Sound symbolism: the end of the dynasty
The first pretender, Clustering made his
presentation:
‘I am able to create semantic groups of words using
only one letter. For example I have created the words which contain the letter
‘h’ and are related to housing like hut, home, hovel, habitat.’
The second pretender was Iconism:
‘I create words which contain meaningful
letters. Look at these examples: 'stamp', 'stomp', 'tamp', 'tromp', 'tramp',
and 'step'. If you put ‘m’ before ‘p’, it makes the action more powerful. I
have created a meaning for every letter. For example: the front vowels such as
i, e represent gentle narrow subjects and back vowels such as o, u represent strong
broad subjects.’
The last pretenders were the twins, Phenomimes
and Psychomimes:
‘We are the most powerful creators. We create
words from intangible and invisible senses.
We imitate soundless states. Phenomime creates words that depict states,
conditions, or manners of the external world such as "damp" or
"stealthily". Psychomime creates words that depict psychological
states or physical feelings.’
Well, the counsellors, the Korean and Japanese languages had already encountered the twins because they had infected their structure with these types of words. For example, Japanese was full of the so-called i-type adjectives which represent emotive states like kanashii "sad" or sabishii "lonely". For that reason, the two wise languages chose the twins for the throne of Glottaland. However, their reign didn’t last long because Arbitrariness arrived to govern the kingdom of languages. He was the creation of Ferdinand de Saussure, the linguist who destroyed the magic of Glottaland and founded modern 'scientific' linguistics.