What's in a name? Sound symbolism ...In his 1929 book Gestalt Psychology Gestalt psychology Twentieth-century school of psychology that provided the foundation for the modern study of perception. The German term Gestalt, referring to how a thing has been “put together” (gestellt), is often translated as “pattern” or , Wolfgang Kohler described a classic experiment that uncovered a striking consistency in the names people picked for two abstract drawings. A rounded doodle was associated with a soft-sounding name; a pointy point·y adj. point·i·er, point·i·est Having an end tapering to a point. scribble scribble - To modify a data structure in a random and unintentionally destructive way. "Bletch! Somebody's disk-compactor program went berserk and scribbled on the i-node table." "It was working fine until one of the allocation routines scribbled on low core. got the hard consonants. Such sound symbolism Sound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phonemes (written between slashes like this: /b/) carry meaning in and of themselves. , according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. some scholars, goes beyond the onomatopoeia onomatopoeia (ŏn'əmăt'əpē`ə) [Gr.,=word-making], in language, the representation of a sound by an imitation thereof; e.g., the cat mews. Poets often convey the meaning of a verse through its very sound. of words like "bow wow" and reflects an intuitive attempt to capture in human speech the salient or essential traits, like size or shape, of at least certain objects. "It's essentially gesturing with the mouth," says anthropologist Brent Berlin of the University of Georgia Organization The President of the University of Georgia (as of 2007, Michael F. Adams) is the head administrator and is appointed and overseen by the Georgia Board of Regents. in Athens. For evidence of sound symbolism, Berlin has looked into the languages and fauna of South America. He described a preliminary analysis of the words for two different animals--the tapir and the squirrel--in 19 distinct Indian languages, whittled to omit those with borrowed words. In 14 of the languages, the pair of words fit a pattern. The tapir was represented by a word containing the vowel sound "ah," as in mezaha, while the squirrel was represented by a word containing an "ee" sound, as in kuzikuzi. To test whether those sounds were symbolic of the large, slow-moving tapir or the quick, small squirrel, Berlin shared the list with a class of 82 English-speaking undergraduates. He pronounced the paired words and asked them to pick the word for squirrel. For the 14 languages fitting the ah-ee pattern, a substantial majority of the students chose the correct squirrel name more often than one would expect by chance. For the 5 other languages, the students picked correctly about as often as chance would dictate--except when the word for tapir carried the high-frequency "ee" sound. In that case, three-quarters of the students assigned it to the squirrel. Berlin says that sound symbolism can also be heard in South American Indian words for fish and bird, as well as rat and bat. Although linguists generally consider the sounds of words to be arbitrary, Berlin says the tapir-and-squirrel results are "fairly dramatic and indicate that some kind of sound symbolism is at work." |
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