Phonosemantics

[Thomas Bloor]

This is far from being a new idea. Rimbaud wrote in the poem "Voyelles":

	A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles
 	[A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels}

and continues with considerable complexity (A noir corset velu des mouches
eclatantes, [A black shaggy corset of dazzling flies] etc; O l'Omega, rayon
violet de ses yeux, etc [O Omega, violet ray of her eyes]).

But Rimbaud was a brilliant teenager showing off, and I don't see how the
identification of colours with letters (except as some sort of code as
suggested by Ardis Eschenberg below) can be anything but psychogarbage.

Tom Bloor


>Re: The psychological link between vowels and colors, is this a link
>felt/known by most Russians?  Is it similar to that between colors and
>emotions (red is anger, blue is sad in English) or is it simply due to the
>fact that these are the first vowels used in the color terms?
>e.g. krAsniy = red
>     sInniy = blue
>     zEljoniy = green
>
>Is jo thought to be yellow (zhOltiy)?
>Or is it being proposed that these colors contain these sounds because of an
>inherent property of the color/sound?
>Curiously,
>Ardis Eschenberg
>University at Buffalo
>UmoNhoN Nation Public School
>
>
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Thomas Bloor
Honorary Fellow
Language Studies Unit
Aston University
Birmingham, UK
B4 7ET