> A **phonestheme** is a pattern of sounds systematically paired with a certain [meaning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(linguistics) "Meaning (linguistics)") in a [language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language "Language"). The idea is that this is there are structures beyond the morphemes and known etymologies which manifest as statistically significant correlations in phonological patterns in words with related meanings. There are two opposite positions I can imagine for this: - Words with related meanings are going to tend to be used in place of each other when someone forgets a word and it would not be surprising that words would evolve towards similarity as well - Of course when you limit the combinations of anything and randomly map those combinations to a large (but finite) number of other things you can find patterns in the chaos if you look hard enough Despite being opposite positions, they are not mutually exclusively, so I suspect that both of these things could be true to one degree or another. # Notability Only notable in that it might be interesting to use something like this when generating and mapping words in a conlang. I'm not sure how useful it is in real linguistic analysis or language acquisition. # References - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonestheme