Re: Town, Zaun, and Celtic Dun-

At 8:55:14 PM on Thursday, August 20, 2009, andythewiros
wrote:

[...]

> Note especially the last two sentences. But it is now
> apparent that the correct word I was looking for was
> 'ideophone', although there is no accepted English word
> for the process of devising ideophones, such as *ideophony.

Terms in common use are sound symbolism, phonosemantics,
phonesthemes, and assonance-rime analysis. John M. Lawler
has done quite a bit on it in English; look about halfway
down his home page at
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/> for some links,
including one to a short bibliography of the subject.

Brian