Gods of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants (Hardcover)

by Margaret Magnus (Author)

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Product Description
In 1993, as part of a computer project I was working on, I found myself reading an English dictionary and dividing all the words into prefixes, suffixes and roots. I had read studies in linguists which suggested that the initial consonants of a word had a set of meanings, and the remaining rhyming part also had a set of meanings. One 'sense' of 'str-' is linearity: string, strip, stripe, street, etc. And one sense of '-ap' is flat: cap, flap, lap, map, etc. If you put them together, you get a flat line: 'strap'. The idea fascinated me, and since I was marking all these words anyway, I decided to keep an eye out for these classes which have similar meaning and pronunciation both. It turns out that it is possible by means of a series of repeatable experiments to show that certain meanings hang out with certain phonemes and others do not.

I have been working on a dictionary which outlines this data for English in much more detail rather formally and scientifically. But I also have many thoughts which I seem to express more openly and cheerfully when I voice them in a separate book. My purpose here is therefore not to prove anything, but to summarize my most important findings in plain English and to philosophize freely and naively on their significance.

About the Author
Margaret Magnus is a freelance writer and researcher. She grew up in Boulder, CO and Trondheim, Norway, and is fluent in English, Norwegian and Russian. Magnus studied Russian at the University of Leningrad, and holds a degree in German with a minor in mathematics from Colorado State University as well as a degree in linguistics from the University of Oslo. She was a PhD candidate in formal theoretical linguistics at MIT, from where she went on to co-found and serve for 10 years as CEO in a business, Circle Noetics, which develops natural language software, such as search engines, spelling checkers and hyphenation subroutines. She enjoys playing the piano and raising her two children.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 146 pages
• Publisher: Truman State University Press (July 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0943549523
• ISBN-13: 978-0943549521
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,515,936 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A revolutionary work by an independent researcher, August 23, 2001

By	Brian J. Miller "primematter" (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Gods of the Word is a rare, beautiful and poetic work of revolutionary science. If Freud was the first to listen to his patients, Margaret Magnus is the first to listen to words and what they are saying to us. Anyone involved with language -- reading, speaking, listening, writing, understanding -- will never see their medium in quite the same way again, and will be richer for the experience of reading this book.

For they will have discovered the underlying phonosemantic structure of inherent meaning in the arbitrary connections between the signifiers and signifieds of their language.

In psychoanalysis and intellectual history, the selected fact is ignored until the anxiety it provokes can be tolerated, and insight (new paradigm) achieved. 2400 years ago, Socrates said in Cratylus that sounds and words are imitations of the essence of their referents. It seems no one got around to testing this theory until Margaret Magnus.

In this book you will learn that monomorphemic (single-syllable) words tend to reduce to a relatively small number of meaning groups (concepts), defined by their phonemes (sounds), and tend to cluster in related groups of meanings. Each phoneme has its own underlying related concepts (or pre-conceptions) which cluster and are different in meaning and direction from other phonemes. The inherent meanings of phonemes interact with the more arbitrary connections between words and what they mean (reference). Inherent phoneme meaning varies between languages but often points to the same underlying concepts.

These are the subterranean "Gods of the Word" that speak through us.

This book is both scientific and spiritual. It offers a testable hypothesis about material reality (provable at home in three hours or less) that calls into question basic assumptions about language, meaning and communication that have been scientific (academic) dogma since de Saussure and responsible for both the shaping and subject of much of twentieth century "discourse." It is spiritual because it points to a realm beyond the arbitrary connections of material reality, to an underlying world of inherent meaning, where sounds and letters and words have essential, formative and poetic capabilies.

The ultimate value of Gods of the Word lies in its capacity to link these two worlds and viewpoints by showing their intimate connections in language. It should open doors in a number of directions.