Phonosemantics

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.

Having been peripheral both in terms of occurrence in language and in terms of its representativeness in scholarly literature, every single instance of the documented recognition of relationships of similarity or analogy between sound and meaning in language deserves particular attention. This is valuable with respect to viewing whether and how the phenomenon was conceived in earlier traditions. With a view to the aforementioned, the present paper focuses on how imitative and affective associations of sounds are represented and translated in a dictionary published more than 150 years ago. This is Dictionnaire géorgien-russe-français, compiled by David Chubinashvili (David Tchoubinof) and published in St. Petersburg in 1840. The dictionary itself is preceded by a short introductory grammar; however, it does not include a discussion of the phenomenon in question. Irrespective of this, the author identifies and provides entries for the following types of instances of phonological iconism:
1. Onomatopeia; e.g. babani ‘frissonement,’ zuzuni ‘bourdonnement,’ etc.
2. Phonesthesia; e.g. entries with the following phonesthemes: bž-, br-, brd-, brk’-; gr-; tk-; k’r-; žr-, žğ-‘ t’k’-, t’q’-; pr-, pš-; ğm-, ğr-; šx-; c’k’-, c’r-, etc.
3.1. Total reduplication; e.g. budbud’-i ‘murmure,’ k’a’ck’ac’-i ‘grencer des dents,’ živživ-i ‘gazouillement,’ t’art’ar-i ‘de bavarder,’ pošpoš-i ‘petite puie accompagnée de brouillard,’ ğavğav-i ‘bruit,’ caxcax-i ‘de greloter,’ etc. 
3.2. Ablaut reduplication; e.g. bak’abuk’-i ‘trepignement,’ k’irc’ik’orc’-i ‘culbute,’ raxirux-i ‘bruit de celui qui frappe,’ šxap’išxup’-i ‘bruit de l’averse,’ etc.
4. Expressive pairs and sets; e.g. bubuni/guguni, k’rusuni/k’ruxuni, zuzuni/žužuni; lak’lak’i/laklaki/laq’laq’i/laxlaxi, etc.
  Judging from the fact that David Chubinashvili was a linguist (professor at Saint Petersburg University), the representativeness of phonological iconism in the dictionary and their definitions and translations lead to the idea that the phenomenon in question was both recognized as such and was conceived of rather adequately.

Sur la base des analyses effectuées par Lévi-Strauss et Severi sur l'efficacité thérapeutique du chant curatif guna "Muu Igala", et en s'inspirant des considérations de Jakobson sur la morphophonologie, cet essai formule l'hypothèse que la puissance mythopoïétique du chant dépend en partie, sur le plan sémiologique, des configurations phonosymboliques présentes dans son texte et enracinées dans la structure phonologique de la langue guna.

Abstract

Based on the analyses carried out by Lévi-Strauss and Severi on the therapeutic effectiveness of the guna healing song "Muu Igala", and inspired by Jakobson's considerations on morphophonology, this essay hypothesizes that the mythopoetic power of the song depends in part, in semiological terms, on the phonosymbolic configurations present in its text and rooted in the phonological structure of the guna language.

The paper represents the results of a linguistic experiment aimed at establishing if the sounding of different fantasy brand names can cause the same associations in collective consciousness. The experiment drew upon crowdsourcing. The data received can be useful for marketing phonosemantics in relation to the methods used for the creation of new brand names.

Biblical legal collections employ various means of presenting casuistic law, including the particle כי to mark the protasis throughout Exod 21:2-22:14, casuistic participial laws that mark the protasis by use of a participial form, the use of אם to mark the protasis, and the use of the yiqtol + אשר to mark the protasis. Although diverse ways of presenting casuistic laws can be attributed to style, I argue that representing the protasis of casuistic law with כי is a reanalysis of כי as a verbal complement (‘that’) through phono-semantic matching with Akkadian kī, which can function as the conditional conjunction “if”. Phono-semantic matching is a linguistic term that refers to an indigenous population reanalyzing a native word (in this case כי), phonetically and semantically with a word in a foreign language (in this case the Akkadian kī). The Hebrew כי was originally used as a verbal complement; however, through contact with the Neo-Assyrian empire, the Hebrew כי took on the additional meaning of a conditional, which matches phonologically and semantically with the Akkadian kī. The use of the Hebrew כי to mark the protasis of casuistic law overlaps with biblical laws that appear to be adaptations of Mesopotamian literature, specifically the Laws of Hammurabi, found in Exod 21:2-22:14, and the Middle Assyrian Laws, similar to laws found scattered throughout Deuteronomy 21-25. Because there are multiple ways to formulate casuistic laws in the Hebrew Bible, the use of כי within these legal collections might be best explained not only due to style but also due to interaction with Mesopotamian legal collections. Moreover, the authors of these legal texts employed כי, rather than the Akkadian šumma both because Neo-Babylonian used kī as a conditional as well as the fact that phono-semantic matching camouflages the external semantic meaning. This might also explain the highly literary use of the Hebrew כי as the conditional conjunction whereas in epigraphic Hebrew, Late Biblical Hebrew, Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew, and Rabbinic Hebrew the particle im was used primarily as the conditional conjunction. While scholars have employed arguments that appeal to thematic and structural similarities between legal collections in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamian Legal collections, I argue that phono-semantic matching reinforces the claim that biblical legal collections were influenced by Mesopotamian law. By analyzing the conditional use of ki as evidence of phono-semantic matching, I seek an approach that bridges historical linguistics and literary history.

Human language has two complementary functions: cognitive and communicative. Consequently, the language also has two antithetical characters: one imitative and natural, which is most suitable to cognition, and the other arbitrary and conventional, which prevails in communication.
There are traces of this distinction in Greek mythology: Apollo, the god of prophecy, represents the cognitive faculties, while Hermes, the messenger of the gods, plays the role of the communicative function. In the myth Hermes stole a herd of cattle from Apollo (i.e., the conventional use of language tends to override the imitative and natural character).

The present research considers crowdsourcing as a method of linguistic
experiment. The paper features an experiment with the following algorithm:
1) problem statement, 2) development, 3) and questionnaire testing. The paper
includes recommendations on crowdsourcing project organization, as well as some
issues of respondents’ motivation, questionnaire design, choice of crowdsourcing
platform, data export, etc. The linguistic experiment made it possible to obtain
data on the potential of the phonosemantic analysis in solving naming problems
in marketing. The associations of the brand name designer matched those of the
majority of the Internet pannellists. The experiment showed that crowdsourcing
proves to be an available method within the network society. It gives an opportunity
to receive objective data and demonstrates high research capabilities. The described
procedure of the crowdsourcing project can be used in various linguistic experiments

The sound symbolism in language is investigated in the light of the orthogenetic principle of Heinz Werner, which states that " wherever development occurs it proceeds from a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation to a state of increasing differentiation , articulation, and hierarchic integration ". According to this principle one phenomenon is considered to be cognitively more primitive if in its development it is closer to the pole with lack of differentiation. The paper shows that the lack of differentiation can be seen in the nature of sound symbolic denomination as iconic, phonetically motivated signs and in all of their features – pragmatic, semantic, phonetic, grammatical. From this point of view sound symbolism can be defined as a primitive and ancient linguistic phenomenon. Neurolinguistic data confirms this conclusion.

[Manuscript.]

The present paper deals with onomatopoeic designations of knocks (Instants) and their relationship with onomatopoeic designations of vibrating dissonance-like sounds (Frequentatives). Moreover one case of figurative meaning characteristic of such types of sound iconic words is discussed. The research is based on the material of Finno-Ugric (Volgaic and Permic) and Turkic languages.

[Published in: Иванов В. А. Звукоизображения ударов в финно-угорских и тюркских языках // Материалы Шестой межвузовской научно-практической конференции с международным участием «Актуальные проблемы языкознания», г. Санкт-Петербург, 20 апреля 2017 года. СПб., 2017. С. 272-277.]

Although sounds are considered the cornerstones in the linguistic form, the relation between the single sound and its meaning, especially in Arabic, has not been studied sufficiently yet. This is maybe due to two main reasons: first, the difficulty of researching such a vividly symbolic field. Anyone can speculate the meanings that sounds add to the word, but no one can judge that those were really their meanings that are not merely imposed by the lexical, morphological, or structural parameters. Second, these phonosemantic meanings are reluctant to be molded in a systematic way. This is ascribed to the fact that most of such meanings are not referred to the sound itself; rather, they would be ad hoc- related to the context that they belong to. As a matter of fact, it is the context that makes the sound bear the meaning. It makes the sound acquire a temporary rather than a permanent meaning since every context encodes its own meaning(s) with the suitable sounds. Moreover, everyone has a different manner in intuiting such meanings.
However, this does not refute the fact that there is a common feeling or ‘taste’ in grasping them. These varieties in the taste and contradictory understandings of the sound meanings can be considered, in my opinion, the underlying reason that generates the sustainable controversy about the truth-value of the relation between sound and meaning.

The article is devoted to the diachronic study of the iconic vocabulary of the English language. Language iconicity manifests itself either in acoustic copying of natural sounds (onomatopoeia) or in articulatory, mimetic copying of various objects (sound symbolism). Any iconic word gradually loses its iconicity in order to fit into a language, a sophisticated system of arbitrary signs. On its way to unavoidable arbitrariness, it goes through 4 stages of de-iconization. Two factors are in operation in this process: regular phonetic changes and the development of polysemy.
Having analyzed the effect of regular phonetic changes on its iconic vocabulary we conclude that de-iconization tempo depends not only on the number of phonetic changed word undergoes, but also on whether or not a particular phonetic change destroys the word’s meaning-bearing elements. These elements are the onomatopoeic word’s phonemes whose acoustic characteristics mirror the prominent acoustic characteristics of denoted sounds (e. g. /r/ is a core element of words denoting harsh, rumbling, discordant sounds).
Taking into account various patterns of iconic word’s form evolution combined with the general semantic development tendencies we create a classification of iconic words according to the stages of their de-iconization.

The claim that words are only arbitrarily related to the meaning that they represent has been unanimously accepted in the field of linguistics. A rose, by any other name, would, and does, smell as sweet. However, recent studies utilizing large corpora have shown that both systematicity and arbitrariness are present in many languages. Through the social evolution of language, patterns emerge and strengthen over time. This study briefly presents the case for universal and language-specific sound symbolism, followed by a statistical analysis of the Japanese sound symbolic system for patterns of sound-meaning relationships. Sampling 546 words from a data set of 1700 unique sound symbolic items, similar sounding words are compared for similar meanings. Examining minimal pairs with vowel, consonant or voicing difference, this study shows that certain phonosemantic patterns do exist within the Japanese sound symbolic system for certain phonemes as well as with patterns of specific sounds in specific positions. The results of this study provide statistical support for the claims of Hamano (1998) and Ivanova (2005) regarding phonosemantic patterns.

Flaksman, M. A. Preservation of long vowels in onomatopoeic words denoting pure tones: phonosemantic inertia / Материалы международной конференции Индоевропейское языкознание и классическая филология XVII (чтения памяти И.М. Тронского), 24-26 июня 2013. – СПб.: Наука, 2013. – С. 917-923.

Phonosemantic inertia is a rare phenomenon when an iconic (onomatopoeic or sound symbolic) word can withstand regular phonetic changes undergone by the majority of the words belonging to the corresponding etymological class if these changes obscure the sound-sense link existing between the shape of the word and its meaning. In English the process and its outcomes can be detected upon studying the concrete textual examples of the words’ diachronic development. The analysis of the discovered cases of phonosemantic inertia allows us to make suggestions about the conditions under which it occurs.

Arabic language is considered one of the hardest natural languages for adults to learn in the world. In addition to being a difficult language, the Arabic alphabet makes learning and even acquiring Arabic much more difficult. There are 28 consonants and three vowels, which are not normally written. On the contrary of English, the script in Arabic is written from right to left. Other languages that are written from right to left include Hebrew, which is a Semitic language like Arabic, and some other languages that use Arabic alphabets such as Persian and Urdu. As a result of this difficulty in dealing with Arabic alphabets, scripts, structures, pronunciation and consequently translation and localization, there are no grammar checkers for Arabic, no OCR, no powerful linguistically-aware search engines or string-processing utilities to handle Arabic. However, Arabic language is just like several other languages, including English, can be studied from a phonosemantic perspective.
Although sounds are considered the cornerstones in the linguistic form, the relation between the single sound and its meaning has not been studied sufficiently yet. This is maybe due to two main reasons: first, the difficulty of researching such a vividly symbolic field. Any one can speculate the meanings that sounds add to the word, but no one can judge that those were really their meanings that are not merely imposed by the lexical, morphological, or structural parameters. Second, these phonosemantic meanings are reluctant to be molded in a systematic way. This is ascribed to the fact that most of such meanings are not referred to the sound itself; rather, they would be ad hoc- related to the context that they belong to. As a matter of fact, it is the context that makes the sound bear the meaning. It makes the sound acquire a temporary rather than a permanent meaning since every context encodes its own meaning(s) with the suitable sounds. Moreover, everyone has a different manner in intuiting such meanings. However, this does not refute the fact that there is a common feeling or ‘taste’ in grasping them. These varieties in the taste and contradictory understandings of the sound meanings can be considered, in my opinion, the underlying reason that generates the sustainable controversy about the truth-value of the relation between sound and meaning.

The present paper deals with semantic typology of ideophones by the material of Finno-Ugric (Permic and Volgaic) languages and discusses some phonosemantic issues. Some semantic features of ideophones are discussed in a typological perspective.
В настоящей статье рассматривается семантическая типология идеофонов на материале финно-угорских (пермских и волжских) языков, а также формулируются некоторые сопутствующие сопутствующие фоносемантические проблемы. Обсуждаются некоторые особенности семантики идеофонов в типологической перспективе.
[Manuscript]

The article attempts to trace how the difference in approaches to the question of
language origin in the Democritus’ and Epicurus’ traditions is reflected in modern
linguistics. According to the monograph by Alexander Verlinsky (2006), Democritus
insisted on the arbitrary connection between objects and words, while
Epicurus insisted on a necessary correlation between them. At first glance,
Democritus’ tradition has ultimately won, being reflected in the ideas of Ferdinand
de Saussure that remain of crucial importance for modern linguistics. If looking
further, however, the research on motivation or iconicity of language sign is still
quite alive, with a number of relevant studies. This paper argues that the majority
of studies on the motivation of language signs still follow the Democritus’ tradition
rather than Epicurus’ one. They tend to find the motivation based on purely
intralingual data rather than in the “world of denotata”, the works by Roman
Jakobson being of especial importance in this sense. Jacobson offered the idea of
paradigmatically motivated signs that are segmentally smaller than morphemes,
and this idea was further developed by Konstantin Pozdniakov and other linguists
into the theory of submorphemic signs and submorphemic neutralizations. In
support of this theory, this paper illustrates how the submorphemic level of the
language can be used for the description of Latin personal pronouns.

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 d...

The article attempts to trace how the difference in approaches to the question of language origin in the Democritus’ and Epicurus’ traditions is reflected in modern linguistics. According to the monograph by Alexander Verlinsky (2006), Democritus insisted on the arbitrary connection between objects and words, while Epicurus insisted on a necessary correlation between them. At first glance, Democritus’ tradition has ultimately won, being reflected in the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure that remain of crucial importance for modern linguistics. If looking further, however, the research on motivation or iconicity of language sign is still quite alive, with a number of relevant studies. This paper argues that the majority of studies on the motivation of language signs still follow the Democritus’ tradition rather than Epicurus’ one. They tend to find the motivation based on purely intralingual data rather than in the “world of denotata”, the works by Roman Jakobson being of especial importance in this sense. Jacobson offered the idea of paradigmatically motivated signs that are segmentally smaller than morphemes, and this idea was further developed by Konstantin Pozdniakov and other linguists into the theory of submorphemic signs and submorphemic neutralizations. In support of this theory, this paper illustrates how the submorphemic level of the language can be used for the description of Latin personal pronouns.

A preview of the second 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.