Phonosemantics

Ancora oggi l’opera di Bolza non gode di buona fama, così come sentenziato nel Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani illustri della Treccani: « La produzione del B. fu però spesso frettolosa e molti suoi lavori, specialmente quelli di carattere filologico o linguistico, non hanno oggi più alcun valore ». Tuttavia, per quanto ne sappiamo, Giambattista Bolza è stato il primo a comporre uno studio sistematico della lingua italiana dal punto di vista fonosemantico, e ciò dovrebbe essergli riconosciuto come merito.

Il linguaggio umano ha due funzioni complementari: cognitiva e comunicativa. Di conseguenza il linguaggio ha anche due caratteri antitetici: uno imitativo e naturale che è più adatto alla cognizione, l'altro arbitrario e convenzionale che prevale nella comunicazione.

Antoine Fabre d'Olivet (1767-1825) può essere considerato come il maggiore rappresentante della teoria fonosemantica ma allo stesso tempo anche il meno conosciuto.
Nonostante le sue notevoli competenze linguistiche, a causa della sua stravaganza intellettuale, fu per lo più ignorato dalla comunità scientifica. Per esempio Gérard Genette non lo prese in alcuna considerazione nel suo approfondito studio sulla storia del fonosimbolismo. Eppure il noto linguista B. L. Whorf, ne rimase affascinato e lo definì «un metafisico mistico e religioso che mescolò questo lato della sua natura con i lavori di uno dei più potenti intelletti di ogni epoca».

La fonosemantica, sebbene sia considerata un recente sviluppo della linguistica, in realtà affonda le sue origini nella remota antichità ed anzi meglio si applica alle lingue antiche piuttosto che a quelle moderne. Pertanto può gettare luce su alcune espressioni simboliche che risultano impenetrabili ai moderni metodi d'interpretazione, come ad esempio la celeberrima metafora del “cammello nella cruna dell'ago”.

A majority of linguistic research concentrates on the conceptual exchange of information, and as a result the emotional aspects of language are found to be superfluous when observing the characteristics of communication. However, the prosody (or melody) within language becomes increasingly more necessary when observed as poetry or music, and one of the key aims of the present paper is to address the shared characteristics exhibited by the means of communication that exist between primitive language and music.

According to etymological dictionaries of Slavic languages there should not be any words of synesthetic sound symbolic origin (i.e. words with a direct linkage between their sound form and non-sound meaning) in these languages or their number should be very small. This fact, however, contradicts the typological assumption of primitiveness and universality of phonetically motivated words.
This book discusses two main points of the etymological analysis of words of synesthetic sound symbolic origin: (1) how to recognize them and (2) how to define the groups of cognates between them in Slavic languages. In the identification of synesthetic sound-symbolic words reduplication is regarded as a most reliable criterion. If a series of words which convey the same non-sound meaning contain reduplicated clusters of sounds, they could be continuants of a synesthetic sound symbolic etymon. In discussing the possibilities of defining the groups of cognates between these words following points are emphasized. Since the relationship between the continuants of the same phonetically motivated etymon cannot be established by phonetic laws and the continuants of different sound-symbolic origin in different languages and dialects can have the same or similar phonetic forms and convey the same meaning, the groups of cognates between these words cannot be defined with much confidence. Since similar reduplicated forms can be created as synesthetic sound symbolic denominations of different meanings, the blending of synesthetic sound-symbolic groups of cognates is possible during their evolution. There exist parallel forms with full and partial reduplication, which convey the same meaning of synesthetic sound-symbolic origin. This fact supports the hypothesis that partial reduplication is historically nothing else but a reduction of full re-duplication.

While there are numerous studies on living languages, about phonesthesia, research is lacking about ancient languages, although the first documented example of phonesthemes dates back to at least the fourth century B.C.: Plato’s Cratylus clearly mentioned the GL- and ST- phonesthemes and their explanation in terms of phonosemantics. This study is particularly concerned with phonesthemes in Latin.

Despite of the fact that, in respective literature, the term 'onomatope' occurs less frequently than 'onomatopoeia,' and that the former has been coined by way of back-formation from the latter, it, as a phenomenon, is basic in relation to what is referred to as onomatopoeia. Normally, onomatopes emerge as mimetic entities which are extra-grammatical owing to their non-wordhood (hardly an onomatope can be referred to as ‗word' if it occurs only as a mimetic syllable, that is, if it is not lexicalized). The distinction between just an onomatope and an onomatopoeic word is better visible in morphologically rich languages such as Georgian. It is noteworthy that, with respect to multiple ways of lexicalization and grammaticalization, onomatope-based entities display same semantic processes (for instance, metaphorization) as other lexical items. Thus, onomatopoeic words have usually been very problematic in terms of their translation, and the aforementioned features make them much more problematic. With a view to the above-stated circumstances, the paper deals with a set of Georgian C 1 aC 2 onomatopes; e.g. *bag-, *lac "-, *rak "-, *čak-, etc. (both initial and final consonants may extend to a cluster: *brag-, *tkar-*rac " k "-, *partx-, etc.). The processes of their lexicalization and grammaticalization are diverse:

Worin ist der Ursprung der Sprache zu suchen? Und was bedeutet eigentlich ‹Bedeutung›? – Gültige Antworten auf diese und andere Fragen können nur gefunden werden, wenn die linguistischen Disziplinen Semantik, Etymologie und Soziolinguistik, wenn Sprachphilosophie und historisch-vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft eng zusammenarbeiten: Die Sprachwissenschaft des 21. Jahrhunderts steht vor der Herausforderung, konsequent integrativ und systemisch zu denken. Dazu möchte dieses Buch einen Beitrag leisten.

Es zeigt auf, dass zu einer Rekonstruktion sprachlicher Ursprünge – und damit von Protowörtern respektive Protosprachen – keine konsistenten Aussagen getroffen werden können, solange nicht auch die Entwicklung der Wortbedeutung und der Semantik ihrerseits einer ausführlichen Analyse unterzogen wird. Dies impliziert die Frage nach der Bewusstseinsentwicklung: Entsprach das Bewusstsein der Menschen, die erstmals die Sprache ausbildeten, dem unsrigen – oder war es von ganz anderer Art?

Die Ergebnisse und Schlussfolgerungen, zu denen die vorliegende Studie auf der Basis einer großen Fülle von empirischen Belegen gelangt, haben gewichtige Konsequenzen für die gesamte Sprachforschung. Sie legen nahe, dass alle Sprachen einer gemeinsamen Quelle entstammen: Nur so ist die Vielzahl an widersprüchlichen Befunden in der Linguistik erklärbar und das Rätsel der Bedeutungsentstehung lösbar.

La fonestesia è un fenomeno linguistico particolarmente studiato nell'ambito anglofono per le peculiarità della lingua inglese, ma si trova in diverse lingue e ricade nell'ambito più generale del fonosimbolismo, di cui è un caso particolare. A fronte di numerosi studi sulle lingue viventi, la ricerca è carente nei riguardi delle lingue antiche, sebbene il primo esempio documentato di fonestesia risalga almeno al IV sec. a.C. ovvero al Cratilo di Platone. Questo studio si occupa in particolare della fonestesia nel Latino.

Antoine Court de Gébelin fu un personaggio eclettico, dalle numerose e spesso contrastanti sfaccettature. Tra il 1773 e il 1784 pubblicò in nove volumi una sorta di enciclopedia storico-filosofica intitolata Le Monde primitif, in cui tentò di dimostrare l’origine comune delle civiltà antiche. In tale prospettiva si colloca anche l'idea che il linguaggio umano abbia un carattere naturale e universale, da cui l'analisi dei valori fonosimbolici dei suoni semplici e composti. Dal punto di vista della Fonosemantica, Court de Gébelin rappresenta la transizione tra l'approccio materialista-meccanicista di Charles de Brosses e l'approccio occultista-spiritualista di Antoine Fabre d'Olivet.

Seguendo la teoria esposta da Platone nel Cratilo, Gottfried Hensel ritiene che ogni lettera abbia un significato naturale ed intrinseco (Valor naturalis atque internus) per mezzo del quale è possibile rappresentare, quasi per immagine, gli oggetti materiali, ma anche per metafora i concetti astratti. I significati naturali attribuiti da Hensel alle singole lettere dell'alfabeto ebraico, sono ripresi da Caspar Neumann ma finalmente spiegati, sistematicamente, sulla base di esplicite motivazioni fonosimboliche.

A preview of the first chapter from my forthcoming book "The Elvish Writing Systems of J.R.R. Tolkien", covering Tolkien's history in writing systems, the origins of Sindarin and Quenya, the Tengwar, Cirth and Sarati, a history of Arda and Middle-earth, aesthetics of the written word and prerequisites for learning Elvish.

The sound-symbolic value of phonemes has been associated with geometric assessments since the beginning of linguistic question. In practice, the imitative character of human language is based on analogies of shape, and shapes can only be properly described in geometrical terms.

Per descrivere il carattere imitativo del linguaggio naturale, altresì noto come fonosimbolismo, alcuni autori ricorrono all’analogia con la pittura. Questa similitudine è molto antica e suggestiva, ma si presta a fraintendimenti ed errori, già in Platone ma anche da parte di Von Humboldt, mentre soltanto Aristotele sembra aver colto la differenza tra l'aspetto grafico e l'aspetto cromatico, mettendoli rispettivamente in relazione con il carattere imitativo naturale e l'uso convenzionale.

The article deals with the problem of diachronic development of onomatopoeic lexicon and discusses how regular sound changes affect imitative words. The classification according to the degrees of the impact of regular sound changes is devised and applied to the bulk of English sound-imitative words. The aim of the article is to establish which regular sound changes of the English language had the most detrimental effect. In order to achieve this aim, all major English regular sound changes are classified into phonosemantically significant and phonosemantically insignificant. This classification is based on the use of methods of historical-comparative linguistics and etymological analysis. The main result is the revelation of the fact that not all regular sound changes are equally detrimental to the iconic lexicon of a language. They are only so if: 1) touch upon salient, meaning-bearing phonemes of an iconic word; 2) change the original phonotype of a phoneme; and 3) take place when the word still retains its original sound-meaning coherence. The devised classification is potentially universal and applicable to the onomatopoeic lexicons of related and unrelated languages.

Commercial names have been thoroughly studied from the point of view of linguistics (Sjöblom 2016: 456). We also know which name properties can affect consumer perception (Lowrey – Shrum – Dubitsky 2003). However, the influence of name properties on actual business performance is relatively undefined. For a practical approach, it is important to know whether the effect of the name can persist among the abundance of other business factors. Our goal was to find measurable name properties that correlate directly with business success, thus providing the possibility to formalize the naming process for managers. To reduce the role of the environment, it was reasonable to limit the sample to names within a certain industry, location and time. In this study, we determined what properties of a commercial name are related to its success in food service, Moscow, 1999–2013.

In this paper, we present the results of preliminary experiments on finding the link between the surface forms of Russian nouns (as represented by their graphic forms) and their meanings (as represented by vectors in a distributional model trained on the Russian National Corpus). We show that there is a strongly significant correlation between these two sides of a linguistic sign (in our case, word). This correlation coefficient is equal to 0.03 as calculated on a set of 1 729 mono-syllabic nouns, and in some subsets of words starting with particular two-letter sequences the correlation raises as high as 0.57. The overall correlation value is higher than the one reported in similar experiments for English (0.016).

Additionally, we report correlation values for the noun subsets related to different phonaesthemes, supposedly represented by the initial characters of these nouns.

The recognition of homonymic expressions is one of the most significant tasks in etymology and lexicography. Sound symbolism should be recognized as a mighty source of homonyms which however didn’t attract the investigators’ attention to an appropriate extent. This is a consequence of the exaggeration of Saussurean postulate of arbitrariness in the language. Because of the iconicity which doesn’t presume a strong connection between the signifier and the signified of the linguistic sign, it is possible that one sound is associated with different sound-symbolic images, as well as the reduplication (inherent to a soundsymbolic expression) is. This leads to homonymy. The present paper deals with the problem of a possible coalescence of homonymic etymological nests of sound symbolic origin – imitative and synaesthetic. The coincidence of varying sound symbolic expressions is shown to be a reason of mixing them in the dictionaries and their coalescence in the semantic memory

Based on the vocabulary of 66 genealogically distinct languages, this study reveals the biased association between phonological features and the 100 lexical meanings of the Leipzig-Jakarta List. Morphemes whose meanings are related to round shapes ('egg', 'navel', 'neck', and 'knee') tend to contain phon-emes that bear the [+round] feature. Also observable is the positive association between buccal actions and the phonological features they resemble ('to blow' with [+labial] and 'to suck' with [+delayed release]). Grammatical morphemes related to proximity ('this', 'in', 1SG and 2SG pronoun) are positively associated with [+nasal]. The phonosemantic patterns found in the most basic vocabulary of spoken languages further confirm that the sound-meaning association in natural languages is not completely arbitrary but may be motivated by human cognitive biases.

On the Typological Criteria for the Recognition of Words of Sound Symbolic Origin in Etymological Research
(On the Basis of Indo-European Languages)

The recognition of the words of sound symbolic origin is a weak point in etymology. According to etymological dictionaries of Indo-European languages there should not be any words of sound symbolic origin in these languages or their amount should be very small. This fact, however, contradicts the typological assumption of primitiveness and universality of onomatopoetic words.
The article examines the application of the typological criteria that can be taken into consideration in the etymological research for the recognition of the words which have a sound symbolic origin. The most reliable of these criteria is the reduplication. If a series of words which convey the same meaning or meanings originating from the same one contains reduplicated clusters of sounds, they could be continuants of sound symbolic etymons. In the article a lot of examples with the same or related meanings are given. These can be considered as forms with full reduplication according to the model: CË-CË and CVR-CVR or partial reduplication according to the model: CV-CË, CV-CVR or CË-C-, CVR-C-.
The etymologist has to take into consideration the fact that reduplication in sound symbolic words could have been obscured by regular and irregular changes. As a result of semantic changes the words of sound symbolic origin can develop meanings that usually are not expressed by the onomatopoetic words. Usually the relationship between the continuants of the same onomatopoetic etymon cannot be established by the phonetic laws or the continuants of the different onomatopoeic origin in the different languages, and dialects can have the same or similar phonetic forms, too. Therefore, in etymological research, the sound symbolic origin of the words can be established with more confidence than their relationship.

Словарь лексики комиксов Кевина Тейлора 'KA-BOOM! A Dictionary of Comic Book Words, Symbols and Onomatopoeia’ содержит 1335 английских звукоизобразительных междометий, бóльшая часть из которых не зафиксирована ни в каких других лексикографических источниках. Их изучение позволяет не только выявить ряд общих тенденций в сфере номинации звука, но также делать выводы относительно самого раннего этапа существования звукоизображений в языке.

This research proposes a procedure for recognition and investigation of the words of synesthetic sound-symbolic origin in etymology. Since some features of the sounds are changing according to the phonetic laws in the language evolution the reduplication is considered to be the most reliable criterion in the recognition of these kinds of words. In establishing the groups of cognates between the words of sound-symbolic origin one should take into consideration their peculiar formal and semantic variation and the possibility of independent origin of words with similar forms and meanings.

This paper deals with the most burning issues of phonosemantics, iconicity, and sound symbolism. The problem of iconic nature of a linguistic sign is capturing the attention of more and more linguists. Widening the perspectives of phonosemantics and studying it not only as phoneme semantics but as prosodic semantics as well, could open new challenges for the linguists in the future. As a matter of fact, segmental phonology has already gathered a vast majority of works dedicated to sound symbolism, whereas suprasegmental phonology lacks thorough investigations of the iconic nature of all the prosodic features.

Chi volesse compilare una storia del fonosimbolismo e della fonosemantica, dovrebbe ovviamente menzionare il Traité de la formation méchanique des langues et des principes physiques de l'étymologie  pubblicato nel 1765 da Charles de Brosses (1709-1777) ma non potrebbe ignorare che il principio dell'interpretazione meccanica dei suoni della lingua è stato introdotto nel secolo precedente da Caspar Neumann (1648-1715) che in riferimento all'alfabeto ebraico disse chiaramente: «Omnium Literarum Hebraicarum Significationes in Sensu proprio spectata, Mechanica sunt» . Allo stesso modo si deve necessariamente citare la La langue hébraïque restituée  pubblicata nel 1815 da Antoine Fabre d'Olivet (1767-1825) ma si deve anche ricordare che il principio di composizione fonosemantica delle lettere ebraiche fu anch'esso introdotto da Neumann in questi termini: «Literarum Significatio transit in voces».

L'episodio biblico della denominazione degli animali da parte dell'uomo, può essere interpretato con riferimento al carattere imitativo del linguaggio umano. Al più basso livello di interpretazione, cioè letterale, l'origine del linguaggio è correlata all'imitazione dei versi animaleschi, ovvero alle onomatopee. Considerando il simbolismo microcosmico, in cui gli animali rappresentano le varie espressioni dell'anima umana, l'origine del linguaggio risulta correlata all'espressione dei sentimenti, cioè alle interiezioni. Ma considerando il simbolismo macrocosmico, in cui gli animali rappresentano i cicli cosmici mediante i loro diversi modi di locomozione, la Genesi ci fornisce un chiaro esempio del terzo principio della fonosemantica, cioè di come i suoni vocali siano naturalmente adatti per descrivere le forme geometriche e quindi per illustrare le immagini e i movimenti mediante la loro forma.

TERZO PRINCIPIO DELLA FONOSEMANTICA
La correlazione fonosimbolica, tra il significante ed il significato, si basa sull’analogia di forma, descritta in termini geometrici, tra la rappresentazione esterna (voce) e la rappresentazione interna (idea).

Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog's barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl-(Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning 'light' via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like 'How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?' So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.