Many parents, thinking about choosing a name for a child, want it to be sonorous and beautiful. But opinions about which name can be considered sonorous differ. To understand this issue, you need to understand what determines the nature of the sound in any word, including the name.
Phonetic analysis of a name
The name, like any other word, consists of sounds. Depending on the nature of their extraction, sounds are divided into vowels, which consist of a voice, and consonants, which consist of a voice and noise. Depending on the degree of "noise", the consonants, in turn, can be divided into
- sonorous, in which sound prevails over noise ([p], [l], [n], etc.)
- deaf, in which noise prevails over sound.
The least sonorous, therefore, can be called hissing and whistling sounds.
It follows from this that the more vowels and sonorant consonants in a name, the more sonorous it will be, and vice versa, if the name is dominated by voiceless, especially hissing and sibilant sounds, it will be difficult to call such a name “sonorous”.
To understand how good a particular name sounds, you can break it down into syllables and analyze each of them. It is clear that a syllable ending in a vowel sound will be more sonorous than one ending in a consonant, especially voiceless.
Determination of the nature of sounds
Official science believes that sound itself does not carry a semantic load. However, there is no doubt that the sounds pronounced sequentially, as well as each of them separately, have a certain emotional impact on a person.
An interesting study on this topic was carried out at one time by the Soviet philologist A. P. Zhuravlev. In the course of the experiment, he invited the participants to characterize the vowel sounds of the Russian language and think about what … color they are. It turned out that the opinion of the majority of the participants in the experiment coincided:
And described as deep red
I was seen as bright red
About perceived light yellow or white
E - green
Yo - yellow-green
E was described as greenish
And most "saw" it as blue
Wu was perceived in different ways: as dark blue, blue-green, lilac; but, anyway, it was a "dark" sound
Yu was "similar" to W, but had a lighter "shade": bluish, lilac
I was seen by all participants as gloomy, having a dark brown or black color
Such unanimity can hardly be called an accident. The experiment showed that people in general perceive certain sounds in a similar way. And since vowels are the most vivid and "noticeable" sounds in any word, it is clear that a name, for example, which has such vowels as "i", "e", "u", "o" will be generally perceived by others as lighter, and grandeur, in which the vowels "y" or "a" prevail - more "dark". It should be borne in mind that the most "main" sound that determines the impression that the name makes on a person will be the stressed vowel as the most clearly audible.
Consonants also affect the emotional perception of words in general and the name in particular. In his dissertation, A. P. Zhuravlev characterized each of the sounds of the Russian language by 25 parameters.
You can use the results of his research and check what kind of impression the name makes (as, indeed, any other word in the Russian language), by making its phonosemantic analysis using a special program.
