Phonaesthetics (also spelled phonesthetics in North America) is the study of the beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by [Holmes, John R. (2010) "' Inside a Song': Tolkien's Phonaesthetics". In: Eden, Bradford Lee (ed.). Middle-earth Minstrel. McFarland. p. 30] during the mid-20th century and derives . Speech sounds have many aesthetic qualities, some of which are subjectively regarded as euphonious (pleasing) or cacophonous (displeasing). Phonaesthetics remains a budding and often subjective field of study, with no scientifically or otherwise formally established definition; today, it mostly exists as a marginal branch of psychology, phonetics, or poetics.[Shisler, Benjamin K. (1997). Phonesthetics". The Influence of Phonesthesia on the English Language.]
British linguist David Crystal has regarded phonaesthetics as the study of "phonaesthesia" (i.e., sound symbolism and ): that not just words but even certain sound combinations within a particular language carry meaning.[Allan, Keith (2014). " Phonesthesia". Linguistic Meaning. Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics.]
Euphony and cacophony
Euphony is the effect of sounds being perceived as pleasant, rhythmical, lyrical, or harmonious.
Cacophony is the effect of sounds being perceived as harsh, unpleasant, chaotic, and often discordant; these sounds are perhaps meaningless and jumbled together.
This is similar to consonance and dissonance in music, which are pleasant and unpleasant sounds respectively. In poetry, for example, euphony may be used deliberately to convey comfort, peace, or serenity, while cacophony may be used to convey discomfort, pain, or disorder. This is often furthered by the combined effect of the meaning beyond just the sounds themselves.
The California Federation of Chaparral Poets uses Emily Dickinson's "A Bird came down the Walk" as an example of euphonious poetry, one passage being "...Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam" and John Updike's "Player Piano" as an example of cacophonous poetry, one passage being "My stick fingers click with a snicker / And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys".
Research
David Crystal's 1995 paper "Phonaesthetically Speaking" explores lists, created by reader polls and individual writers, of English words that are commonly regarded as sounding beautiful, to search for any patterns within the words' phonetics. Frequently recurring example words in these lists include
gossamer,
melody, and
tranquil. Crystal's finding, assuming a
British English Received Pronunciation accent, is that words perceived as pretty tend to have a majority of a wide array of criteria; here are some major ones:
[Crystal, David (1995). " Phonaesthetically Speaking". English Today 42.2 (April): 8–12. Cambridge University Press.]
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Three or more syllables (e.g., goss·a·mer and mel·o·dy)
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Stress on the first syllable (e.g., góssamer and mélody)
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is the most common consonant phoneme, followed by , then a huge drop-off before other consonants (e.g., luminous contains the first four)
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Short vowels (e.g., the schwa, followed in order by the vowels in lid, led, and lad) are favored over long vowels and diphthongs (e.g., as in lied, load, loud)
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Three or more manners of articulation (with approximant consonants the most common, followed by , and so on)
A perfect example word, according to these findings, is
tremulous. Crystal also suggests the invented words and , which he notes are similar to the types of names often employed in the marketing of pharmaceutical drugs.
Cellar door
The
English compound noun cellar door has been widely cited as an example of a word or phrase that is beautiful purely in terms of its sound (i.e., euphony) without inherent regard for its
semantics.
The phenomenon of
cellar door being regarded as euphonious appears to have begun in the very early twentieth century, first attested in the 1903 novel
Gee-Boy by the
Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. It has been promoted as beautiful-sounding by various writers; linguist
Geoffrey Nunberg specifically names the writers H. L. Mencken in 1920; David Allan Robertson in 1921;
Dorothy Parker, Hendrik Willem van Loon, and Albert Payson Terhune in the 1930s; George Jean Nathan in 1935; J. R. R. Tolkien in a lecture, "English and Welsh", delivered in 1955 (in which he described his reverence for the
Welsh language and about which he said "
cellar doors i.e. are extraordinarily frequent"; see also Sound and language in Middle-earth); and C. S. Lewis in 1963.
Furthermore, the phenomenon itself is touched upon in many sources and media, including an anonymous short piece in the September 1905 issue of
Harper's Magazine, the 1967 novel
Why Are We in Vietnam? by
Norman Mailer, the 1967 play
It's Called the Sugar Plum by
Israel Horovitz,
a 1991 essay by
Jacques Barzun,
[Jacques Barzun, An Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry (New Directions, 1991). : "I discovered its illusory character when many years ago a Japanese friend with whom I often discussed literature told me that to him and some of his English-speaking friends the most beautiful word in our language was 'cellardoor'. It was not beautiful to me and I wondered where its evocative power lay for the Japanese. Was it because they find l and r difficult to pronounce, and the word thus acquires remoteness and enchantment? I asked, and learned also that Tatsuo Sakuma, my friend, had never seen an American cellar door, either inside a house or outside — the usual two flaps on a sloping ledge. No doubt that lack of visual familiarity added to the word’s appeal. He also enjoyed going to restaurants and hearing the waiter ask if he would like salad or roast vegetables, because again the phrase 'salad or' could be heard. I concluded that its charmlessness to speakers of English lay simply in its meaning. It has the l and r sounds and d and long o dear to the analysts of verse music, but it is prosaic. Compare it with 'celandine', where the image of the flower at once makes the sound lovely."] the 2001 psychological drama film
Donnie Darko,
[Ross Smith, Inside Language, Walking Tree Publishers (2007), p. 65)] and a scene in the 2019 movie
Tolkien.
The origin of cellar door being considered as an inherently beautiful or musical phrase is mysterious. However, in 2014, Nunberg speculated that the phenomenon might have arisen from Philip Wingate and Henry W. Petrie's 1894 hit song "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard", which contains the lyric "You'll be sorry when you see me sliding down our cellar door." Following the song's success, "slide down my cellar door" became a popular catchphrase up until the 1930s or 1940s to mean engaging in a type of friendship or camaraderie reminiscent of childhood innocence.
Tolkien, Lewis, and others have suggested that cellar door auditory beauty becomes more apparent the more the word is dissociated from its literal meaning, for example, by using alternative spellings such as Selador, Selladore, Celador, Selidor (an island name in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series), or Salidar (Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series), which take on the quality of an enchanting name (and some of which suggest a specifically standard British pronunciation of the word: ),
See also
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("euphonic" rules in Sanskrit grammar)
Notes
