Core principles: Sounds

Now we're going to talk about the smallest components of written texts, which are words. And what are words made of? Sounds.

Sounds create and effect meaning. Think about how words must have evolved. Words sound like what they describe. We use the word 'lullaby' to describe a song sung to help a baby sleep. It is soft and lilting and flowing. We use the word 'stop' to arrest a person's action. The sounds are sharp and clean, and the final sound stops. Think of the sounds of swear words. They express anger and frustration and insults and are full of harsh sounds. The way words feel in your mouth provides a clue to how a person or a character is feeling. This is particularly true when you read works by Shakespeare. I'm sure you know the literary term onomatopoeia from primary school. It means the name for the sound describes the sound itself. The examples you would be familiar with are words like gurgling, pop, whoosh. I want you to start thinking of all words as possibly employing onomatopoeia.

Here is a key to help you. There are principles of sounds, and words you can use to describe sounds.  Those words extend beyond onomatopoeia, assonance, sibilance, alliteration, dissonance, cacophony, tone and euphony. The effects of sounds depend upon context, and other sounds in juxtaposition. Generally, long vowel sounds tend to sound more peaceful or solemn than short ones. Short vowel sounds tend to give an impression of quick movement, agitation or triviality.

Consonants

b, p, g, d, t, k - Plosives. Explosive sounds, suggest quickness, movement, triviality, scorn. Also called mutes - they hard stop the voice.

m, n, ng - Nasals. Provide various effects of humming, singing, music, contemplative, pleasurable, occasionally sinister

l - Liquid. Suggests liquids in motion, streams, water, rest, peace, luxury, voluptuousness, slipping, sliding

j, ch - Affricate (new IPA standards). Begins as a stop and releases as a fricative.

k, g, j, st, ts, tz, ch, dz, dg - Affricate (old IPA standards) .  Suggests harshness, violence, cruelty, movement, discomfort, noise, conflict, derision (ch - also endearment)

s, sh - Continuent. Sizzles in the mouth, hissing, also soft and smooth, soothing sounds

z - Continuent. Tends to appear in contexts of harshness

f, w, (v) - Fricative - Suggests wind, wings, a light and easy motion

t, d -  Interdental - tongue against the back of the teeth. Like k, and g, but less emphatic. Used to describe short actions

r - Liquid. Depends on other sounds near it but usually suggests movement and noise. (Some call m and n liquids too.)

th - Aspirate. Hard and soft, tends to be quiet and soothing

h - Unvoiced - just air

Vowels

i - Smallness

a, o - Largeness

e - Contemplative

u - Ugly


This is extending on the work of Boulton, The Anatomy of Poetry, p.58, and Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook.

This key is incomplete - I would like to have it checked by a linguist - but it is enough to give you some words to use to explain sound effects in texts. To learn more see the International Phenetic Alphabet used by linguists, speech pathologists, singers, lexicographers, language teachers, and teachers of reading. It all becomes quite complicated.

Other effects of sounds are rhyme and rhythm. These are about the creation of patterns - the repetition of sounds and stresses. Even a near rhyme, a slant rhyme, can be used to add to meaning, either as wordplay or to suggest something else.

You can consider sound effects to be a category you can write about. Here is an extract from Gary Lutz'e essay, The Sentence is a Lonely Place. (I recommend you read the whole piece - available online)

This was my first real lesson about language - this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and  palpable. It was news to me that a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has a cubic  bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround.

See also Alexander Pope's poem Sound and Sense.

Sound and Sense
by Alexander Pope

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!

See also this letter about the appreciation of words, read by Benedict Cumberbatch, in Letters of Note. (2 mins)

See also: Autological words.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/52927/17-words-describe-themselves

http://www.segerman.org/autological.html

The idea is that the form supports the function. The closer to creating or recreating the experience for the reader the better!