16 Comments

1. 

   There is a rich history of exploring this phenomenon in psycholinguistics and general linguistics, under the name “phonetic symbolism” or less concisely “sub-morphemic regularities of sound/meaning mapping”. From where I’m sitting I can see on my bookshelf two books of Roger E Brown essays, and later I might go take down the one with the groundbreaking “Phonetic Symbolism” paper and give the correct citation and an accurate summary. My general uncorrected recollection is that it could be cited as “Brown, Black, and Horowitz, ‘Phonetic Symbolism’. Journal of Social and Abnormal Psychology, 1956.”

   And my general recollection of the content is that they tested with word lists or paired basic concepts from several languages, and asked [1st experiment] English monolingual speakers to guess which Hungarian (for instance) word meant high and which meant low from a pair which did have that meaning. This gave significant results. A suggested explanation could be that the sound patterns of English led them to associate certain sounds or patterns with certain ideas. (Hence the term “phonetic symbolism”. )

   So as a second experiment, they (and overseas colleagues) tested with speakers of other languages. Though not as strong, there was still a significant effect. So perhaps the effect can be attributed to a universal of some kind, not just a pattern of English subconsciously used by the subjects in the first round of experiments.

2. 

   A nice quick way of explaining the concept of this phonetic symbolism to novices was akin to the “nonsense words” idea of the boubka-kiki studies, but with a particular basis. You need an audience who may or may not have read “Gulliver’s Travels” or seen an adaptation, but do not recall the particulars. Then explain that the first Book takes place in a land of miniature people, and the second Book in a land of giants. These two lands are called — not necessarily in this order — Lilliput and Brobdignag. Which is which, at a guess?

3. 

   At a Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, in the 1980s I think, we had a speaker give an interesting and entertaining talk on “submorphemic regularities of sound-meaning correlations”.

   For those not sure of the jargon, a morpheme (informally an indivisible word, or a basic root, stem, or inflection which can appear as a part of a word) was semi-formally defined in terms of being a “minimal unit of regular sound-meaning correspondence”. (For instance, /kaet/ means cat, but also /s/ “means” plural-marked! And /kaets/, meaning cats, is made of two morphemes.) So to talk about sub-morphemic regularities of sound-meaning correspondence is to somewhat fly in the face of standard definitions. I forgot to say that in the standard formulations of 1st-half-20th-century linguistics the sound-meaning pairings are said to be arbitrary. (We can thank de Saussure for that valuable and usually true principle!) So this is another way the whole phonetic-symbolism business was nonstandard.

   Anyhow, one of the examples from that talk was a big hit at the afterparty. People were going around exchanging items like these:

   A snout is a projecting part of an animal’s face containing its mouth and nose.

   Snot is mucus in your nose.

   A snob is somebody who looks down their nose at other poeple.

   To sniffle is to make a noise with repeated small sharp inhalations at the nose.

   To snore is to make rough breathing noises from your open mouth and nose while asleep.

   Snow in drug slang is a drug in the form of a white powder, to be inhaled thru the nose.

   Okay, enuff! The point is that initial /sn/ sound sequence in a word, not constituting a whole morpheme on its own, can “mean” ‘having something to do with a nose’, with a very partial but still striking regularity.

4. 

   From https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1956-02803-001 here is the data of that paper. I got Brown’s middle initial wrong, and was off by a year on the publication date. (The reason I had it memorized at all is that I planned to cite it in an essay exam, where our practice-questions and previous-year exam handouts led me to anticipate a question where this could come up. I thought, How cool to make a formal citation in an exam answer!)

   Phonetic symbolism in natural languages.

   Journal ArticleDatabase: APA PsycArticles

   Brown, Roger W. Black, Abraham H. Horowitz, Arnold E.
   Citation
   Brown, R. W., Black, A. H., & Horowitz, A. E. (1955). Phonetic symbolism in natural languages. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 50(3), 388–393. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046820
   Abstract
   “Three separate investigations, using three lists of English words and six foreign languages, have shown superior to chance agreement and accuracy in the translation of unfamiliar tongues. The agreement can be explained as the result of a ‘cultural conception’ of the symbolic value attached to various phonetic combinations. This hypothesis does not explain the accuracy of translation. The accuracy can be explained by the assumption of some universal phonetic symbolism in which speech may have originated or toward which speech may be evolving.” (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

   Copyright
   Holder: American Psychological Association
   Year: 1955

5. 

   How lucky, my academic email address still sort of works, so the Psycnet site let me download the paper as PDF for free.

   I doubt if this will format well when pasted, but let’s have a go at their word list.

   EDIT: Deleted the table, posted as image in following comment.

6. 

   Nah, maybe as an image it will be more legible

   

7. 

   I was also incorrect in characterizing the conditions for two rounds of the experiments. There were indeed follow-up studies with different populations of subjects. But in this first paper, it was all American college students (I think), but there were two different kinds of statistical examination. First was just agreement among the subjects, without regard to whether their answers were correct. This suggested an explanation in terms of patterns they had absorbed simply as native speakers of the same language, English. In effect this would be comparable to a nonsense-words study. But the second test was to score how much they had the correct choices. Significant correlation here could not be explained by just their habits from English, it required saying that to some extent similar patterns are present in Czech, or Hindi, or Chinese.

8. 

   Were the words presented audioly or visually in the experiments? I.e.: is my looking at the chart roughly similar to the experiment, or basically useless as I’m not hearing the words?

   (Actually, that sounds like a second variation to test: whichever way the first experiment was presented, present it the other way and see if the effect persists.)

9. 

   I think it was audible, and spoken by someone who knew the alter language.

   After checking the article:

   English antonyms were selected from the Thorndike-
   Lorge word list with two considerations in mind, (a)
   The words should name sense experiences (e.g., warm-cool,
   heavy-light), (i) The members of a pair should
   both fall in the frequency range of 100 or over per
   million. The final list of 21 pairs consisted of those on
   which the three authors could agree. We were all
   completely ignorant of the languages into which the
   list was to be translated—Chinese, Czech, and Hindi.
   The English lists were presented for translation to
   native speakers or scholars of the particular languages.4
   None of the translators was aware of the purpose of the
   study. They were asked to render the list into the
   familiar foreign equivalents—preserving the opposition
   within a pair. They then recorded their pronunciation
   of the pairs with five seconds between words and ten
   seconds between pairs.

10. 

    
    Hey, Mitch,
    
    I’ve been looking for a book/essay that I read back in high school in the 70s, which I remember as being written by James Thurber. It spelled out (!) a new orthography, substituting the new spelling as the author went on. It was hilarious, but I’ve been looking for it for all this time and, well, no joy.
    
    Any ideas?
    

11. 

    
    I’ve stopped looking at xkcd. Instead, I use explainxkcd.com. The explanations are often amusing in themselves, even when I understand the comic (which is sometimes).
    
    https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3025:_Phase_Change
    

12. 

    Chak # 10: You are probably thinking of the text attributed to Mark Twain, although the attribution is in doubt.

    For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.

    Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli.

    Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

13. 

    Chak (10), I suspect the story you’re looking for is Meihem in ce Klasrum (“Mayhem in the Classroom”), by Dolton Edwards – a pseudonym W.E. Lessing used for short work. It’s from the ’40s but got reprinted a lot.

    Mitch (∞), I didn’t follow much of that but I love that Munroe gets people excited about ideas. xkcd is one of my favorites and I asked for What If? in my still-pending office Secret Santa wish list.

14. 

    Thanks so much, MiB! When I saw Chak’s inquiry, I had a recollection of what she was talking about, but could not put a finger on it.

15. 

    Then how about snogging? Or is that more mouth than nose?

16. 

    Thanks to everyone who replied. 50 years of desultory searching and I could have just asked.

    The itch is grateful for the scratch.