Sound symbolism
Encyclopedia
Sound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics
and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phoneme
s carry meaning in and of themselves.
propagated an idiosyncratic theory that words containing the front vowel sounds E, I, YU should be used when depicting tender subjects, and those with back vowel sounds O, U, Y - to when describing things that may cause fear ("like anger, envy, pain, and sorrow").
However, it is Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857–1913) who is considered to be the founder of modern 'scientific' linguistics. Central to what de Saussure says about words are two related statements: firstly, he says that "the sign
is arbitrary". This means that he considers the words that we use to indicate things and concepts could be any words - they are essentially just a consensus agreed upon by the speakers of a language and have no discernible pattern or relationship to the thing. (Not that this was an entirely new concept. As early as 1595 Shakespeare included the line "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet
" in his play Romeo and Juliet
.) Thus, the sounds themselves have no linguistic meaning. Secondly, he says that, because words are arbitrary, they have meaning only in relation to other words. A dog is a dog because it is not a cat or a mouse or a horse, etc. These ideas have permeated the study of words since the 19th century.
However, Saussure himself is said to have collected examples where sounds and referents were related. Ancient traditions link sounds and meaning, and some modern linguistic research does also.
(see below):
Another hypothesis states that if a word begins with a particular phoneme, then there is likely to be a number of other words starting with that phoneme that refer to the same thing. An example given by Magnus is: if the basic word for 'house' in a given language starts with a /h/, then by clustering, disproportionately many words containing /h/ can be expected to concern housing: hut, home, hovel, habitat...
Clustering is language dependent, although closely related languages will have similar clustering relationships.
Magnus suggests that this kind of iconism is universal across languages.
Runes, the Hebrew Kabbalah
, the Arab
Abjad
, etc.. References of this kind are very common in The Upanishads, The Nag Hammadi Library
, the Celt
ic Book of Taliesin
, as well as early Christian works, the Shinto
Kototama, and Shingon Buddhism
.
, Plato
has Socrates
commenting on the origins and correctness of various names and words. When Hermogenes
asks if he can provide another hypothesis on how signs come into being (his own is simply 'convention'), Socrates initially suggests that they fit their referents in virtue of the sounds they are made of:
However, faced by an overwhelming number of counterexamples given by Hermogenes, Socrates has to admit that "my first notions of original names are truly wild and ridiculous".
, the founder of Shingon wrote his Sound, word, reality in the 9th century which relates all sounds to the voice of the Dharmakaya
Buddha
.
and the Renaissance
. In 1690, Locke
wrote against the idea in an essay called "An Essay on Human Understanding". His argument was that if there were any connection between sounds and ideas, then we would all be speaking the same language, but this is an over-generalisation. Leibniz's book New Essays on Human Understanding
published in 1765 contains a point by point critique of Locke's essay. Leibniz picks up on the generalization used by Locke and adopts a less rigid approach: clearly there is no perfect correspondence between words and things, but neither is the relationship completely arbitrary, although he seems vague about what that relationship might be.
published Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts. It is here that he establishes the three kinds of relationship between sounds and ideas as discussed above under Types of Sound Symbolism. Below is a sample of researchers in the field of phonosemantics.
Otto Jespersen
suggests that: "Sound symbolism, we may say, makes some words more fit to survive." Dwight Bolinger
of Harvard University
was the primary proponent of phonosemantics through the late 1940s and the 1950s. In 1949, he published The Sign is Not Arbitrary. He concluded that morpheme
s cannot be defined as the minimal meaning-bearing units, in part because linguistic meaning is so ill-defined, and in part because there are obvious situations in which smaller units are meaning-bearing.
Ivan Fónagy (1963) correlates phonemes with metaphors. For example, nasal and velarized vowels are quite generally considered ‘dark’, front vowels as ‘fine’ and ‘high’. Unvoiced stops have been considered ‘thin’ by European linguists, whereas the fricatives were labelled ‘raw’ and ‘hairy’ by the Greeks.
Hans Marchand
provided the first extensive list of English phonestheme
s. He wrote, for example, that "/l/ at the end of a word symbolizes prolongation, continuation" or "nasals at the end of a word express continuous vibrating sounds."
Gérard Genette
published the only full length history of phonosemantics, Mimologics (1976). In 450 pages, Genette details the evolution of the linguistic iconism among linguists and poets, in syntax, morphology and phonology.
Linguist Keith McCune
demonstrated in his doctoral thesis that virtually every word in the Indonesian language
has an iconic (phonosemantic) component. His two-volume doctoral thesis "The Internal Structure of Indonesian Roots" was completed at the University of Michigan
in 1983 and published in Jakarta
in 1985.
In the 2003 BBC
Reith Lectures, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
outlined his research into the links between brain structure and function. In the fourth lecture of the series he describes the phenomena of synesthesia
in which people experience, for example sounds in terms of colors, or sounds in terms of tastes. In one type of synesthesia, people see numbers, letters of the alphabet, or even musical notes, as having a distinct color. Ramachandran proposes a model for how language might have evolved. The theory may explain how humans create metaphor
s and how sounds can be metaphors for images – why for example sounds can be described as "bright" or "dull". In explaining how language might have evolved from cross activation of adjacent areas in the brain, Ramachandran notes four crucial factors, not all related to language, but which combined might have resulted in the emergence of language
. Two of these four processes are of particular interest here.
Synesthetic cross modal abstraction: i.e. we recognize properties that sounds and images have in common and abstract them to store them independently. The sounds and shapes of the objects have characteristics in common that can be abstracted; for example, a "sharp", "cutting" quality of a word, and the shape it describes. Ramachandran calls this the 'Bouba/kiki effect
', based on the results of an experiment with two abstract shapes, one blob-like and the other spiky, that asked people to relate the nonsense words bouba and kiki to them. The effect is real and observable, repeatable across linguistic groups, and evident even in the description of the experiment (with the bouba shape usually described using similar-sounding words like bulbous or blobby while the kiki shape is prickly or spiky).
Built in preexisting cross activation. Ramachandran points out that areas of the brain which appear to be involved in the mix-ups in synesthesia are adjacent to each other physically, and that cross-wiring, or cross activation, could explain synesthesia and our ability to make metaphors. He notes that the areas that control the muscles around the mouth are also adjacent to the visual centers, and suggests that certain words appear to make our mouth imitate the thing we are describing. Examples of this might be words like "teeny weeny", "diminutive" to describe small things; "large" or "enormous" to describe big things.
, and rhetoric
more generally. Tools such as euphony
, alliteration
, and rhyme
all depend on the speaker or writer confidently choosing the best-sounding word.
John Mitchell's book Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments collects lists of words of similar meaning and similar sounds. For example, the entry for V begins:
Likewise, "gl-" words for shiny things: glisten, gleam, glint, glare, glam, glimmer, glaze, glass, glitz, gloss, glory
, glow, and glitter. In German, nouns starting with "kno-" and "knö-" are mostly small and round: Knoblauch "garlic", Knöchel "ankle", Knödel "dumpling", Knolle "tuber", Knopf "button", Knorren "knot (in a tree)", Knospe "bud (of a plant)", Knoten "knot (in string or rope)".
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s carry meaning in and of themselves.
Origin
In the 18th century, Mikhail LomonosovMikhail Lomonosov
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art,...
propagated an idiosyncratic theory that words containing the front vowel sounds E, I, YU should be used when depicting tender subjects, and those with back vowel sounds O, U, Y - to when describing things that may cause fear ("like anger, envy, pain, and sorrow").
However, it is Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
(1857–1913) who is considered to be the founder of modern 'scientific' linguistics. Central to what de Saussure says about words are two related statements: firstly, he says that "the sign
Sign (linguistics)
There are many models of the linguistic sign . A classic model is the one by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to him, language is made up of signs and every sign has two sides : the signifier , the "shape" of a word, its phonic component, i.e...
is arbitrary". This means that he considers the words that we use to indicate things and concepts could be any words - they are essentially just a consensus agreed upon by the speakers of a language and have no discernible pattern or relationship to the thing. (Not that this was an entirely new concept. As early as 1595 Shakespeare included the line "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" is a quotation from William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, meant to say that the names of things do not matter, only what things are....
" in his play Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers.Romeo and Juliet belongs to a...
.) Thus, the sounds themselves have no linguistic meaning. Secondly, he says that, because words are arbitrary, they have meaning only in relation to other words. A dog is a dog because it is not a cat or a mouse or a horse, etc. These ideas have permeated the study of words since the 19th century.
However, Saussure himself is said to have collected examples where sounds and referents were related. Ancient traditions link sounds and meaning, and some modern linguistic research does also.
Types of sound symbolism
Margaret Magnus is the author of a comprehensive book designed to explain phonosemantics to the lay reader - Gods in the Word. This work describes three types of sound symbol using a model first proposed by Wilhelm von HumboldtWilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...
(see below):
Onomatopoeia
This is the least significant type of symbolism. It is simply imitative of sounds, or suggests something that makes a sound. Some examples are: crash, bang, whoosh.Clustering
Words that share a sound sometimes have something in common. If we take, for example, words that have no prefix or suffix and group them according to meaning, some of them will fall into a number of categories. So we find that there is a group of words beginning with /b/ that are about barriers, bulges and bursting, and some other group of /b/ words that are about being banged, beaten, battered, bruised, blistered and bashed. This proportion is, according to Magnus, above the average for other letters.Another hypothesis states that if a word begins with a particular phoneme, then there is likely to be a number of other words starting with that phoneme that refer to the same thing. An example given by Magnus is: if the basic word for 'house' in a given language starts with a /h/, then by clustering, disproportionately many words containing /h/ can be expected to concern housing: hut, home, hovel, habitat...
Clustering is language dependent, although closely related languages will have similar clustering relationships.
Iconism
Iconism, according to Magnus, becomes apparent when comparing words which have the same sort of referent. One way is to look at a group of words that all refer to the same thing and that differ only in their sound, such as 'stamp', 'stomp', 'tamp', 'tromp', 'tramp', and 'step'. An /m/ before the /p/ in some words makes the action more forceful - compare 'stamp' with 'step' or 'tamp' with 'tap'. According to Magnus, the /r/ sets the word in motion, especially after a /t/ so a 'tamp' is in one place, but a 'tramp' goes for a walk. The /p/ in all those words would be what emphasizes the individual steps.Magnus suggests that this kind of iconism is universal across languages.
Phenomimes and psychomimes
Some languages possess a category of words midway between onomatopoeia and usual words. Whereas onomatopoeia refers to the use of words to imitate actual sounds, there are languages known for having a special class of words that "imitate" soundless states or events, called phenomimes (when they describe external phenomena) and psychomimes (when they describe psychological states). On a scale that orders all words according to the correlation between their meaning and their sound, with the sound-imitating words like meow and whack at one end, and with the conventional words like water and blue at the other end, the phenomimes and the psychomimes would be somewhere in the middle. They are not found, however, only in children's vocabulary, but widely used in daily conversation among adults and even in more formal writing. Like Japanese, the Korean language also has a relatively high proportion of phenomimes and psychomimes.History of Phonosemantics
Several ancient traditions exist which talk about an archetypal relationship between sounds and ideas. Some of these are discussed below, but there are others as well. If we include a link between letters and ideas then the list includes the VikingViking
The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to...
Runes, the Hebrew Kabbalah
Kabbalah
Kabbalah/Kabala is a discipline and school of thought concerned with the esoteric aspect of Rabbinic Judaism. It was systematized in 11th-13th century Hachmei Provence and Spain, and again after the Expulsion from Spain, in 16th century Ottoman Palestine...
, the Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
Abjad
Abjad
An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
, etc.. References of this kind are very common in The Upanishads, The Nag Hammadi Library
Nag Hammadi library
The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. That year, twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman...
, the Celt
Celt
The Celts were a diverse group of tribal societies in Iron Age and Roman-era Europe who spoke Celtic languages.The earliest archaeological culture commonly accepted as Celtic, or rather Proto-Celtic, was the central European Hallstatt culture , named for the rich grave finds in Hallstatt, Austria....
ic Book of Taliesin
Book of Taliesin
The Book of Taliesin is one of the most famous of Middle Welsh manuscripts, dating from the first half of the 14th century though many of the fifty-six poems it preserves are taken to originate in the 10th century. The manuscript, known as Peniarth MS 2 and kept at the National Library of Wales,...
, as well as early Christian works, the Shinto
Shinto
or Shintoism, also kami-no-michi, is the indigenous spirituality of Japan and the Japanese people. It is a set of practices, to be carried out diligently, to establish a connection between present day Japan and its ancient past. Shinto practices were first recorded and codified in the written...
Kototama, and Shingon Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
.
Plato and the Cratylus Dialogue
In CratylusCratylus (dialogue)
Cratylus is the name of a dialogue by Plato. Most modern scholars agree that it was written mostly during Plato's so-called middle period...
, Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
has Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
commenting on the origins and correctness of various names and words. When Hermogenes
Hermogenes
Hermogenes is a Greek name . It may refer to:* Hermogenes , Attic Greek potter* Hermogenes , Greek* Hermogenes of Priene , Greek architect...
asks if he can provide another hypothesis on how signs come into being (his own is simply 'convention'), Socrates initially suggests that they fit their referents in virtue of the sounds they are made of:
- "Now the letter rhoRhoRho is the 17th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 100. It is derived from Semitic resh "head"...
, as I was saying, appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose: for example, in the actual words rein and roe he represents motion by rho; also in the words tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words such as krouein (strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein (break), kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of movements he generally finds an expression in the letter R, because, as I imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order to express motion" - Cratylus.
However, faced by an overwhelming number of counterexamples given by Hermogenes, Socrates has to admit that "my first notions of original names are truly wild and ridiculous".
Upanishads
The Upanishads contain a lot of material about sound symbolism, for instance:- "The mute consonants represent the earth, the sibilants the sky, the vowels heaven. The mute consonants represent fire, the sibilants air, the vowels the sun… The mute consonants represent the eye, the sibilants the ear, the vowels the mind". Aitareya Aranyaka III.2.6.2.
Shingon Buddhism
KūkaiKukai
Kūkai , also known posthumously as , 774–835, was a Japanese monk, civil servant, scholar, poet, and artist, founder of the Shingon or "True Word" school of Buddhism. Shingon followers usually refer to him by the honorific titles of and ....
, the founder of Shingon wrote his Sound, word, reality in the 9th century which relates all sounds to the voice of the Dharmakaya
Trikaya
The Trikāya doctrine is an important Mahayana Buddhist teaching on both the nature of reality and the nature of a Buddha. By the 4th century CE the Trikāya Doctrine had assumed the form that we now know...
Buddha
Buddhahood
In Buddhism, buddhahood is the state of perfect enlightenment attained by a buddha .In Buddhism, the term buddha usually refers to one who has become enlightened...
.
Early Western phonosemantics
The idea of phonosemantics was sporadically discussed during the Middle AgesMiddle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
and the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
. In 1690, Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
wrote against the idea in an essay called "An Essay on Human Understanding". His argument was that if there were any connection between sounds and ideas, then we would all be speaking the same language, but this is an over-generalisation. Leibniz's book New Essays on Human Understanding
New Essays on Human Understanding
New Essays on Human Understanding is a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal by Gottfried Leibniz of John Locke's major work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is one of only two full-length works by Leibniz...
published in 1765 contains a point by point critique of Locke's essay. Leibniz picks up on the generalization used by Locke and adopts a less rigid approach: clearly there is no perfect correspondence between words and things, but neither is the relationship completely arbitrary, although he seems vague about what that relationship might be.
Modern phonosemantics
In 1836 Wilhelm von HumboldtWilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...
published Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts. It is here that he establishes the three kinds of relationship between sounds and ideas as discussed above under Types of Sound Symbolism. Below is a sample of researchers in the field of phonosemantics.
Otto Jespersen
Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin...
suggests that: "Sound symbolism, we may say, makes some words more fit to survive." Dwight Bolinger
Dwight Bolinger
Dwight Le Merton Bolinger was an American linguist and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He began his career as the first editor of the "Among the New Words" feature for American Speech. As an expert in Spanish, he was elected president of the American...
of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
was the primary proponent of phonosemantics through the late 1940s and the 1950s. In 1949, he published The Sign is Not Arbitrary. He concluded that morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s cannot be defined as the minimal meaning-bearing units, in part because linguistic meaning is so ill-defined, and in part because there are obvious situations in which smaller units are meaning-bearing.
Ivan Fónagy (1963) correlates phonemes with metaphors. For example, nasal and velarized vowels are quite generally considered ‘dark’, front vowels as ‘fine’ and ‘high’. Unvoiced stops have been considered ‘thin’ by European linguists, whereas the fricatives were labelled ‘raw’ and ‘hairy’ by the Greeks.
Hans Marchand
Hans Marchand
Hans Marchand was a German Linguist. He studied Romance Languages, English and Latin and was due to his fleeing from Germany during the Third Reich a lecturer of linguistics at Istandbul, Yale University, Bard College. From 1957 to 1973 he was a professor at the university of Tübingen...
provided the first extensive list of English phonestheme
Phonestheme
The term phonestheme was coined in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language.A phonestheme is different from a morpheme because it does not meet the normal...
s. He wrote, for example, that "/l/ at the end of a word symbolizes prolongation, continuation" or "nasals at the end of a word express continuous vibrating sounds."
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.-Life:...
published the only full length history of phonosemantics, Mimologics (1976). In 450 pages, Genette details the evolution of the linguistic iconism among linguists and poets, in syntax, morphology and phonology.
Linguist Keith McCune
Keith McCune
Keith Michael McCune is a linguist, novelist, and translator. His study of Indonesian roots has been called "perhaps the most detailed and complete single work in the field of phonosemantics," while his retelling of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin earned praise from Michael Boyer, the...
demonstrated in his doctoral thesis that virtually every word in the Indonesian language
Indonesian language
Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....
has an iconic (phonosemantic) component. His two-volume doctoral thesis "The Internal Structure of Indonesian Roots" was completed at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
in 1983 and published in Jakarta
Jakarta
Jakarta is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Officially known as the Special Capital Territory of Jakarta, it is located on the northwest coast of Java, has an area of , and a population of 9,580,000. Jakarta is the country's economic, cultural and political centre...
in 1985.
Relationship with neuroscience
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
Reith Lectures, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
Vilayanur Subramanian "Rama" Ramachandran, born 1951, is a neuroscientist known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics...
outlined his research into the links between brain structure and function. In the fourth lecture of the series he describes the phenomena of synesthesia
Synesthesia
Synesthesia , from the ancient Greek , "together," and , "sensation," is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...
in which people experience, for example sounds in terms of colors, or sounds in terms of tastes. In one type of synesthesia, people see numbers, letters of the alphabet, or even musical notes, as having a distinct color. Ramachandran proposes a model for how language might have evolved. The theory may explain how humans create metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
s and how sounds can be metaphors for images – why for example sounds can be described as "bright" or "dull". In explaining how language might have evolved from cross activation of adjacent areas in the brain, Ramachandran notes four crucial factors, not all related to language, but which combined might have resulted in the emergence of language
Origin of language
The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
. Two of these four processes are of particular interest here.
Synesthetic cross modal abstraction: i.e. we recognize properties that sounds and images have in common and abstract them to store them independently. The sounds and shapes of the objects have characteristics in common that can be abstracted; for example, a "sharp", "cutting" quality of a word, and the shape it describes. Ramachandran calls this the 'Bouba/kiki effect
Bouba/kiki effect
The Bouba/Kiki Effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. This effect was first observed by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929...
', based on the results of an experiment with two abstract shapes, one blob-like and the other spiky, that asked people to relate the nonsense words bouba and kiki to them. The effect is real and observable, repeatable across linguistic groups, and evident even in the description of the experiment (with the bouba shape usually described using similar-sounding words like bulbous or blobby while the kiki shape is prickly or spiky).
Built in preexisting cross activation. Ramachandran points out that areas of the brain which appear to be involved in the mix-ups in synesthesia are adjacent to each other physically, and that cross-wiring, or cross activation, could explain synesthesia and our ability to make metaphors. He notes that the areas that control the muscles around the mouth are also adjacent to the visual centers, and suggests that certain words appear to make our mouth imitate the thing we are describing. Examples of this might be words like "teeny weeny", "diminutive" to describe small things; "large" or "enormous" to describe big things.
Relationship with poetry
The sound of words is important in the field of poetryPoetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, and rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
more generally. Tools such as euphony
Euphony
Phonaesthetics is the claim or study of inherent pleasantness or beauty or unpleasantness of the sound of certain words and sentences. Poetry is considered euphonic, as is well-crafted literary prose...
, alliteration
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
, and rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
all depend on the speaker or writer confidently choosing the best-sounding word.
John Mitchell's book Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments collects lists of words of similar meaning and similar sounds. For example, the entry for V begins:
- Vital and vigorous but vain and vicious.
- Vitality is in words which relate to the Latin vita (life), vis (force) and vigor. In English are vim and vigour, vitality and velocity. The effect of V can be described as very vivacious. Like several other sounds V has a second, opposite meaning. In accordance with its relationship to the sounds W and F it is sometimes weak and flustured (German verwirrt), as in the words vain, vacuous, vapid, vague, vacillate, vagrant, vaporous, vertigo, veer, and vary.
Likewise, "gl-" words for shiny things: glisten, gleam, glint, glare, glam, glimmer, glaze, glass, glitz, gloss, glory
Glory (optical phenomenon)
A glory is an optical phenomenon that resembles an iconic saint's halo about the shadow of the observer's head. The effect is produced by light backscattered towards its source by a cloud of uniformly sized water droplets...
, glow, and glitter. In German, nouns starting with "kno-" and "knö-" are mostly small and round: Knoblauch "garlic", Knöchel "ankle", Knödel "dumpling", Knolle "tuber", Knopf "button", Knorren "knot (in a tree)", Knospe "bud (of a plant)", Knoten "knot (in string or rope)".
See also
- Japanese sound symbolismJapanese sound symbolismThis article describes sound symbolic or mimetic words in the Japanese language. Most languages have such words; for example, "bang", "zap", "ding", "slither", "pop", etc. in English. Sound symbolic words occur more often in Japanese than in English—they are found in formal as well as vernacular...
- Phonoaesthetics
- PhonesthemePhonesthemeThe term phonestheme was coined in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language.A phonestheme is different from a morpheme because it does not meet the normal...
- Imitation of natural sounds in various cultures
External links
- Margaret Magnus's Phonosemantics Website
- Sound Symbolism Robin Allott.
- The Influence of Phonesthesia on the English Language - an alternative approach to phonosemantics.
- Cratylus Dialogue
- Reference and symbol in Plato's Cratylus and kuukai's Shojijissogi Philosophy East and West Vol. 32:4 (October 1982)
- BBC Reith Lectures 2003
- especially "Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese"
- An example of phonosemantics in advertising
- Oral Metaphor Construct Asa M. Stepak
- Induced generic sound symbolism for the blind - "seeing with sound"
- Conversational Grunts
- Eating the Wind a satirical but illustrative example of sound symbolism and iconicity using airstream mechanismAirstream mechanismIn phonetics, the airstream mechanism is the method by which airflow is created in the vocal tract. Along with phonation, it is one of two mandatory aspects of sound production; without these, there can be no speech sound....
s. - "Phonological Clusters of Semantically Similar Words"
- comparison of dirty words in Chinese and English
- complete meanings of sounds of Hindi and IPA (international phonetic alphabets)
Sources
- Magnus, M. Gods of the Word : Archetypes in the Consonants. (Truman State University Press, July 1999)
- The Sound Shape of Language by Roman JakobsonRoman JakobsonRoman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
and Linda Waugh - Euphonics: A Poet's Dictionary of Enchantments by John Mitchell (ISBN 904263 437)
- Theory of Phonosemantics by Pramod Kumar Agrawal (www.soundmeanings.com)