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/.

Types of Sound Symbolism

Magaret Magnus is the author of probably the only popular book on phonosemantics - Gods of the Word. She describes three types of sound symbol using a model first proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (see below):

Related Topics:
Magaret Magnus - Wilhelm von Humboldt

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Onomatopoeia

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This is the least significant type of symbolism. It is simply imitative of sounds, or suggests something that makes a sound.

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Clustering

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Words that share a sound have something in common. This can be clearly seen by looking at words that start with the same letter. If we take for example all of the words that have no prefix or suffix and group them according to meaning they will fall into a small number of broad categories. So we find that many words beginning with /b/ are about barriers, bulges, bursting, and many about being banged, beaten, battered, bruised, blistered and bashed - if we compare the statistics we find that the proportion is way above average for other letters.

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Another way of thinking about this is to say that if a word begins with a particular phoneme, then there is likely to be a number of other words starting with that phoneme that refer to the same thing. An example given by Magnus is If the basic word for 'house' in a given language starts with a /h/, then by clustering, you expect disproportionately many words containing /h/ to concern housing: hut, home, hacienda, hovel,...

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Clustering is language dependent, although closely related languages will have similar clustering relationships.

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Iconism

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This is noticeable when you compare words which have the same sort of referent. One way is to look at a group of words that all refer to the same thing, and that differ only in their sound, like 'stamp', stomp', 'tamp', 'tromp', 'tramp', 'step'. An /m/ before the /p/ makes the action more forceful - compare 'stamp' with 'step' or 'tamp'. The /r/ sets the word in motion, especially after a /t/ so a 'tamp' is in one place, but a 'tramp' goes for a walk. The /p/ in all those words is what emphasizes the individual steps.

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Iconism is universal across langauages. Magnus suggests that whether a lot of light words will begin with /fl/ will vary from language to language. But if the light word begins with /fl/, it will be direct light.

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