Talk:Sound symbolism

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This whole article is a mess.

First, there are problems with organization. For example, the last paragraph begins, "/p/ has quite a similar symbolism because the process of making the sound /p/ is identical except that /b/ is voiced, and /p/ is unvoiced." /p/ has a similar symbolism to what exactly? The previous paragraph (and in fact the entire section) was about Ramachandran's ideas on metaphors. And the section is entitled "Relationship with Neuroscience".

Second, the tone is as far from encyclopedic as possible. It's more of a fan page for Margaret Magnus's pop-science book "Gods of the Word" than an article. Here's a good example: "The sounds of these words, evoke images, and images have an emotional impact, and every advertiser knows that emotions determine behaviour! Prozac was originally called Fluoxetine before the marketing guys got hold of it...."

Third, the article is extremely POV, being nothing but Magnus's ideas, and all of the support she's found for those ideas in historical and modern times.

There clearly is something to phonosemantics. Nobody disputes intra-language iconism in Japanese, Yoruba, etc. Nobody doubts that the pook/pak/peek experiments show at least some inter-language iconism.

However, this quote from the article is another story: "/b/ forms blunt bulges, whereas /p/ tends to precise points; /b/ blows up, whereas /p/ simply pops". It certainly sounds cute, but it means very little, and what it means is wrong. Think about "pan" vs. "ban" or "lap" vs. "lab". How precise is "plateau", how blunt is "bristle"? (It's also a possible copyvio from Magnus's book and/or site, but I haven't checked that.)

The real problem is that there's no established consensus out there. Linguistics as a whole is a pretty young and under-manned science, and this is at best a nascent sub-speciality of minority interest.

Do a quick search on sci.lang or LINGUIST for works like phonosemantics, iconism, ideophone, phonesthetics (there's not even a consensus on the terms...) and you'll see that almost everyone making strong claims disagrees with almost everyone else. And the quality ranges from the plausible scholarly speculations of John Lawler to the usual cranks trying to prove that their national language is descended from Sumerian. To an outsider, it's hard to tell what to believe.

Wikipedia should have an article on phonosemantics (or some other related term). But this--or anything else pulled straight from "Margo's Magical Letter Land"--is not it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.109.111.60 (talk • contribs)

I couldn't agree more! There are many problems with this article, and to be honest I wouldn't know where to start fixing them. It says that many of the phenomena aren't universal, yet happily goes on giving English examples. It cites Plato's Cratylus crudely out of context, without the crucial part of Socrates admitting that his theory is problematic as there are innumerable counterexamples. The tone is far too colloquial. The section 'Application of Phonosemantics' is simply original research (I will remove it in a minute, see WP:CITE). It looks like the part on Japanese phonosemantics has been copy-pasted from another article without any regard for structure or flow, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are copyvios to be found in other parts of the texts.

There are a few useful things, however, especially on the history of phonosemantics. Merging the useful material into Phonosemantics and redirecting this one might be the start of a solution. — mark ✎ 16:17, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Certainly, the article needs work. Overall, however, it is a much better treatment of phonesthesia than we might have feared. I really think you are being a bit harsh with Magnus, dear 69.109.111.60, though I tried to tone down the plug for "Gods of the Word." The fact is that phonesthesia has long been a taboo subject in circles traveled by serious linguists, which has harmed scientific endeavor in this field, creating a situation in which an encyclopedia must make an extra effort to maintain NPOV. I have read that book and really do not think calling it "pop science" is fair or justified, though many 'official' linguists who have their own positions to defend would certainly agree with such a judgment. In this case, the scholarly consensus itself may reflect substantial bias. That is what Magnus' popularization stems from.

With time, we ought to be able to improve the treatment of this subject in Wikipedia. In my own view, the concept of the phonestheme deserves separate treatment from the many issues of sound symbolism generally. With hopes of further improvement to come in the future, I have at least taken the step of linking to the other article, to which I added a minor item, a couple of (initial) references, and some internal links.

I may not have enough experience as a wikipedian to fully grasp the point you were making, Mark, about merging some articles but I do concur that reorganizing material now in various different Wikipedia articles would help with the reorganization of this one. Bibliography for this subject is extremely problematic but is something I could help with (although I'm not sure how much detail would be appropriate in a generalist reference like Wikipedia).--Ph7five 14:43, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I wrote the original article in the early days of Wikipedia when standards were not so high, and I'm sorry that people have not found my efforts up to scratch. It was a case of having to start somewhere and someone having to start - I was the one committing time and energy back then so that you'll would have something to complain about! Please let everyone note that my main source was Margaret Magnus' PhD thesis, particularly her extensive literature review, not her more popularly oriented book. Please note also that at the time she, in a letter to me, approved of my use of her material: "cool" was her adjective. (Perhaps she was just being kind?) Magnus has showed that initial word sounds in monomorphemic words are very closely correlated with 'meaning' for that word - e.g. words beginning with /m/ do fall into a very small no of what Lakoff would call "basic level categories", and when compared with other phonemes there is very little overlap of categories represented - well outside what a random (ie arbitrary) distribution would suggest. I've repeated some of her experiments for the whole of the Oxford Concise ed, 10,000's of words, and can confirm this. I have yet to see any serious effort to show how or why her reasoning is flawed, or an attempt at an alternative explaination for the considerable data that she amassed during her research. Meanwhile the University of Trondhiem apparently did not consider Margaret's research to be "junk science" since they granted her a PhD on the basis of it. Please do fix up my poor writing by all means. mahaabaala 20:04, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

There is nothing here on the commercial uses of sound symbollism which is a shame. While the academics fiddle the marketing departments of large multinationals have realised that this is a real phenomena and now use the research to design product names and pay big bucks for it. mahaabaala 20:04, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I wrote the part on Japanese phonosemantics myself (section "Phenomimes and psychomimes"), and it certainly isn't a copy-paste from anywhere. I agree that I had a hard time finding a place for it in the article. Please feel free to move it where you think it belongs, and edit it if you think it's wrong. Other than that, I agree, the article is not the best around. — AdiJapan ☎ 16:29, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I have in my last few edits pruned a lot of nonsense and I have tried to do away with the uncritical endorsements of Manske as much as possible. I have also put the Cratylus thing right, noting that Socrates conceded that "My first notions of original names are truly wild and ridiculous" after being faced by an overwhelming number of counterexamples. There is still very much to be done. Phonosemantics is an intriguing phenomenon, well worth a good article, as our anonymous editor above points out. I'm not sure if I have the time to do something about it in the near future; I surely hope others can help out and to that end I'll put up a notice at Wikiproject Languages. — mark ✎ 19:33, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes my own understanding of the text has come along since I first used that quote. However there is a lot of humour and wisecracking in the dialogue. The more honest accounts admit that they are not sure when Socrates is being serious, or when he is being self-deprecating, or when he is denouncing his own statements. Overwhelming is surely an overstatement. A number of counter examples are offered and show up a possible weakness in the method, but Socrates does not completely abandon it - he steers a middle path between naturalism and convention. You seem to suggest that he takes up an extreme position, when the dialogue in fact concludes nothing and Socrates adopts no position. It is quite possible to elucidate a word based on similar sounding words as Socrates, and his Indian counterpart Yaska do. It does actually work. What you can't do is assume that every word with a similar sound is related. The problem lies in an assumption that everyone seems to make which has two aspects: One that "things" are unitary and not complex, or that something complex has a simple 'essence' to which a word can refer; and two that any given word/sound only has one meaning. Personally I see protestant preocupations with canons and singular truths and ideal languages in this, and find it frustrating that contempoary linguists still seem to see things as having an 'essence' that a word corresponds to even when they think of the word as arbitarily chosen. I think Lakoff has showed the way forward: things are complex and their membership of categories is complex; and names tend to correspond to how we interact with things; and are frequently metonymic, with the name relating to that part of a complex thing which most stands out for us, or with which we interact most strongly. Take this into account and Socrates' method is not only useful, but fun. mahaabaala 20:04, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Contents 1 Sound symbolism applied in literature 2 Sound symbolism and synesthesia 3 Disclaimer 4 Phonaesthesia

[edit] Sound symbolism applied in literature

There is not much in the article at present about sound symbolism (in many cases, before the modern formulation of what sound symbolism is) in literature. Poets especially have made much use of sound symbolism, e.g. Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme, etc. I don't plan on discussing this in the article until I have references however. I remember for example a literary critic pointing out that Rimbaud's heavy use of the voiceless velar plosive in the first 5 or so sentences of his prose poem Villes was meant to give the impression of the clashing and dissonant sounds of the modern city. Alexander 007 08:48, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

See John Michell. Euphonics : a poets dictionary of sounds. Frontier Publishing, 1999.

[edit] Sound symbolism and synesthesia

As Ramachandran's co-author, I may not be the most impartial commentator, but I am certainly knowledgable about our attempts to link synesthesia with sound symbolism. I am quite happy to help work on the Relationship with Neuroscience section. I have been working mostly on the synaesthesia page recently, but added some mention of the links with other phenomena, including the kiki/bouba example. Note that this phenomenon was originally noted by Wolfgang Kohler (using the words takete and maluma) and expanded by Lawrence Marks. Subsequent to our 2001 article, follow-up experiments have shown that children as young as 2 1/2 show the "kiki/bouba" effect (Maurer et al., 2006), and that the effect can be replicated in more precise reaction time studies (Westbury, 2005). Edhubbard 23:45, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

What about people who do no speak Indo-european languages? mahaabaala 20:04, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Disclaimer

The bulk of sound symbolism is largely discredited by the vast majority of linguists. The article should begin with the fact that outside of onomatopoetics, trained linguists don't believe in it. This is junk science for the most part and it should be reported as such.

(The author of the above lines didn't sign them.)

On the contrary, there is a slowly growing body of evidence in favor of it from respected scientific sources. I'll agree that the vast majority of linguists "discredit" it-- but that doesn't mean much to me. The flat earth theory held wide sway at one point too. It would be worthwhile to give readers a sense of how controversial these findings are, and how they contradict established linguistic principles (Saussurian arbitrariness of the sign, etc.). I've done [of course unusable] original research in which participants agreed on the meanings of pseudowords with p<.001. Doesn't seem like junk science to me.

Some possible sources: Brent Berlin's Ethnobiological Classification, Bolinger's "The Sign is Not Arbitrary," Janice Nuckolls' "The Case for Sound Symbolism."

What I think is important is that etymology need not be entirely linear. If language speakers are aware of the sounds of their words along with their meanings, then some sort of Bolinger-style "associative lexical influence" can play into the evolution of the lexicon to develop clusters and phoneme-sememe correlations.

Hope this is helpful/convincing. Starvingpoet 07:48, 24 January 2007 (UTC)starvingpoet

I think the article does need a (brief) discussion of the fact that most mainstream linguists don't believe in this, though mainly to refute mainstream linguistics rather than to disprove sound symbolism. Linguistics for quite some time (and particularly in the past 50 years or so) has been obsessed with various theories of meaning that just ignore many philosophical issues of how meaning comes into being. Can a gesture or even basic body language have meaning? Can abstract visual art have meaning? Can music have meaning? Much philosophical debate in the past century has tried to classify these things in one way or another, but frequently the issue is a lack of imagination on the part of the theorists about how broad meaning can be. The fact is that things can often mean something (in a vague and nonspecific way) even if you couldn't write a specific lexical meaning down in a dictionary definition. And they can have a vague meaning that is context dependent to varying degrees (as most words/utterances are). If we're willing to accept a broader and more abstract kind of meaning, clearly the use of sounds and phonemes have enough patterns that we can say some of them have this kind of vague meaning.

Anyhow, the fact that there is little "scientific" evidence for most of this is because cognitive linguistics has been operating since its inception on the principle that such kind of meaning doesn't exist. As Starvingpoet points out, though, slowly but surely some cognitive scientists are catching on (even faster than most linguists).

But there does need to be a better discussion of how this all relates to mainstream linguistics, as well as a disclaimer pointing out that one could take either view too far (i.e., sounds can have some form of meaning, contrary to popular linguistic theories, but those forms of meaning also aren't going to be some sort of universal and specific meanings valid for all times and places). Just my thoughts....85.178.7.103 13:03, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Phonaesthesia

has a redirect to this article, but it isn't mentioned here. someone who is willing to explain that term? --213.47.167.58 21:36, 12 December 2006 (UTC)