

[lurker]

Interesting. Signed languages seem to rely much more on iconicity compared to spoken languages. I wish I could learn ASL, but that's not going to happen. I can see an individual sign if it's done slowly and in isolation, and even that only when watching on a screen where I can stick my face as close as possible.

I like the word for "abduct", which is where you hold up a few fingers of one hand, then grab them with the other hand and pull them across the body like you're kidnapping them.

Stuff like this makes me think that language in general tries to be as iconic as possible, like the kiki/bouba effect. It's just that there's only so much you can do with sounds when the human brain is overwhelmingly visual.