Phonosemantics

[Belianine Valeri]

Hello dear Discoursers!
I am a psycholinguist.

I was dealing with sound symbolism and found out that
there is such a theory that every letter (and sound) has its meaning.

For example, there are pleasant and unpleasant sounds (for some national ear).
Thus according to some investigations, Russian ZH is unpleasant
while L soft is pleasant (mild).
R for Russians is masculine, rude and energetic,
while F is dark, weak and dangerous.

And all the vowels may have some kind of colour. E.g. for Russians A (as in cup) is red,
I (like in film) is blue, E (like in let) is green, etc.
Some computer programs use it for Russian text analysis.
I am involved in a project of making the same in English.
I suppose that this is closely connected with the investigations of Charles Osgood.

And I thought that some of you may have some data concerning this.

If anyone knows some investigations on the English material,
please let me know offline. vbelyanin at mtu.ru

Val Belianine, www.textology.ru