Complex Numbers

Word to the Wise

Speaking of words...

    Why people hate or love the sound of certain words  

We’ve all experienced how certain sounds can grate on our nerves, such as the noise made by dragging your fingernails across a blackboard or the cry of a baby...

I suspect most people don't know what their own fingernails sound like dragged across a blackboard. Partly because who uses blackboards anymore, since like the 90s, and also partly because most people aren't evil enough to do it themselves. I, however, know exactly what my fingernails sounds like dragged across a blackboard.

Certainly I was a baby, but I don't remember how annoying my cries were. Knowing me, "very."

...but it turns out that the sounds of some words (like “virus”) can also affect how we feel and even give us a clue to what they mean (something to avoid).

I'd expect it to be the other way around: the name for something you want to avoid takes on a bad connotation. But that's why I'm reading the article, isn't it?

This phenomenon, where the sound of a word triggers an emotion or a meaning, is referred to as “sound symbolism”. Yet the idea that there might be a link between the sound of words and their meaning flies against accepted linguistic thinking going back more than a century.

And? Sometimes paradigms get reversed.

In our book...

Of course it's another book ad. What else is free on the internet anymore? Apart from this blog, I mean.

...we outline a radically new perspective on how we, as humans, got language in the first place, how children can learn and use it so effortlessly, and how sound symbolism figures into this.

Okay. Well, that first part sounds like speculation, but okay.

For example, if you pick a language at random that has the concept of “red”, the corresponding word is more likely than not to have an “r” sound in it — such as “rød” in Danish, “rouge” in French, and “krasnyy” (красный) in Russian.

Um.

The way an R is pronounced can be way different in different languages, such as the trilled R of Spanish or the nearly-German-CH sound of the letter in French.

Made-up words can be sound symbolic too.

All words are made up. Some just longer ago than others. And I'd be more surprised if newly minted words didn't have sound symbolism. Like when people go "whoosh" when a joke flies over someone's head.

In a classic study from 1929, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler observed that when Spanish speakers were shown a rounded shape and a spiky one and asked which one they thought were called “baluba” and which “takete”, most associated baluba with roundedness and takete with spikiness.

So much for flying against "accepted linguistic thinking going back more than a century."

Computer modelling of how children learn language has revealed that, as a child’s vocabulary grows, it becomes harder and harder to have unique sounds to signal different aspects of meaning (such as that all words relating to water should start with a “w”). Indeed, in a study of English sound-meaning mappings, we found that words that tend to be acquired earlier in development were more sound symbolic than words that are acquired later.

Computer modeling is a powerful tool, but it's only part of science. Also, I'm quite surprised these authors don't go into the "m" sound widely present in words associated with motherhood. Maybe they do, in the book.

I don't have much else to say, really (except "moist"). The article is less substantive than most book ads (which, again, I don't have a problem with here on a writing site), but the little bit of speculation I saw in it doesn't make me want to delve deeper by buying the book... and I'm predisposed to appreciating books on linguistics.

Still, I feel like it's something to keep in mind while writing, especially (but not limited to) writing that's going to be spoken, like a speech or screenplay: that the sound of words matters as well as their literal meaning.