In linguistics, 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 Cratylus ( ; grc, Κρατύλος, ''Kratylos'') was an ancient Athenian philosopher from the mid-late 5th century BCE, known mostly through his portrayal in Plato's dialogue '' Cratylus''. He was a radical proponent of Heraclitean philosophy ...

'', 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".

Upanishads

The Upanishads and

Vyākaraṇa ''Vyākaraṇa'' (, ) refers to one of the six ancient Vedangas, ancillary science connected with the Vedas, which are scriptures in Hinduism.James Lochtefeld (2002), "Vyakarana" in ''The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism'', Vol. 2: N-Z, Ros ...

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 Encycl ...

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 sec ...

, 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 Lu ...

Early Western phonosemantics

The idea of phonosemantics was sporadically discussed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 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 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 mathema ...

'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.

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 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. ...

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

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 lang ...

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 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 is ...

. 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 Xhosa (, ) also isiXhosa as an endonym, is a Nguni language and one of the official language ...

. 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 interrelatedness ...

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 Demonstratives (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 depending on a particular frame ...

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 In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internatio ...

. 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, and has been demonstrated to be valid across different cultures and languages.

Tactile sound symbolism

Bilabial consonants In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tling ...

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