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/.

Reference

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is considered to be the founder of modern 'scientific' linguistics. Central to what de Saussure says about words are two related statements: firstly he says that "the sign is arbitrary". This means that he considers the words that we use to indicate things and concepts could be any old 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. Secondly 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.

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However Saussure himself is said to have collected examples where sounds and referents were related. Ancient traditions link sounds and meaning, and some modern linguistic research does also.

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