[blooalien]

I'm really surprised at what a challenge that turned out to be. I was certain I was gonna have no problems distinguishing drugs from Tolkien characters, but I only got 15/24 in the end. Recognized a few obvious brand names and characters, but half the time I had to resort to straight-up guessing. Some of those drug names totally sound like Tolkien characters.

[ren_engineer]

it's actually a due to a research field created/popularized by Tolkien

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics

all about studying pleasant sounding words, big pharma uses it for naming drugs. "Cellar door" was one of Tolkien's favorite phrases, you can see variations and modifications of it in many fantasy settings

>Tolkien, Lewis, and others have suggested that cellar door's auditory beauty becomes more apparent the more the word is dissociated from its literal meaning, for example, by using alternative spellings such as Selador, Selladore, Celador, Selidor

[retrac]

There's a related field, phonosemantics, about the inherent meaning of a word because of how it sounds. (Words which sound like what they should sound like are, I would guess, pleasing.) Onomatopoeia fall in this category: bang, crash, pow, glug-glug.

Teensy eensy tiny itty bitty little bit. All /e/ and /i/ front vowels. The mouth is literally closed up. Grand large vast ginormous expansive gargantuan. All /a/ back vowels. The mouth is literally relaxed and open. There are of course exceptions (big, small being notable) but English has a strong tendency in this way with size terms. Big = back and open vowel. Small = front and close vowel. This tendency isn't restricted to English; it shows up across languages in unrelated language families.

One of the classic linguistics experiments is Bouba and Kiki [1]. One of these shapes is called Bouba, and one is called Kiki. As you probably already instinctively know, the one on the right is Bouba, and the one on the left is Kiki. Arabic, Japanese, English, Swahili speakers all agree on this, with like 90% or greater concord across cultures being typical.

And one thing I noticed myself I haven't seen written about elsewhere. Take a look at the letter forms for how we write these sounds. In English: Bouba, Kiki. In Japanese: ボウバ and キキ. In Arabic: بوبا and كيكي. Bouba is written with round glyphs that enclose spaces. Kiki is written with sharp straight lines. Maybe that is just a coincidence. I haven't done a larger sampling than those three writing systems.

Other patterns tend to show up within a language, but not cross-linguistically, and are probably arbitrary associations formed simply because of existing patterns. For example with English:

* gl- : related to light -- glance, glare, glass, gleam, glimmer, glint, glisten, glitter, gloaming, gloom, gloss, glow

* sw- : related to a long movement - sway, sweep, swerve, swing, swipe, swirl, swoop, swoosh

The last three are very fun: swirl, swoop, swoosh. Swirl ends in -rl which literally curls (oh, there's that rl again) the tongue. A swoop ends with a stop consonant. Accordingly, it has more finality, suddenness, than swoosh. So: a bird swoops in to grab its prey. And a bird swooshes by, when it misses that prey.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Booba-Ki...

[indigoabstract]

I've noticed that too. It's like some form of synesthesia, where one sense (audio in this case) influences perception in another seemingly unrelated sense (visuals).

And, perhaps related, in addition to their regular meaning, a lot of things seem to also have an inherent symbolic value. Like going up/going down, on top/at the bottom, sharp/blunt, clear/foggy, etc.

I think that most people, when asked, would prefer going up to going down, even though they have to push against gravity.

[adastra22]

"slithering snakes"

[Semaphor]

> "Cellar door" was one of Tolkien's favorite phrases

Oh cool, so that is where Donnie Darko got it from ("the most beautiful word in the English language")

[misstuned]

There is, or was, a radio/TV company in Europe called Celador - I always wondered where the odd-sounding name came from.

[SamFold]

Also the name of the island where the dragons live in Ursula Leguin’s books. (Written Selidor)

[collaborative]

Also means jail keeper in Spanish

[jltsiren]

None of the drug names sounded like Tolkien characters to me. I guess native English speakers are at a disadvantage, because they are more likely to consider the names as they would be pronounced in English. The intended pronunciation is usually close to Classical Latin, which means that pronouncing the names in any other European language is likely closer to the truth. And when you pronounce the names in that language, Tolkien characters and drugs tend to sound different.

[sspiff]

I'm European and I studied Latin for 6 years in high school and yet I found the test very challenging.

[fikama]

You got me interested, could you say more about how are doing this? What exactly sounds different to you, and maybe what is your first language too. I am European but my first language is polish so in this context it is useless :P

[jltsiren]

My first language is Finnish, which has a very straightforward correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.

I would divide the drug names into four categories based on how they sound:

Obviously a substance: Amantidine, Sildenafil

Generic fantasy names / pronounceable strings with no meaning: Azafen, Clédial, Cymbalta, Desyrel, Edronax, Luvox

Could be Tolkienian, but it's spelled wrong: Sintamil

Could be Tolkienian, but the final syllable is wrong: Elronon, Eskalith, Nardil

Additionally, the two Tolkien characters I had to guess were both kings of Gondor: Minalcar and Narmacil. Their names are in Quenya, while the commonly used names for elves etc. are in Sindarin, which sounds different.

[User3456335]

It sounds like you got by more on thorough knowledge of Tolkien than your knowledge of Finnish. I'm going to guess there's more speakers of non-English languages here than of Quenya and Sindarin (which may have been pharmaceutical names for all I know).

[dawatchusay]

So you were 100% correct on the test?

[jltsiren]

I got 23/24 this time, as I guessed one Tolkien character wrong. The last time I saw this test, maybe a couple of years ago, I got 24/24.

[steve_adams_86]

Yeah, wow. It’s been years since I read and watched, but I expected this to be challenging for the uninitiated. That crushed me. I guess I just lost a bunch of nerd cred.

It’s bizarre that I did about as well at getting drug names correct, and I can’t say I’m well versed in those.

[jhbadger]

It depends if you've read The Silmarillion or not. Pretty much all the obscure Tolkien characters are from that and had no problem recognizing them. Also, they included accent marks on some of the names which is a dead give away (I can't think of any drug name that uses those). Still, if your exposure to Tolkien is just LOTR, I could see how this could be difficult.

[thedanbob]

> Also, they included accent marks on some of the names which is a dead give away (I can't think of any drug name that uses those).

There actually was one, Clédial. It caught me out because I was thinking the same thing.

[blooalien]

Hey, thanks to everyone who responded to this comment with interesting and educational tidbits. That's the sort of stuff I very much appreciate about HackerNews. Can always count on finding new and interesting knowledge to explore here.

[BerislavLopac]

24/24 here :P