August 27, 2012, 06:12
arnieGlint, glisten, glitter, gleam …
This is from
The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett:
quote:
Glint, glisten, glitter, gleam … Tiffany thought a lot about words, in the long hours of churning butter. ‘Onomatopoeic’, she’d discovered in the dictionary, meant words that sounded like the noise of the thing they were describing, like ‘cuckoo’. But she thought there should be a word meaning ‘a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn’t, but would if it did’. Glint, for example. If light made a noise as it reflected off a distant window, it’d go ‘glint!’ And the light of tinsel, all those little glints chiming together, would make a noise like ‘glitterglitter’. ‘Gleam’ was a clean, smooth noise from a surface that intended to shine all day. And ‘glisten’ was the soft, almost greasy sound of something rich and oily.
Is there a word that describes such a thing?
August 27, 2012, 07:16
goofyI love that book.
The word is phonestheme or ideophone,
which I wrote about a few years ago.August 27, 2012, 20:35
KallehAh, but not here, goofy.

In reading your links, it seems to me that
ideophone might be the best word, but then who am I to know.
August 27, 2012, 22:16
arnieInteresting that we both spotted the same passage in the the book, goofy. I like
ideophone as well.
August 28, 2012, 11:21
goofyI think
gl- is a phonestheme denoting light in Germanic languages. The words themselves,
glint glisten glitter etc, are ideophones.
quote:
Originally posted by Kalleh:
Ah, but not here, goofy.
No, I didn't mean to suggest that you should have known this or anything. I was just stating that I blogged about it.
August 29, 2012, 20:49
KallehNo, I was just teasing you about not posting it
here. You know me...always protective of our Wordcraft!