AIQS NEWS 80 (CAST)

38 39 AIQS News 80 AIQS News 80 Formació AIQS Formación AIQS AIQS Training MELODY & HARMONY The other day one reader of this magazine asked me about the goal of my articles as it seems he couldn’t find any attachment between the articles I write and the scientist background of this magazine. Given the ambiguity of the topics I have been dealing with I’ll explain with pleasure. The reason for these stories was providing knowledge or opinion about some linguistic or discussion topics in English. A little touch of humanities into this universe of Science. Curiosities about words connected to our everyday life or social issues, if possible in English. Like the present article Melody & Harmony, which is not about music but about words. Do these words sound so well because of their sound or because of their meaning? Do they have the same power when pronounced as when written? When you read “melody” do you automatically listen to some type of music or do you read m-e-l-o-d-y like any other word? I bet you chose the first option. One of the most beautiful and rich semantic fields relates to music and many music words are used and associated to our everyday life, too. We unconsciously have this association of ideas where we relate meanings to the words, and the English language is one of the richest at this linguistic point. There are many concepts here, for example Synesthesia in linguistics which is formally “ a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway, ” which in simple words is what happens when we associate different senses into one idea; Dante Alighieri in Inferno talks about “a silent sun”, or Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby says “the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music” where yellow for the Saxon is a cheerful and pleasant colour to associate to the sound. In English Melody and Harmony are names given to girls so you can imagine the impact of such names on our minds. But besides the beautiful sound of both names and their Greek origin “melos and harmos” I was curious about the specific difference between them. According to the Thesaurus dictionary “ a melody is a rhythmical succession of single tones producing a distinct musical phrase or idea ”, colloquially we could say it’s the tune of the song. Harmony “ is the simultaneous combination of tones, especially when blended into chords pleasing to the ear ”, and that seems to be the main point of difference, the harmony connection should be always pleasant . Still talking about associations and ideas, English is the king language for onomatopoeias , that is “ the word means nothing more than the sound it makes. ” Think for example of “water” words such as splash, spray, sprinkle, drip... or vocal sounds such as giggle, grunt or blurt. These are meaningful words, which sound like their meaning. Do not confuse with words that only reproduce sounds such as the group of animal sounds , which is very regular in all languages, as well. For example, in Catalan you have “un aplaudiment” but this word does not sound like the “aplaudiment”, it’s a complete different word. In English you “clap” which is the action and the sound. In Catalan a lion “brama” but the sound the lion makes is “grrrrau” meanwhile in English the verb and the sound that the lion makes are the same “roar”. And like the “roar of the lion” in English most of the animal sound words are reproduced by the same sound the animal makes, e.g. quack, purr, meow, buzz or oink... I guess you know which animal they correspond to if you pronounce them well. It’s funny though that some animals despite making the same sound everywhere in the world, they are perceived as making different sounds by different languages or cultures. This is the case of the dog, which in English is supposed to woof-woof and in Spanish is probably heard as wuau-wuau and the Japanese hear wan-wan . To finish, another big group of types of onomatopoeias is the collision sound words like clap, click, slap, ding, screech they all sound like the word they mean and they all imply some type of physical contact or collision. The sound reproduces the meaning. Likewise happens with air sounds, with the use of the light combination of the letters “fl” such as fly, flutter, or flee which are easily associated to air. All in all, this is probably why English is the most used language for songs and singing, because it’s very rich in sounds and soundful associations and this way melodies and harmonies are easily reached. One last thing “that’s music to my ears” is a beautiful idiom which in English means what you heard is “very good news.” MANAL ZAHRAA MURAD monday3morning@gmail.com A l’octubre, més sessions d’anglès A partir de l’octubre es reprendran les sessions d’anglès al local de l’AIQS. Es faran cada dimarts de 7 de la tarda a les 8:30h i, de moment, ja estan confirmades les sessions dels dies 2, 9, 16, 23 i 30 d’octubre. Us hi esperem! From left to right: Pedro Ros, Teresa Raventós, Joan Pons, Jesús Majem, César Canut, Ricard Aguirre and Manal Zahraa.