Sonoesthetics and metaphor: glimmers in the gloaming

[Jim Deutch]

I ran into a very interesting article. It doesn't mention Tolkien, or invented languages, but seems very relevant to our discussions of these.

Why meaning is more sunken into words than we realise | Aeon Essays

Words stand for things in the world, and they stand apart from it. Perhaps meaning is more sunken into words than we realise?

aeon.co

...what we now call sound symbolism, a much wider range of connections between sounds and what they mean. These include things such as the association in English and related languages between the ‘gl-’ sound and light, as in ‘glisten’, ‘glint’, ‘glimmer’ and ‘glow’.

Does this sound have an onomatopoetic connection to light? Or is it just an arbitrary connection that has come to ‘feel’ nonarbitrary to native speakers? ... There seem to be universal or near-universal synaesthetic connections between particular shapes and sounds.

That's pretty cool. The idea that synaesthesia is the basis of all metaphor is one I've heard before, though I'm sure it's not the complete story.

Near the end of the essay he gets kinda political about the whole thing:

In all kinds of domains – science, technology, politics, religion – we are prone to taking useful interpretations and turning them into frozen and potentially dangerous ideologies. Instead of looking at the concrete application of the words, we disengage them from practice, and instil them and the pictures they generate with greater reality than reality itself. We side with the words even when they begin to contradict the reality.

So now I finally get to the Question for Narnion:

If the evil of Melkor and Sauron is, at its basic root, their failure to understand The Music (or, we could say, the mind of Illuvatar), then why are they so skilled at language and deception? Are these things - evilness and the misuse of language - intimately and necessarily connected?