linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, sound symbolism is the perceptual similarity between speech sounds and concept meanings. 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 Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiology, neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavior, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or suffering, displeasure. There is ...

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 ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

has

Socrates Socrates (; ; – 399 BC) was a Ancient Greek philosophy, Greek philosopher from Classical Athens, Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and as among the first moral philosophers of the Ethics, ethical tradition ...

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 (; , , ) are late Vedic and post-Vedic Sanskrit texts that "document the transition from the archaic ritualism of the Veda into new religious ideas and institutions" and the emergence of the central religious concepts of Hind ...

and Vyākaraṇa contain a lot of material about sound symbolism, for instance: The concept of Sphota and Nirukta is also based on this.

Shingon Buddhism

Kūkai , born posthumously called , was a Japanese Buddhist monk, calligrapher, and poet who founded the Vajrayana, esoteric Shingon Buddhism, Shingon school of Buddhism. He travelled to China, where he studied Tangmi (Chinese Vajrayana Buddhism) und ...

, the founder of

Shingon is one of the major schools of Buddhism in Japan and one of the few surviving Vajrayana lineages in East Asian Buddhism. It is a form of Japanese Esoteric Buddhism and is sometimes called "Tōmitsu" (東密 lit. "Esoteric uddhismof Tō- ...

, 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 legends, he was ...

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 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

and the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

. 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 Understand ...

''. 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'' () is a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal by Gottfried Leibniz of John Locke's major work '' An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' (1689). It is one of only two full-length works by Leibniz (the other being the ...

'' 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 Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wi ...

(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 (or rarely echoism) is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetics, phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias in English include animal noises such as Oin ...

refers to words that imitate sounds. Some examples in English are ''bow-wow'' or ''meow'', each representing the sound of a dog or a cat.

Ideophone

An ideophone 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 ...

touch The somatosensory system, or somatic sensory system is a subset of the sensory nervous system. The main functions of the somatosensory system are the perception of external stimuli, the perception of internal stimuli, and the regulation of bo ...

. 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, Thai,

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

and Xhosa. Their form is very often reduplicated, 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 A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as ...

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 present throughout English vocabulary as well.

Deictic symbolism

In many languages, the proximal

demonstrative Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning ...

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 Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it''). Personal pronouns may also take different for ...

(''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

Wolfgang Köhler Wolfgang Köhler (; 21 January 1887 – 11 June 1967) was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology. During the Nazi regime in Germany, he pro ...

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 in 2001, this phenomenon is now more commonly known as the

bouba/kiki effect The bouba–kiki effect ( ) or takete–maluma phenomenon is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. The most typical research finding is that people, when presented with nonsense wor ...

, 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.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sound Symbolism Sound Symbolism Phonaesthetics Onomatopoeia Semantics