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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 J. R. R. Tolkien, [1] during the mid-20th century and derives from Ancient Greek φωνή (phōnḗ) 'voice, sound' and αἰσθητική (aisthētikḗ) 'aesthetics'.
Example: My stick fingers click with a snicker And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys; Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker And pluck from these keys melodies. —“Player Piano,” John Updike. Euphony–A series of musically pleasant sounds that give the poem a melodious quality, conveying a sense of harmony to the reader.
Alliteration is the repetition of syllable-initial consonant sounds between nearby words, or of syllable-initial vowels if the syllables in question do not start with a consonant. [1] It is often used as a literary device. A common example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," in which the "p" sound is repeated.
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually the exact same phonemes) in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of rhyming (perfect rhyming) is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic effect in the final position of lines within poems or songs. [1]
The repetition of identical or similar sounds, usually accented vowel sounds and succeeding consonant sounds at the end of words, and often at the ends of lines of prose or poetry. [7] For example, in the following lines from a poem by A. E. Housman, the last words of both lines rhyme with each other. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Another special case of consonance is sibilance, the use of several sibilant sounds such as /s/ and /ʃ/. An example is the verse from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven": "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain." (This example also contains assonance around the "ur" sound.) Another example of consonance is the word "sibilance ...
Assonance, where the use of similar vowel sounds within a word rather than similar sounds at the beginning or end of a word, was widely used in skaldic poetry but goes back to the Homeric epic. [77] Because verbs carry much of the pitch in the English language, assonance can loosely evoke the tonal elements of Chinese poetry and so is useful in ...
Shippey gives as one example Tolkien's statement that he had used such names as Bree, Archet, Combe, and Chetwood for the small area, outside the Shire, where Hobbits and Men lived together. Tolkien selected them for their non-English elements so that they would sound "queer", with "a style that we should perhaps vaguely feel to be 'Celtic'". [6]