Phonosemantics
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In
linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
, sound symbolism is the resemblance between sound and meaning. It is a form of linguistic iconicity. For example, the English word ''ding'' may sound similar to the actual sound of a bell. Linguistic sound may be perceived as similar to not only sounds, but also to other sensory properties, such as size, vision, touch, or smell, or abstract domains, such as emotion or value judgment. Such correspondence between linguistic sound and meaning may significantly affect the form of spoken languages.


History


Plato and the Cratylus Dialogue

In '' Cratylus'',
Plato Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
has
Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...
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".


Upanishads

The
Upanishads The Upanishads (; sa, उपनिषद् ) are late Vedic Sanskrit texts that supplied the basis of later Hindu philosophy.Wendy Doniger (1990), ''Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism'', 1st Edition, University of Chicago Press, , ...
and Vyākaraṇa contain a lot of material about sound symbolism, for instance: The concept of Sphota and
Nirukta ''Nirukta'' ( sa, निरुक्त, , "explained, interpreted") is one of the six ancient Vedangas, or ancillary science connected with the Vedas – the scriptures of Hinduism.James Lochtefeld (2002), "Nirukta" in The Illustrated Encyclope ...
is also based on this.


Shingon Buddhism

Kūkai Kūkai (; 27 July 774 – 22 April 835Kūkai was born in 774, the 5th year of the Hōki era; his exact date of birth was designated as the fifteenth day of the sixth month of the Japanese lunar calendar, some 400 years later, by the Shingon se ...
, the founder of
Shingon Shingon monks at Mount Koya is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asia, originally spread from India to China through traveling monks such as Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra. Kn ...
, wrote his ''Sound, word, reality'' in the 9th century which relates all sounds to the voice of the Dharmakaya
Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, he was born in L ...
.


Early Western phonosemantics

The idea of phonosemantics was sporadically discussed during the
Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
and the
Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
. In 1690, Locke wrote against the idea in ''
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 (although dated 1690) with the printed title ''An Essay Concerning Humane Understan ...
''. 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 Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz . ( – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of ma ...
's book ''
New Essays on Human Understanding ''New Essays on Human Understanding'' (french: Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain) 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-leng ...
'' 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 linguistics

Modern linguistics has been seen as opposing sound symbolism, beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), considered the founder of modern 'scientific' linguistics. Central to what de Saussure says about words are two related statements: First, he says that "the sign is arbitrary". 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. Second, 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.


Types


Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', '' ...
refers to words that imitate sounds. Some examples in English are ''bow-wow'' or ''meow'', each representing the sound of a
dog The dog (''Canis familiaris'' or ''Canis lupus familiaris'') is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it is derived from the extinct Pleistocene wolf, and the modern wolf is the dog's nearest living relative. Do ...
or a
cat The cat (''Felis catus'') is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from the wild members of ...
.


Ideophone

An
ideophone Ideophone is a word class evoking ideas in sound imitation or onomatopoeia to express action, manner of property. Ideophone is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically occurring mostly in African, Australian and Amerindian langua ...
is "a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery". Unlike onomatopoeia, an ideophone refers to words that depict any sensory domain, such as
vision Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...
or
touch In physiology, the somatosensory system is the network of neural structures in the brain and body that produce the perception of touch ( haptic perception), as well as temperature ( thermoception), body position (proprioception), and pain. It ...
. Examples are Korean ''mallang-mallang'' 말랑말랑 'soft' and Japanese ''kira-kira'' キラキラ 'shiny'. Ideophones are heavily present in many African and East/Southeast Asian languages, such as
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
, Thai, and
Xhosa Xhosa may refer to: * Xhosa people, a nation, and ethnic group, who live in south-central and southeasterly region of South Africa * Xhosa language, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa, principally spoken by the Xhosa people See als ...
. Their form is very often
reduplicated In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwar ...
, but not necessarily so.


Phonaesthemes

A phonaestheme is a sub-morphemic sequence of sounds that are associated to a certain range of meanings. A well-known example is English ''gl-'', which is present in many words related to light or vision, such as ''gleam'', ''glow'', or ''glare''. Since it is submorphemic, ''gl-'' itself is not a morpheme, and it does not form compounds with other morphemes: ''-eam'', ''-ow'', and ''-are'' have no meaning of their own. Phonaesthemes, however, are not necessarily iconic, as they may be language-specific and may not iconically resemble the meaning they are associated to.


Sound symbolism in basic vocabulary

Blasi et al. (2016), Joo (2020), and Johansson et al. (2020) demonstrated that in the languages around the world, certain concepts in the basic vocabulary (such as the
Swadesh List The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatednes ...
or the Leipzig-Jakarta list) tend to be represented by words containing certain sounds. Below are some of the phonosemantic associations confirmed by the three studies:


Magnitude symbolism

High front vowels, such as /i/, are known to be perceptually associated to small size, whereas low and/or back vowels, such as /u/ or /a/, are usually associated with big size. This phenomenon is known as magnitude symbolism. Sapir (1929) showed that, when asked which of the two tables, named ''mil'' and ''mal'', is bigger than the other, many people choose ''mal'' to be bigger than ''mil''. This phenomenon is not only observable in pseudowords, but also present throughout English vocabulary as well.


Deictic symbolism

In many languages, the proximal demonstrative pronoun ('this') tends to have high front vowels (such as /i/), whereas the distal demonstrative pronoun ('that') tends to have low and/or back vowels (such as /u/). Examples include: English ''this'' and ''that'', French ''ceci'' and ''cela'', and Indonesian ''ini'' and ''itu''.


Pronominal symbolism

First person pronouns (''me'') and second person pronouns (''you'') tend to contain a nasal sound. Joo (2020) suggests that this may be related to the infant's tendency of using the nasal sound to seek the attention of the caretaker.


Bouba-Kiki effect

Köhler (1929, 1947, 1970) introduced what is known as the Takete-Maluma phenomenon. When presented two shapes, one being curvy and another being spiky, and asked which one is called ''Takete'' and which one is called ''Maluma'', participants are more likely to associate the name ''Takete'' to the spiky shape and the name ''Maluma'' to the curvy shape. Following Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001), this phenomenon is now more commonly known as the
Bouba/kiki effect The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil ...
, and has been demonstrated to be valid across different cultures and languages.


Tactile sound symbolism

Bilabial consonants have been demonstrated to be linked to the perception of softness, arguably due to the soft texture of human lips. The is frequent in words for 'rough' while infrequent in words for 'smooth'.


Use in commerce

Sound symbolism is used in commerce for the names of products and even companies themselves. For example, a car company may be interested in how to name their car to make it sound faster or stronger. Furthermore, sound symbolism can be used to create a meaningful relationship between a company's brand name and the brand mark itself. Sound symbolism can relate to the color, shade, shape, and size of the brand mark.


See also

*
Ideasthesia Ideasthesia (alternative spelling ideaesthesia) is a neuropsychological phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like sensory experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Ancient Greek () and (), meaning 'se ...
*
Ideophone Ideophone is a word class evoking ideas in sound imitation or onomatopoeia to express action, manner of property. Ideophone is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically occurring mostly in African, Australian and Amerindian langua ...
*
Imitation of natural sounds in various cultures The imitation of natural sounds in various cultures is a diverse phenomenon and can fill in various functions. In several instances, it is related to the belief system (yoiks of the Sami,Szomjas-Schiffert 1996: 56, 76Szomjas-Schiffert 1996: 64
*
Onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', '' ...
*
Phono-semantic matching Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with Phonetics, phonetically and semantically similar words o ...
* Phonestheme *
Phonaesthetics Phonaesthetics (also spelled phonesthetics in North America) is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by during the mid-20th century and ...
* Sign (linguistics) *
Zaum Zaum (russian: зáумь) are the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. Zaum is a non-referential phonetic entity with its own ontology. Th ...


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sound Symbolism Sound Symbolism Phonaesthetics Onomatopoeia Semantics