Sound symbolism

Sound symbolism or phonosemantics is an obscure branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. An important concept for understanding this idea is phoneme: phonemes are written between slashes like this /b/.

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 Viking Runes, the Hebrew Kabbalah, the Arab Abjad, etc.. References of this kind are very common in The Upanishads, The Nag Hammadi Library, the Celtic Book of Teliesin, as well as early Christian works, the Shinto Kototama, and Shingon Buddhism.

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Plato and the Cratylus Dialogue

In this dialogue Plato has Socrates commenting on the origins of various names and words. However Hermogenes asks where these definitions come from, and Socrates replies that they arise from the qualities of the letters of the alphabet - or more precisely the sounds of the letters.

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:"Now the letter rho, 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.

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:(note this is an open source translation available at Internet Classics Archive)

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Upanishads

The Upanishads contain a lot of material about sound symbolism, for instance:

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:"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" - Aitrareya-Aranya-Upanishad

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Shingon Buddhism

Kukai, the founder of Shingon wrote his Sound, word, reality in the 9th_century which relates all sounds to the voice of the Dharmakaya Buddha.

Related Topics:
Kukai - Shingon - 9th_century - Dharmakaya - Buddha

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(more to come: in the meantime see: Mantra)

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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 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.

Related Topics:
Middle Ages - Renaissance - 1690 - Locke - 1765

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(adapted from a literature review by Magnus - see website below)

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Modern Phonosemantics

In 1836 Wilhelm von Humboldt 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.

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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 40?s and the 50?s. In 1949, he published The Sign is Not Arbitrary. He concluded that morphemes cannot be defined as the minimal meaning-bearing units, in part because ?meaning? is so ill-defined, and in part because there are obvious situations in which smaller units are meaning-bearing.

Related Topics:
Otto Jespersen - Dwight Bolinger - Morpheme - Meaning

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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.

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Hans Marchand provided the first extensive list of English phonesthemes. 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.?

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Gérard Genette published the only full length history of phonosemantics ? Genette (1976). Fortunately it is also a magnificent work. In 450 pages, Genette

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colorfully details the evolution of the linguistic iconism both among linguists and poets, in syntax, morphology and phonology.

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(adapted from a literature review by Magnus - see website below)

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