I'm stuck on the mobile so researching on the net is a pain in the arse. What is the term for when a word sounds like it's meaning in kind of an onomatopoeic sense. i.e greetings tend to sound genial, words like "yes" sound soft, while "no" or "stop" sound harsh?
Are you sure there is a word? I see lots of discussions of the softness and harshness of words, but no specific name for the phenomena comes up. 100 Beautiful and Ugly Words
Ideophone These examples are from Wikipedia. pitter-patter; the sound of rain drops twinkle; the sound of something sparkling or shiny swish; the sound of swift movement splish-splash; the sound of water splashing ta-da; the sound of a fanfare bling-bling; glitter, sparkle yoink; the "sound" of stealing/snatching Some of these are still clearly based in simple onomatopoeia, like pitter-patter, but there is no actual sound associated with twinkle, though the sound of the word has a certain evocative quality of the visual phenomenon.
Maybe I imagined it, I am sure there is a term related specifically to the propensity for languages to develop words whose general sound mirror their meaning.
Using the bolded section as a search string I found this: The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language Iconicity: 2) Symbolic, emblematic, or representative
