soundlore

soundlore

English

Alternative forms

• sound-lore

Etymology

From sound +‎ lore. Perhaps calqued from German Lautlehre (“phonology”, literally “sound-lore”).

Noun

soundlore (uncountable)

1. Information or knowledge about sounds.
   • 2013, Allan and Paulette Macfarlan, Handbook of American Indian Games:

     When a young brave in training could distinguish between these sounds he was well on the road to know what made them, but there was still an enormous amount of sound-lore to be learned.

   • 2008, Dixie Deerman, Steve Rasmussen, The Goodly Spellbook: Olde Spells for Modern Problems:

     Back in the days before grammar split off from grimoire, when magic was taught alongside poetry, and rhetoric was an application of philosophy, Priest/esses and bards passed along to their initiates the correspondences between their languages' particles of sound and the parts and patterns of the world around them. Tragically, as cultures were conquered by new religions and their old wisdom-keepers persecuted, most of this oral soundlore was lost—forcibly forgotten, or buried beneath the new priesthood's patter and Babel.

2. (dated, phonology) The study of sounds; phonology.
   • 1875, Longmans, Green and co, Notes on Books:

     The present opportunity has been used to enlarge and improve several departments of the Grammar, especially those of Soundlore and Derivation, and to bring out somewhat more prominently than before the leading facts of Comparative Philology, […]

   • 1893, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art:

     Since this volume contains a careful analysis and complete survey of what has been hitherto written on soundlore, the author would deserve the gratitude of all learners if his work were to be looked upon […]

   • 1910, George Saintsbury, A history of English prosody from the twelfth century to the present day:

     I must reiterate excuse if I have seemed heedless or impertinent in my refusal seriously to consider works on prosody which are based upon "sound-lore."

   • 1969, Demetrius Charles de Kavanagh Boulger, Asian Review:

     It may be, as he says, that these groups are not so generally studied as Greek, Teutonic and Latin, but they often (especially Lithuanian) supply forms which are of the greatest value for deciding difficult points of Aryan sound-lore.