The words we choose to describe the world around bear some extralinguistic information; being realized in a context they come to life and can either calm down or drive the listener crazy. In this post I'd like to speak about our linguistic preferences and some factors that determine our choice and I need your feedback as this questions doesn't let my inner linguist sleep well at night.
To begin with, I'd like to share a list of my favourite words in English and Russian (with transcription and translation) with you.
English
English is my first foreign language used almost every day. There are some words which I caress with some queer passion: I turn to these on special occasions only as they seem to be in a way sacred for me. What I love about these? Well, the way they are pronounced.
- Eerie
- Sophisticated
- Vicenary
- Universal
- Tremendous
- Dandelion
- Bitterness
- Sacrify
I am not a native speaker so the words I like don't have that thick layer of assosiations that native speakers have. Anyway, none of this words include some [ch], [sh], [tsh] or [z] sounds that irritare the hear. Almost all are quite rare and used in unusual, powerful contexts.
Russian
When it comes up to Russian I can write a long list of my favourite words used both in prose and in verses. The choice is more thorough as it's not only the pronounciation that's important but also the long row of assosiations.
- Полынья [polyn'ya] - unfrozen patch of water
- Вереница [verenitsa] - succession
- Калина [kalina] - arrow-wood
- Тетива [tetiva] - bow string
- Млечный [mlechnyi] - milky
- Високосный [visokosnyi] - leap (leap year)
- Вереск [veresk] - heath
- Медуница [medunitsa] - lungwort
The interesting thing is that all these words have Slavic origin and have a very long history behind. Many of these are also names of different plants. There're also many vowels in these and they don't have any negative connotation (in comparison to the first list of English words).
Your turn
I would like to invite you to this interesting discussion and ask you to share some words that you love most in your mother tongue (if not English, please, share the transcriptions and the translations) or in other languages.
Thank you for attention,
Anastasia