Ideophones: How does this word feel?

serious thought. And the question is is you take a look at your hand and you think, why the heck is this call to hand? Think about the sounds you make with your mouth when you say the word hand, or the marks you make on a page when you spell the word, or even or in say like American Sign language or another sign language, the gestures you would

make to signal the concept of a hand. Somehow, those sounds you make with your mouth, or the marks you make on the page, or the gestures cause other people's brains to call up the concept of one of these five legged meat spiders that's attached to the end of our wrists. And in fact, I often think about this, that one of the really creepy and astonishing things that we usually just forget to notice about ourselves and our

bodies and our brains. And the power of language is that in most cases, you are completely powerless to resist the conjuring power of a word. You ever think about this, like, unless you have some kind of unusual neurological condition, If you understand the language I'm speaking, and I say a giant crocodile crawling up the side of the Eiffel Tower with a bouquet of roses in its mouth, you will have no choice but to envision or at least understand

the concept of what I just said. Words have so much power over your brain that most people, most of the time can't even turn off their understanding of them if they want to. We live in a world where like, particular patterns of mouth, sounds, and marks on a page are literally a way of controlling the contents of somebody

else's mind. Yeah, which were which? When you think of it that way, it makes total sense that some people are like, hey, I would prefer you not use a bunch of vulgar language around me, you know, um would, which I have always found it sometimes weird, And say an office environment where uh, you know, certain individuals will feel like, you know, they need to use a lot

of vulgarity when they're talking. But you're really in many times taking like particularly vulgar images, and you were forcing them into everybody's mind around you, and it's perfectly reasonable to say no, thank you. Yeah. I'm of two minds about this. I mean, on one hand, I I do definitely have a strong sort of innate anti censorship streak. But then on the other hand, I recognize that, like, yeah, anybody who says, like, what's the big deal is just words?

That is really underselling the power of words. Words are like one of the most powerful things in the universe. Yeah, But to think about like just the casual way that that that you can summon uh imagery with the word uh. You brought up hand And I was thinking, all right, what does some other kind of tape Like I basically tried to understand the idea by breaking the idea, Like, what's another important concept or notable concept to me involving

hand or something? You know? And uh, I thought, Okay, but we have the movie Dark City where you have the character of Mr. Hand that's Richard O'Brien. Yeah, yeah, plays one of the strangers but but now that I think about it, like, that's a great example of how you can just call this character Mr. Hand and in thinking about him looking at him, you also end up contemplating what a hand is and what a hand does in the form of the hand, and kind of melding

it with the idea of a shadowy individual. Absolutely, and this is why, you know, metaphors and poetry and everything are so powerful. It's like you when you use one word to describe a thing that it doesn't isn't directly assigned for you. You cause all this kind of like cross linking within the brain that is often very evocative and exciting. Yeah, Like if you say, introduced a character in a work and his name was Dr Chainsaw, Right that way that that brings there is a number of

conflicts arise, and I can't help it. Then try and imagine who Dr Chainsaw is. That's funny. But what you say, I think is more thoughtful and profound than than you might realize at first glance. Well, we'll think about this more as we go. Okay, So a lot of times when we ask this question, like why do we call a hand a hand? Why is that the sound we make with our mouths, or the you know, H, A and D, the marks on a page. Where does that

word come from? We're usually asking a historical question that can have a relatively straightforward answer. Right. This is the domain of etymologies, and we do this all the time on the show. Right. We talk about some concept or some character from myth and legend, and we break down what their name means, where it comes from, right, and you. You can do this with most words, like you can

trace it back through older versions of languages. One example we've mentioned on the show before that I really enjoy is how obsolete scientific hypotheses that are we know aren't true anymore, or sometimes still included in our language. The words we use for things. Take the English word malaria. I mean, you know, this is a word for a certain disease is caused by a protozoan parasite. But malaria comes from the Italian words mal and area, meaning bad air.

So the name we use for this disease incorporates miasthma theory, which proposed that diseases were caused by exposure to foul smelling vapors that emanated from the Earth, or from planets, or from things like rotting carrion. Did we do an episode of miasma theory? Oh, yeah, we did. Yeah, it was earlier. I think maybe it was last year. Uh. And we talked in the episode about how the word malaria, so it reflects miasma theory, this incorrect understanding of where

diseases come from from before germ theory took hold. And the fact that even the French physician Charles Louis Alfonse lover On, who discovered the fact that malaria was caused by a parasitic organism in the blood, he hated the word malaria. He didn't like that because he considered it unscientific. So instead he recommended the term uh palladisma, which essentially means like marsh or swamp fever or swamp disease, and

this is still the French word for the disease. So anyway, many words can be tracked back through the history of evolving languages like this, and in fact pretty much all

words can. But you can only follow this trail so far because if you go back far enough, you run out of ways to track words as straightforward cases of evolving species or adoption from other languages, like at some point words had to be created for things and concepts that had no explicit word before and no analogies to draw from, so that once you get back to like the initial case, you have to wonder, how did this happen? How is a word born? And does a word inherently

mean anything? Why did the speakers of the earliest words pick one set of mouth sounds for hand and a different set of mouth sounds for tree and a different set of mouth sounds for mother. What do these sounds mean anything? And if they do mean anything, what do

they mean interesting? So, I mean we're kind of dealing with some of the same properties that we've discussed on the show, and that we were regarding, say the evolution of Chinese characters, where they in their very primitive origins they were essentially tiny pictures of what you were talking about, uh And then as they evolved they become more eleguent in design, more abstract, uh not, and then sometimes it's

abstract and meaning as well. But but certainly they no longer look exactly like the thing, like the word for, you know, for a person is no longer looks like a tiny person that sort of thing. So we might be we're particially talking about the same thing with words themselves, Like how if you trace it back far enough, do you have simply a word is a sound for a thing. It's not even a word yet, it's just the sound for the thing. And then how did we get that sound?

How did you decide that that is the sound for that thing. Yeah, it's a fascinating question, and I want to go ahead and say we're not going to answer this question today. I mean their whole this is a whole field of study about the origins of language, where it came from. You know, we could write whole books on the subject, and I am sure we will revisit

this in the future. But we wanted to look at one specific strange class of word today and and some some lighted sheds on what words are and how we how we use language. So a minute ago we asked that idea of like do sounds inherently mean anything in

in the a lexigraphic sense? And one of the key ideas of modern linguistic theory is that the answer to that question is no. That the signs we use to refer to concepts, so like the sounds you make with your mouth, or the markings you make on a page when you're indicating a concept like hand or mother or something like that. These signs are arbitrary. They do not have inherent meaning, and they're arbitrarily associated with the concepts

they call to mind. So to quote from the Swiss semiotician and linguist Ferdinand de Sajur, who is often cited as like the founder of the modern study of linguistics, quote, the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say the linguistic sign is arbitrary. The idea of sister is not linked by any inner relationship to the

succession of sounds. Uh. And then he spells out the French for sister sir, which serves as its signifier in French. That it could be represented equally by just any other sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the very existence of different languages. The signified OX has as its signifier Boff on one side of the border is in the French Frox is boff and OX on the other.

And so we know, like we know today that to some extent what as here says here must be true, right, at least to some extent, because of course, words are not fixed in sound or in visual notation. Words evolve over time where it's come to mean different things. They come to be pronounced differently, often in multiple stages that

we can track through history. Right. I mean a recent example of this on our show, trying to figure out what puppy meant a form of insult in in in ages prior Oh yeah, we're apparently Isaac Newton called this guy he was harassing a puppy. Were like, what the heck does that mean? But apparently it means like a fop Like it's the same word basically means the same thing, except in certain contexts, and then that has changed over time.

But those those minor differences we can acknowledge between, say like early modern English and the English of today, can become radical differences over longer periods of time. But might say, well, wait a minute, doesn't the widespread literacy of the world

and the printing press changed all this. Aren't words fixed once they're in print, obviously, They're not like just read a play of Shakespeare or something else from the early modern period, and compare that to the language of modern English. This is just a few hundred years ago. This is not that long ago. But you'll find tons of words that have changed in meaning, spelling, connotation, or have simply disappeared from everyday use. If you doubt this, I will

bet you forty ferkins of post it and barm on it. Yeah. Or just try and read say the obbit yeah, to to to to a child, and you're gonna run across certain words where it's like, oh, well this just meant uh that you know, now, this is a slur word, but in its original context that Tolkien was using, he's talking about a bundle of sticks. Another writer might be using the word and they're talking about a cigarette or something. So that the words can change sometimes for the worst. Oh,

that's absolutely true. In fact, I was just thinking about this. Even happens, you know, with with letters. Have you ever read the early seventeenth century poem The Flee by John Dunn, who it's probably been a long time, you know done. Was a great poet. I mean he wrote great like

devotional poetry, but he also wrote like seduction poetry. The flea is just absolutely nasty it's a poem where he's essentially begging for sex by making this questionable recourse to the idea that if a flea bites two different people, they've basically slept together already, and so they might as

well not resist any temptation. He says, quote Mark, but this flee and Mark, in this how little that which thou deniest me is it sucked me first and now sucks thee And in this flee our two bloods mingled be Yeah, he's he's really stretching, I think with that one. Yeah, what a creep. But then it's even funnier if you read it in older printed versions where s is making the s sound don't look like they do today. Back then they looked like a modern lower case F. So

so this would have impacted the words suck or sucked. Yes, it would have become a much more by modern standings vulgar term. That this is already I think, a pretty nasty poem. It just gets a slight nastiness upgrade. But then, in the same way that concepts are described by different words across time, obviously they're also described by different words at the same time between different languages. So the Basque word for hand is escua, and the Melee word for

hand is tongue gun and so forth. So obviously the concept of hand is in no way intrinsically linked to the English H sound or the D consonant or anything like that. This does seem to be truly arbitrary, and part of that is that the hand does not make a sound. You know. Well it can of course, but yeah,

it doesn't inherently make a sound. And that's a good thing to point out, because while I think it's it's pretty much inarguable that that sazure is correct in many cases that, like most word in most languages, don't have any inherent link between the sound you make with your mouth and what the word means. There were some words that inarguably do How about the word cockadoodle do? Oh, yeah,

this is a great one. Uh. This is always a fun exercise anytime you travel somewhere where they speak a different language, or even if they speak just a variant of your own language, asked them what sound a rooster makes, and the uh, it's always going to be some variation of the same sound, but at times with surprising variety,

and exactly how that sound is realized in language. Oh yeah, I love this, like it looking at different languages words for like what a dog does, Like the dog doesn't bark in every language, but in pretty much every language. Whatever word they've got for what a dog sound is, you can hear it. You're like, oh, yeah, that that's

what a dog sounds like. Yeah. David Saderis has a fun bit where he talks about this, and I believe it was a Christmas essay called six Day Black Men about it mainly dealing with variations in the Santa Claus tradition, the title referring to certain European traditions in which Santa is attended by by personal slaves with black skin. But he also talks a little bit about, you know, variations

in how people say what the rooster says. Man, it is shocking how disturbing some of those Santa traditions are. Oh yeah, it gets dark, but it is. It's the holidays, you know. I guess it's supposed to be dark and weird. But I got another word for you, one of my favorites. PLoP. Oh, PLoP, that's a good one. It's the sound that a drop makes when it hits another body. Of water. So if you drop falls into a bucket, it plumps. So I was thinking it's also the sound of a cat throwing

up on the hardwoods. That's probably the context I encounter more often. Like you hear that PLoP, you know you're cleaning up something, Well, you'd think it would be like a splat, but no, it is a very polite sounding kind of PLoP, which belies how gross it's going to be. But yeah. So these are known as onomatopeia in English, the words that make a sound that's close to the sound of the concept being named. Uh so, like the noun naming a rooster's called the cockadoodle do obviously is

meant to sound like the call itself. Same thing with plot, it's meant to sound like with the concept you're talking about. And you know, automotopia for some reason or just great fun to say. Usually I love like glug, that's a glug glug hiss, that's an automotopia. Quack oink, squeak toot toot is a fun one, yeah, kind of yeah, burp is perhaps one as well. What do you think about Yeah,

I think that could be an automotopia. Yeah, now I think some of these could probably be false on amotopia, where uh, I don't know, I sure, but if you like looked up the etymology, you could find that they're derived from some other word in history that doesn't actually sounds. It's just a coincidence. But a lot of them clearly are on Amotopia, like they're the word comes from the sound. The thing makes I wonder about the How about the sounds that are the words that flash on the screen

when Batman punches somebody? Yeah, you know, are those uh what we talk about? Is that a case of automatopeia? Biffe, biff, biff, etcetera. How about plink plunk, ploop, PLoP, slash, splash, Yeah, those are those? Are those all seem pretty solid? I noticed how a lot of English on a moatopia. Maybe this is just because they're the words I could think of, but it seems to me like a lot of them are sounds for sounds that animals make, or words for

what water does or what happens in water. Another one great one is twinkle. Wait a minute, did you catch me there? It's a trick? I think, did you notice that twinkle? And when I very first said it did you think, yeah, that's a good one too. I probably would have thought that that's a good on a mootopeia. Pale stars twinkle in the night sky. What do you

hear when you envision that sentence. I hear a twinkling. Yeah, I I picture stars twinkling, almost in a cinematic sense, like twinkling more than they actually appear to twinkle in the night sky. But there's a little almost on a bell sound that goes with the word, don't you think, uh? Like I think about when William Wordsworth rights continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way.

Of course he's he's talking about flowers. He's talking about daffodils, and he's comparing them to stars by the way they move back and forth in the breeze. He says, ten thousand I saw at a glance tossing their heads in sprightly dance. Here's another one you might have heard before, Twinkle twinkle, little star that you have. That's another another famous version, which, by the way, here's a mind blower

for at least some listeners out there. I didn't, you know, I didn't realize until the last couple of years that it's the same song as the ABC song with just different lyrics. Try that out for size. I gotta pick my jaw up off the ground. I don't think I've ever heard of that. I never know one ever made. I never made that connection before. But then I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah,

if you yeah, that's exactly the same song. Did you know that London Bridge is Falling Down is the same tune as that classic old English full crime, Happy, Happy Halloween, Halloween Halloween silver Shamrock. Yes, there there is that. You know. One that's a less conventional use of twinkle that I really like is in Walt Whitman. He's got a poem

about a shuttering locomotive. I think it's called Like to a Locomotive in Winter, where he says thy knitted frame, thy springs in valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels. But the weirdness is twinkle feels like an automotopia to me, it feels exactly like PLoP or or ploop or quack. But it's not an ont amotopeia. I mean, we know that, like the stars don't make a sound, but part of

me rebels. Of course, twinkles an automotopea. It really feels like one twinkle twinkle is the sound that stars make when their brightness fluctuates. And of course that isn't true, but I I just know it's true, even though it's not that stars don't make a sound, and yet that's

the sound they make. And I believe the sense of the false on amotopeia of twinkle is even sort of suggested in the way the word is used in some rhymed poetry, like writers seem to sense a deeper parallel between twinkle and a true on amotopia word, like in ed garlan pose poem The Bells. Oh that's a great one. Do you want to read it? Oh? Sure? Here the sledges with the bells, silver bells, what a world of merriment.

Their melody fore tells how they twinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy air of night, while the stars that oversprinkle all the heavens seemed to twinkle with a crystalline delight. So yeah, tinkle is like the anomotopia of the bells. But then the stars also twinkle, as if that's like the same thing. Fun fact. Folk singer phil oaks Uh it was one of probably many people to set pose poem to music. Oh, I don't think I've heard the fun little folk song. What a world of merriment their

melody foretells, you know, it's a fun little tune. Cool to look that up. But anyway, I like the idea here that if a word is, like we were talking about earlier, like a form of mind control, it's a way of just with without a person's consent, controlling the contents of their brain. Twinkle is a form of mind control that drives us to believe. In a contradiction, the word is like an automatopeic simulacrum. It's an attempt to copy a thing that does not exist, the sound of

a bright light varying in intensity. And I just wonder why do we feel this so deeply? I mean, maybe everybody else doesn't feel it as strongly as I do, but I feel like this is probably a common sensation. Yeah, I'm trying to think of any that that resonate particularly strongly with me. I guess sometimes there's a very strong word for like various facial expressions, you know, And we feel facial expressions very strongly because they are, you know,

non verbal forms of communication. Like, for instance, I don't know that this may not hold up when we start tearing it apart here, But for someone to gawk at something, yeah, it's not like the face makes a sound the sound gawk. But if you were to make that argument for me, you know, like that this is a sound like it. It almost feels like a sound sound in the mind

if you're seeing somebody that is visibly gawking at something. Yes, it's a word that doesn't just have a lexical definition that you understand, but it has it has like a sensory force. It delivers a sensory feeling by saying the word. Now, I'm just this is just coming off the top of my head. So I'm sure later if I when I look up gawk, I can you know you'll be able to tease a part the history of the word and where it comes from and what it's a linguistic origins

are well. As we said earlier, I mean, it's possible for there to be like false on amunopeas where something you would think is just copying the sound of something, but actually you can show where it derives from other words in a language that maybe don't even originally sound so much like the thing. But anyway, So one answer as to why we feel these kind of connections between like the feeling or sound of a word and a concept that is not actually a sound or does not

sound like the concept um one. One answer would simply be that we're culturally conditioned to feel the strange kind of synesthesia with the meaning of a word, simply because we know what the word means, We've learned it, we've learned to think of it this way, and it's just conditioning, right. But the answer also might not be that simple, And I think maybe we should take a break and then come back and look at some words in other languages. Alright,

we're back. So I was inspired to talk about this today in in this episode by an article that I read an Eon magazine by a writer named David Robson. And in this article, Robson begins this article with a list of Japanese words and then asks non Japanese speaking readers to guess what they mean. And given a couple of like antonymic options, you know a word and its opposite. So if you do not speak Japanese, consider the following word nuru nuru. Okay, I'm sorry if I'm not saying

that exactly right, But it's something like that. Nuru nuru Does that word mean dry or slimy? Um? It sounds slimy to Yeah, It sounds slimy to me too, and in fact, that is what it means. Here's another Japanese word, waku. Waku? Does that mean excited or bored? That sounds excited to me? It sounds excited to me too. Here's another one, pika. Pika Does that mean dull or sparkly? That sounds sparkly. It also sounds sparkly to me, and we're We're correct

in all three cases. Those are the real meanings. And if, like us, you do not speak Japanese and yet you can correctly guess the meanings of those words, you're not alone. According to a sixteen study by in the psychology journal Collabora by Lockwood, at all, almost three quarters of Dutch participants were able to correctly identify the meanings of these

words without knowing them. But how is it possible if you don't speak a language to know what words in a language mean When they're not words for things with sounds, they're not on amount of pea. It's not like moo or something. Right, these are cases where it's coming down more too. I mean the obvious point being the case sounds right, those sharp ks which sound and it's hard to even put that in words. Why but they sound pointy. Yeah, yeah,

they sound pointy. They sound sparkly bright somehow. Uh, And that this is not just our opinion. Well, we'll come back in cite some evidence about this in a minute. But anyway, Robson cites these as examples of words that are known as idiophones, and these are words that are the way I would try to describe it, though this is a concept that can be kind of hard to define as well discuss as we go on. But their words that are kind of like on a mootopia, but

there's no original sound that they're copying. Instead, they're described by by Lockwood and co authors as quote sound symbolic words, and I think this is a common way of describing them in the in the scientific literature. And what that means is that by the sound of the word, they tend to strong evoke a sensation like a site or a tactile feeling. And you don't need to know the language or know the word already to understand what that feeling is supposed to be, or at least get close

to what that feeling is supposed to be. You've never heard the word nuru nuru before, but it definitely sounds more slimy to you than it sounds like dry or something else. And they're There are different kinds of ideophones in different languages. Some languages are much richer in them than other languages are. But like Japanese is an example of a language, there's a good number of ideophones and uh.

Willem Lockwood, one of the authors of that paper I cited a second a second ago in a blog post, writes that these these words create a very vivid image or this this strong feeling that normal lexical words just don't quote. When a Japanese person hears the word kira kira meaning sparkly, it is like they can actually see

the thing that is spark Really. How sound symbolism works, however, is not quite clear, and there have not yet been many neuroscience studies on it, but the research so far suggests that hearing sound symbolic words might involve other forms of sensory perception in a similar way to how people with synesthesia associate colors with letters. Interesting, but you can probably already tell just from us talking so far, that this idea of the sound symbolic word is kind of

difficult to pin down exactly. It's gonna involve like related concepts across different languages, because different languages have different qualities that can be used to evoke these things. You know, this or this reminds me of of you know, I've read before about how you know, k sounds either hard case or soft cash or even um, even like the sound of of cheese. How these are inherently funny sounds,

you know. But but then again, you know, we're thinking of like like sparkly excitement, Like those are also kind of the signifiers of of things that are funny, right, Uh, They're not dull, they're exciting, They're evocative in some form or another. Yeah, but it's really hard to really tease

out exactly why. Well, to be very clear, we don't want to suggest that all words are idiophonic, because I think it's totally clear that probably most words in most languages are actually arbitrary signs and the sound has nothing to do with what they mean. And a word like clown is potentially funny because the concept of the clown is funny. She's itself is inherently funny. I mean, if you had no word for what this was, it's still like this soft, smushy thing that has a distinctive odor

to it, but it is also delicious. We screeze, we squeeze, goat utters and we get the stuff out of it, and then we'd like boil that and separated. It's basically a practical joke of the gods as it is, so you know, we can't help but laugh. But clearly, while one of the interesting features of these ideas of idiophonic words is that they are somewhat detectable across language. Different is like you don't necessarily have to speak the language

to understand what some of them mean. There are ways that languages are going to kind of change the way they're used, right, Like you can think of like tonal languages versus non tonal languages. Yeah, I was, I was looking around at some of the papers that because the thing is, when you start looking at papers on idiophones, a number of them are you know, they're they're they're focusing on one particular language or a couple of different languages, and so I was looking around it some that that

looked at at ideophonic words and say Mandarin. Not that I speak Mandarin, but I've at least read about it enough that I have like some you know, base understanding of of of what it is linguistically, and uh, I did run across um. So it's says from chen Zi Ming's uh idiophonic words in Mandarin and um. The author points that there's perhaps some difficulty in settling on a unified ideophone definition that works across all languages quote or

even within a language. Uh, they wrote, quote ideophones are much likely to be proposed as different categories under different names, in different in terms of different criteria within a certain language. Uh So there is this kind of elusive nature to to really like pinning it down, you know, well, certainly to create any kind of like unified definition of ideophone. That's one of the senses I'm getting from this paper.

And other said I looked at I think the closest I can find is that the uh, the the sign of the word itself, either the sound or the markings on a page or whatever generates a sensation other than a sonic one. Okay, Yeah, so that it could be like a tactile feeling or the belief that you're seeing something, or like just an association with feelings or images, or

or maybe even like smells or tastes or something. And I think especially if that can be detected by people who have never encountered the word before in use and don't know what it means in context. I got another exercise for us to protect us here to to figure this out. So, Robert, I've attached a couple of images here. You may have seen this experiment before, you may already know where we're going with this, But um describe these

two images briefly. Okay. One is like a sharp pointed kind of sharooken shape, and the other is, uh something looks kind of like a splat, like a cartoon splat, like a cartoon paintball shape, also kind of reminiscent of, you know, a bizarre clover. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that's a very good way of putting. An image on the left is like kind of like a pointy star. Image on the right sort of like a splatty cloud. Now,

let's say I give these two images names. I'm not going to tell you which is which, But one is named Molly and one is named Kate. Which is which. Well, if we're going to go back to some of these ideas we've been dealing with, Kate has that k sound, it's gonna be sharper, it's going to be point here, and Molly has that kind of I mean, I'm maybe overthinking. That's kind of the problem with this, right you started thinking about it too much. You're not dealing with the

direct um. We're not coming at this clean. We've already been talking about the what sounds feel like. But I feel like pretty instinctively we would say that Kate is the one with the sharp angles and Molly is the one with the rounded cloud edge, And a large portion of people would actually agree that this is the answer and it works not just for those names. That's just one type of example, but uh, this, this experiment has been done giving them names like Kiki and Buba. Oh yes,

the Kiki Buba and uh Takete and Maluma. And in research that this has been multiple experiments over the past century or so by like Wolfgang Cohler vs. Rama Schandren and others. Cola definitely sharpened pointing well, it's both kind of right because the K is sharpened pointy, but the owl that sounds like round to me, So like, why this inherent? And this apparently works in not all cases, but in most cases that it's been tried across language differences.

So apparently sharp angles sound like T N K, and round clouds sound like M and L and round vowels like oh. And this isn't the only example. For some reason, it just seems that across different cultures and different languages were pretty consistent, not always consistent, but pretty consistent in associating certain types of human mouth sounds with particular non auditory sensations like sites and geometric angles and feelings and

so uh. To read a quote from Robson here from his article, he's talking about a strain of linguistics that's now taking idiophones more seriously as a subject. Quote. Language is embodied a process that involves subtle feedback for both listener and speaker between the sound of a word, the vocal apparatus, and our own experience of human physicality. Taken together, this dynamic helps to create a connection between certain sounds

and their attendant meanings. These associations appear to be universal across all human societies. Interesting, So it sounded like when we when we when we we're trying to comprehend some of these, uh, these sound words, like we're potentially connecting in like like the pre language verbal communication skills of our species. Yeah, it's quite possible, and we should come

back to that at the end of the episode. Um, but yeah, there appears to be some kind of primordial association that somewhat transcends culture, that associates certain mouth sounds with certain types of sites or feelings. And so we know one example now is that like t s and k's look like sharp angles, and and like bees, and

m's and l's feel like round, rounded edges. Here some more, he Robson cites the research of a guy named Diedrich Westerman who found that across different languages in Western Africa, the e sound like in cheese or peak or twinkle, was often associated with concepts that were light, fine, or bright, while the back vowels in the mouth like walk or fast,

were associated with concepts of slowness, heaviness, and darkness. And so at the same time, there were associations with consonants, right, not just the vowels consonants like B and G, like but and go were associated with heaviness and softness, while voiceless consonants like P and K, put and cut were associated with harder surfaces and lighter weight. And just contemplating these again, we're not coming at this clean. We're you know,

having these observations already color our thinking. But I totally feel like this rings true with my feeling of sound sensations, at least as an English speaker. Like if we imagine two totally new, made up words for animals in a made up country. So we're we're going to an island that's never been dis ever before, and we're seeing some fauna there, uh one piece. One piece of fauna is a tiny yellow crab that runs quickly across the sand. And the other animal is a large, blubbery semi aquatic

mammal that looks kind of like a hippopotamus. And the two names for these creatures are Peaky Kiki and Gubba Gubba. Which one is which? Well, Gubba Gubba definitely has to be that hippo creature for sure, exactly but why because it just sounds like a like if yeah, it's it's it's just that's that's the sound. Like to reverse those names would be a cause for comedy itself, wouldn't it right? I think it would. Yeah, Like if the if the hippo was Peaky Kiki and the and the crab was

Gubba Gubba, that would be funny. That would almost seem like, well, that's absurd, why would you call them that? Well, but the thing is once if you if you establish them as such. I I don't know, I might on some level find it funny because those are funny word anyway, shake it and then the idea of a crab having a name is also inherently funny. But I would I would probably just buy it, Like I would begin to associate the name, like the sound of the name with

perhaps the personality of the creature. Like suddenly I go beyond thinking like Gubba Gubba is just like this blubberry animal, but maybe like Gubba Gubba sums up the personality of this cartoon crab that we're introducing, you know, like it it's it's it's easy to again over to overthink and overshoot, just the sort of initial reaction that should be taking place when we hear the sound. Yeah, Now to bring it back to tonal languages like like Mandarin Chinese of

course as a tonal language. Robson writes that Westerman also discovered sound symbolic connotations with the tones used in tonal languages,

so so it applies somewhat there too. For example, even though English doesn't really employ tonality the signal meaning, in the languages that do that Westerman was studying, you found a general trend that quote words were representing slowness, dryness, and heaviness tended to have lower tones, and the meanwhile, things depicting quote speed, agility, and brightness were formed by

higher tones. I don't know if you have a general sense of that in in your experience trying to speak Chinese, But I can't say that I've progressed enough to where I can really break that down now. Yeah, trying to think of some good examples offhand. I'm sure they'll come to me after the podcast, though. So The question, of course, is what explains these really common and apparently often not always,

but pretty often cross linguistic associations. And one idea is that there is some sort of mental feedback that's created by the sensation in the body from making a sound. Right, So, like with kiki and buba, one idea would be, well, when you say buba, you say oh, and the mouth there makes a round shape, and maybe we intuitively associate the rounding of our lips with round soft edges in

an image as possible. Right. Yeah. Another example here would be um matching sensations in the body in the case of things we do with our noses that usually involve nasal sounds. So U think about like snort, sniff, sneeze, snout, snore. You can't say the end without the nose. Yeah, okay, sorry, I keep I keep running Mandarin words I do know through my head, trying to figure out like where they would fall. Like bow comes to mind, you know, uh,

certainly has like a round soft consistency to it. What does it mean though, it's you know, it's like the food the bow, Oh, like a bun Yeah, okay um, And then you know other words like like like bob depending on how you hit it, totally like that that can mean father, which doesn't quite really fall into what we're talking about here. And I'm trying, I'm sort of hurting my brain trying to think of some good, sharp

sounding words that aren't names. Uh, But at any rate, Like again, I'm sure all this will will come to me after we're done recording. It's interesting how we start

once we are asked to observe this. You start looking forward in all the words, even though we know that most words are not idiophones, but we still, like I start seeing correlations there in all kinds of words where it might just be you know, it met me losing my mind here, but like, uh, I start thinking about like, oh, what about all the the the words that start with g r, you know, you know, just like growl, grunt, grown,

Like what is that that growl? Grunt, grown, grumble? They all start with gr which sort of like almost evokes this kind of natural sense of something being like a problem or a burden, and the needed words like great. How does that work? Yeah? So, I mean, clearly, I think maybe the mind is going to places where but where it's not quite fruitful. But anyway, it's hard to really to take a word and think about it without the context of its meaning and and how that meaning

kind of you know, dilutes through culture. But anyway, I guess we should we should get back to the possible explanations for why this. Another one that Robson mentioned in this article is just the idea that when some types of ideophones occur there is a kind of cross contamination

between sensations in brain regions. That this could be literal just like cross linking or kind of bleed over in the brain, right, a type of synesthesia, And of course synaesthesia is quote a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway, for example, hearing, leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway such

as vision. And that's a definition from psychology today. But synesthesia is an interesting concept in itself, like how come people associate certain like letters with colors, or like feelings with with sounds or something that's interesting because it's without having experience synaesthie issha it is. What's taking place in the mind is um it does feel like that kind

of direct connection, you know. Um. The the difficulty in describing it kind of seems to match up there well for me, almost saying saying twinkle is like some of the closest I get to sinis thesia, because that's it's the sound of star makes again. And the star doesn't make a sound, but I can sort of hear it, and it's the word twinkle. It's like saying, why is this note purple? That sort of thing? All right, well, on that note, we're gonna take one more break and

then we're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about this

concept a little bit more. Alright, we're back. So I was looking around for some commentary on idea phones, and you know, I wanted to see, like, well, what's an example of somebody's sort of poopooing on idio phones to sort of use in an idea And I ran across an article by linguist Paul Newman from Indiana University, and uh, and he said the following quote, how far ideophones deviate from the normal systems will vary from language to language,

in some cases more, in some languages less. But in the final analysis, ideophones are part of the structure of a specific language and have to be viewed in the context of that language. Okay, So this is kind of against the idea of like an overarching class of ideophones and more like they're specific to the languages where they occur. Yeah,

I mean he's not. I don't want to make it sounding like he's completely poop poing on the idea, but like basically what he's he's maybe recommending caution and like

over analyzing their importance. I guess you would say. For instance, he points out that ideophones are extremely important and certain certain African languages as well as Asian and Native American languages, but he argues that in focusing on what's different about ideophones, he thinks that scholars tend to overlook quote the simple notion that to a great extent, idiophones are part and

parcel of whatever language they belong to. So again he's not, you know, saying I don't believe in ideophones, but he's may he's questioning maybe to what, you know, what amount of emphasis is is appropriate? Uh? And in looking around for other tidbits on the topic, I ran across a very interesting paper by Gary Lupin and Daniel Casisanto in Language and Cognition from two thousand fourteen titled Meaningless Words Promote meaningful categorization. Oh, I think I know where they're

going at this, I like this. Yeah. So the common thread here is that we're talking about non arbitrary word to meaning mappings. Okay, so this would be back to kind of like new and newer, like if people are detecting an inherent sliminess about the word just the sound of the word itself, right, And so they start exploring

this in the context of just pure nonsense words. And so they bring up the nonsense words of one of the great nonsensical writers of all time, and at least in terms of some of his word choices, that being Lewis Carroll. Oh yeah, the jabberwock Yes. In fact, they quote the Jabberwocke twas Brillig and the slivey toves did guy Or and gimbal in the wave. So there's some great nonsense in there, But to just focus on one in particular, slithy is not a word and yet quote.

The nonsense words of Jabberwockie are made meaningful by a combination of phonological queuing and syntactic and uh distributional information. So slithy is used as an in an adjective frame and has phonological neighbors lithe and slimy. Okay, So there are some queues here, right, like the words in the Jabberwockie. While they're not English words, it's also not just like pure sound from out of nowhere, because they often are. They sound a lot like other words that we do

know the meanings. Right. So it's kind of this idea that like a new word and nonsense word doesn't quite work in isolation. And this from actually brings back our squirrel episode and sort of our uh really are unearthing I guess of the term skug we're actually ug was a proper name for a squirrel, right. It was what Benjamin Franklin, Uh, basically believed that the people in England called their pet squirrels. Like it's saying a bunch of scugs would be two squirrels what it would be to

say like a bunch of rovers referring to dogs. And so when I started using it in my household just as a general term for squirrels, uh, my wife took issue with it. It's like that sounds a little like dirty or something, you know. It sounds like you're you're you're using profanity against the squirrels. It sounds like an insult. Or something, and so in cases like that you have to realize, well, the word scug does not exist in isolation.

If it sounds a little bit like this word or that word, or even just certain sounds from other words, then well it does incorporate ug. As if you're going like ug, yes, yeah, or I guess part of the appeal of scug to me is like it also sounds like skull and so much as that's tough. Yeah. So much of those episodes dealt with how tough and uh and how and how likely they are to eat the intense of another animal skulp that sort of thing. Not

all of them, not all. Anyway, back to this paper, they conducted a lab experiment using the words food and creelch. Crelch is grape juice, it's my favorite brand, And they apply these words to two distinct alien species um that they made up for the experiment, and ascid participants to come up with real adjectives to describe them. So they're basically saying, hey, there's an alien known as the crelch.

Describe it. Come up with some adjectives to describe what this creature looks like, or you there, think about the foods and so they ended up the describing the creelches as pointy and narrow. What do you know that's got a hard case sound? And then guess what the foods were shaped like, Well, there's an oo sounds those rounded lips sort of front of the mouth, long vowel, that makes me think of soft, pillowy. Yeah, yeah, round and plump. That's what they said, yeah, they and they say quote.

The results expand the scope of research on sound symbolism and support a non traditional view of word meaning, according to which words do not have meanings by virtue of a conventionalized form meaning pairing. Rather, the meaning of a word is the effect that the word form has on the user users mental activity, which I think a nice way of summing up some of what we're talking about here, like what does this word due to your mental activity?

Like what what additional adjective is, what additional words is? It's summoning, and what basic characteristics is it's summoning into your mind? And then you're forced to piece together like I can imagine very faintly, like it's not a distinct picture, but I without even reading any of the adjectives listed in the paper, I kind of have an idea of what the crouch looks like and what the food looks like in a broader sense. You know what this makes

me think of? So I like the idea of what they're suggesting here, that like words can have a sort of like generalized mental activity impact even if they have no lexical definition. Uh, it makes me think about the way that I don't know if you remember, especially, I had this experience all this time when I was a kid, of finding jokes funny even though I didn't get them. Oh, yeah, you know about this, Like when you would hear a joke that was like an adult joke that had references

to things in it that you didn't understand. So a joke is made by making sense of something, but you don't get the sense, and yet it's funny anyway. Sometimes it would be really funny even though you didn't get it at all. Oh. I would get this all the time watching Mystery Science Theater thwo thousand as a kid, because a lot of they were a lot of pop pop culture references to shows that I was maybe not quite old enough to have seen, just because I wasn't

watching television. Uh as a child, you know, I wasn't watching television when Joe Hodgson was watching television when he was my age, that sort of thing. So I didn't necessarily get the jokes, but I found them hilarious. And to this day, there are still a lot of the jokes I've I've researched or come up to speed on. But occasionally I'll be rewatching an old episode of MST and there'll be a joke where I'm I'm laughing out loud, and I still have no idea what the connection is there.

I'm right there with you. That happens sometimes with MST especially, but it just happens. Sometimes you don't get a joke, but it's still involuntarily triggers laughter. It's just funny, and it's not even always like you could maybe explain it, like what if it's just like social laughter, like you're in a group other people are laughing, but it I don't know. It happens to me when I'm like, oh,

by myself, there's nobody else there, and it's funny. So yeah, I think language has this power of it has an effect on our brains, even when we don't fully understand the lexical or syntactic significance of it and that's really interesting. Or sometimes maybe we can only get vague hints of the lexical significance, but it's it's like it's having an

impact anyway. It's the same way that, um, you know, you can listen to poetry in another language and it can be great, like you literally don't understand what they're talking or you know, I think I can admit this, especially since I've heard the Columbia linguists John mcward admit this too, that like most of the time, if I'm like, if I'm listening to Shakespeare performed, I'm not catching the

meaning of everything. I mean, like, I don't know if you have this experience too, Like I I sort of can basically follow the action, but you know, like half the lines go over my head and I'm like, a way, you know, I couldn't follow the sense for sense, meaning of every statement made by a character in a Shakespeare play because there's a lot of antiquated language in it and sometimes like the the rhythm, you know, the diambic pentameter or whatever, the rhythm and stuff in the in

the writing makes for very sonically beautiful writing that is creating pleasurable feelings in my brain, but I'm not always following the literal sense of what is being said. Yeah, I would always have that experience in college taking Shakespeare classes, you'd end up, I feel like I would end up having like two different readings or two different viewings of

the same play or the same scene. There's the version that you you take in before you've done a deeper reading, and then you get in, you read the text, you read all the footnotes about what what this word means or what it's referring to, or what it would have meant in the context of the time, and then you're left with this, you know, ultimately enriched understanding of what the play is. But it is a slightly different experience. Yeah,

that is really interesting. One thing that I think is really funny that I mentioned that that comment by John mcward, But I've heard him recommend watching Shakespeare plays in another language, like where where somebody's gonna done a good translation into another language of Shakespeare if you speak that other language, like if you speak Vietnamese and somebody's done a good Vietnamese translation of Hamlet, watch that He says that sometimes

that can be even better than watching Shakespeare in the original English. How about watching the German language episodes of Monty Python. Have you ever done that? No? They cut at least one, maybe more. I don't remember the details on it, but they cut at least one German language episode where it wasn't dubbed in German. They performed all these skits again in German. Is it funny? Um? Glad? Yeah?

I mean, it can't help but be funny given that concept, I don't know if it's necessarily funny beyond just I mean, if you speak a little German, you can certainly pick up on some of the words, and of course there's a lot of you know, a lot a lot of similarity between the German language system and the English language system. Uh. But ultimately I would say it it always felt just kind of like surface level amusing to someone who doesn't like speak German at all. You know, it is funny though,

is a non French speaker Eddie Iszard's bits in French? Okay? You ever seen those? No? I haven't. It's a show for an English speaking audience, but he does a long stretch of the show just in French, and it's really funny. But anyway, I wanted to come back at the end here to just briefly discuss a little bit about like what we might learn from idiophones. One interesting point that Robson makes in his Eon article is about language acquisition

in infancy. You know, obviously idiophone type words are useful to speakers falling ages. Everybody uses them, But he wonders, you know, could they be especially useful when a baby is acquiring language for the first time, Like if certain sounds innately for some reason or another signal associations with certain images or tactile sensations or types of movement. Could it be that we instinctually use these associations to help

young children learn language without realizing it. Like think about the ways that parents tend to say things when talking to young children, like teensy weensy instead of small. Well, I'm going to speak for at least some segment of the parents out there and say I never used the word eatsy weensy. Well, a lot of parents do, though.

I mean, you hear that kind of thing, Yeah, I mean the whole Yeah, the whole topic of of for lack of a better word, cute talk is is very fascinating to me because I mean, I really I would like to come back and do we've touched on it before, talking about um a little bit about about talking cute. I think we did. It came up a little bit

in the episode about whining whining. Yes, there's like there's sort of like an embedded language between parent and child, where like the parent uses like an elevated tone, like higher pitch terms and certain kinds of things when talking to a kid, and then the kid does it back

when wanting attention from the parent. Right, Yeah, but I would like to come back and discuss this thing that I'm going through now, is experiencing like, uh, my child who's in first grade, Well, suddenly he'll need to talk in this cute voice, like he'll be using terms that are they're a little cute, see wootsie, you know, but but speaking in a way that we never spoke. We never spoke to him like that. We never spoke like cartoon characters. We didn't encourage him to speak like a

cartoon character. And granted, you know, you can pick up all this stuff from your classmates, from TV shows, et cetera. There are so many different, uh, you know, ways you're getting information at this age. But but uh, I know there have been there, there have been papers written on like try trying to figure out exactly why uh kids about this age range why they do this, because it seems to be a pretty widespread thing. So that's one topic I would I would love to return to, if

if only for my own sanity. Well, I mean, I think it's clear that some of these types of terms that parents use in this qt C talk are sort of sound symbolic, right, their versions of ideophones some one

way or another. Robson sites research by Mutsumi am I at Kio University in Japan and so Taro Kita at the University of Warwick and in the UK that UM one and two year olds quote when given a sound symbolic word, we're more likely to direct their attention at the appropriate object or movement, and also that sound symbolic words for things were easier for children of this age

to remember, lay it or after they had learned. And then for a deeper dive, I guess I I'd recommend people go and read this article themselves, but I just wanted to mention he is sort of by talking about the question which is just a hypothesis at this point of whether sound symbolic types of words could have been there at the genesis of human language. About this question, we asked at the beginning, where did the first words come from? When there were no words, but you know

that it existed before for things to derive from? The question is would words that inherently, for one reason or another evoke feelings and evoke sensations just by the sound of them? With those kinds of words form a bridge from humans with no language to the mostly arbitrary lexical

languages that would come later. So like a very simple like survival basis, you could imagine like a like a kiky sound is attention, attention, and then a buba sound or whatever is calm down, it's chill, everything's good, like bay sically get into some of the theories about like the communication of laughter after being a way of of instantly saying, Oh, the thing that I thought was gonna kill us is not. It's not kiki, it's bubba after all. Ha. Yeah.

Well yeah, I mean like that the first sounds or the first words could have been things that were like phonemes that create a certain sensation or sort of evoke a certain kind of image or feeling. And that later on they have more fixed lexical definitions, and these sounds perhaps are like potentially like some of the first building blocks of of more powerful words and concepts, you know, yeah,

like it's it's something that's booba. Booba is like it's super comforting and chill, and something that's kiki kikikiki is like three times is rough, or something that's bubba kiki is soft at first but has like a hidden bar, you know, uh, you know. Obviously you can extrapolate from there and imagine like language language systems building up based on that. But the funny thing is, of course, I mean, we have no idea is actually correct about this being

the origins of of language. But if that were in some way true, the funny thing is we don't like run out of uses for these types of words as we get lexical languages. These words just continue to be as useful as they ever were, were more and more useful all the time. I just thought of a great one in English. It I I there's no ikey sound that ikey is mimicking, and yet ikey is like a deeply evocative word that conjures a feeling. Yeah, yeah, And then is the word moist. You know, that's a common

common topic of discussion. They're like, why do people have a like a visceral reaction to that word. I don't know, but we just lost a lot of listeners. Well it's just as well because we're at the end of the episode. We're going to wrap it up there. But again, this is something we could come back to in the future. There's plenty more to discuss about about the you know,

the potential origins of language and just how language works. UH. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where you'll find links out to our various social

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