Research Symposium

BIO

A resident of Jacksonville, I'm passionate about the issues facing Northern Florida and our state more generally. I plan on attending law school after finishing my undergraduate and engaging in Consumer Protection work with my law degree.

Sound, Meaning and Music in Tolkien’s Elvish Languages and in Le Guin’s Invented Language Kesh

Abstract

Our project examines sound-meaning connections (‘sound symbolism’) in two
constructed languages (‘conlangs’)
○ J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish language Sindarin (from The Lord of the Rings; Fig. 1)
○ Ursula K. Le Guin’s post-apocalyptic Kesh (from Always Coming Home) (Fig. 2)
● Sound symbolism drives Tolkien’s conlanging to a great extent (see for example
Tolkien, Fimi & Higgins 2019; Farrugia 2019).
● Our project investigates the extent to which sound symbolism is present in Kesh
○ Not investigated before.
● Sound symbolism is present in many languages (Hinton, Nichols & Ohala 1995;
Blasi et al. 2016; Jao 2020, Winter & Perlman 2021, Winter et al. 2022, inter al.)
● Sound symbolism is also relevant in poetry, advertising and branding, among
others.

Keywords: linguistics, tolkien, elvish, conlang