So let’s talk about matching. Sometimes, when we look at the world around us, it's
really easy to tell what things go together. But when it comes to working out which sounds
go with which meanings, a lot of the time, it's not so straightforward. If you go in
thinking there's some natural order that gives your words their inherent wordiness, you're
going to have a hard time. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
Words in our languages can really feel like there's something just naturally that-thing
about them. Like, take a word like “horse”. To an English speaker, that set of sounds
just obviously goes with that four-legged, long-faced, maned mammal. What else could it be?
But in other languages, the word for “horse” can sound totally different – it's
馬 [ɯma] in Japanese, kabayo in Tagalog, pferd in German, סוס [sus] in Hebrew, and more. These
don't really sound alike at all, and you could find similar lists for most words if you look
across languages.
It’s not like this is a revolutionary idea – over a hundred years ago, the linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure was already wondering about what this meant for how language works.
He realized that there wasn't something fundamental about anything that ties sound and meaning
together, an idea which he termed the “arbitrariness of the linguistic sign”. By this, he meant
that a language could pick potentially any combination of sounds to point out any object
or idea in the world. Horses don't have to be called horses.
This idea lies at the heart of our modern conception of words. We can't just tap into
some collective vocabulary unconscious; we have to learn each and every thing in every
language we pick up. It's a large part of why we assume that kids have such a challenge
in front of them when it comes to language acquisition, as we've talked about before.
And this applies to nearly all concepts in language! Pretty much everything you can think of
in the world has no deep-rooted connection between what it is and the words we use to describe it.
One exception to this is onomatopoeia, or words that imitate the sounds they're associated
with. So English speakers decided a long time ago that when you hear a bee fly by your ear,
and it makes that [bzzzz] sound, that's a buzz. The word is pretty much the same as
the noise coming from the insect. It's not arbitrary – there's a clear link between the two.
Except… how true is this, really? If we look across different languages, we can often
find things that sound really different showing up as onomatopoeia for the same thing. Like,
take our horse from before, and picture it prancing down a nice cobblestone street. What
sound does it make? Well, in English, it goes clip-clop. But in Turkish, the same horse
running would go digidik-digidik, or in Punjabi it would go tun-tuk, or in Japanese, paka-paka.
In each case, you can imagine how the sound got turned into the onomatopoeic word, but
the results aren't close to being the same. And you can find this for lots of similar
onomatopoeic activities – roosters crowing, people sneezing, dogs barking, and so forth.
But even if there are differences, we still have this intuition that underneath, these
aren't quite as arbitrary as calling a horse a horse instead of an uma. And we can show
that through psycholinguistic experiments. A 2016 study dug into this, using Japanese
ideophones, or onomatopoeic words. See, Japanese has this whole class of these ideophones that
get used to express not just things like quacking or laughing, but lots of other adjectives
and adverbs, too.
And they usually come in the form of two pairs of two syllables each. Like, excited is わくわく [wakɯwakɯ],
or exhausted is へとへと [hetoheto]. There are a ton of these pairs, but they should be less
immediately associated with the concepts underneath them, right? I mean, there's nothing particularly
fluffy about a word like ふわふわ [ɸɯwaɸɯwa]. A fluffy horse doesn't go ふわふわ as it fluffs on by.
To check into this, the researchers in the study took 38 of these words, and gave
them to native Dutch speakers, who didn't know any Japanese. The participants got shown
pairings of each Japanese word with a Dutch translation twice. But not all of them had
the right Dutch word: half of them got matched with the correct translation, and half of
them with the opposite translation. So, like, ぼろぼろ [boɾoboɾo] for worn out would
get the Dutch “worn out” versleten, but うきうき [ɯkiɯki] for happy would get paired with
verdrietig, or "sad".
After that, the participants were shown another set of word pairs: one of the Japanese words
with either the Dutch translation they'd already seen, or with some other random Dutch word.
They were asked to hit a button as quickly as they could to show whether this pairing
was one they'd seen already. And even after only having two exposures, something really
cool already turns up: it was a lot easier for the Dutch participants to remember a pairing
if the translation was correct in the first place. So they memorized the pairs where both
the Japanese and the Dutch meant the same thing 86.1% of the time, versus only 71.1% for the
ones where the words had opposite meanings.
And that wasn't the end of their evidence. The researchers also included a follow-up
part, where they confessed to the participants that they'd been devious, and that half the
Japanese words they'd learned were actually the opposite of the Dutch words. But they
didn’t tell them which half. Instead, participants were given all the Japanese words, and this
time, they had to choose between two opposites for the Dutch translation.
One opposite was always the Dutch word that they'd originally seen, and the other was something
new: so, like, if they got the word for energetic, きびきび [kibikibi], they'd have to choose between
the Dutch words for energetic vs. tired. If they were just picking randomly, knowing that
half of the translations they’d learned before were wrong, their success rate should
be at chance, or about 50%. But here, even after being told to disregard everything they'd
heard, participants still picked right 72.3% of the time.
But maybe this is just something about Japanese and Dutch – maybe the word matching between
the languages is better than we'd think. But ah, those careful researchers. They also
ran a study where participants went through the exact same steps, except with regular
Japanese adjectives. You know, the kind that are supposed to be totally arbitrary, with
no deep connections between the sounds, like 高い [takai] being tall or 安い [yasɯi] being cheap.
And with these words, there was less of an effect. They didn't remember the real
vs. opposite words any better, and while they were still above chance for the guessing between
two opposites part, their performance wasn't as high as with the ideophones.
So it looks like there's some meaning gain to the ideophones themselves – there really
is something fluffy about ふわふわ. And it's not just here where this looks like it
can be helpful – it may also ease word learning in kids, as we'll talk about back on our website.
But why should this be the case? Well, the power of these words probably stems at least
partly from the sounds themselves, which seem to come with certain associations. You probably
don’t think of [k] or [f] as having anything particular meaning associated with them. They’re just sounds.
But let’s try something that’s a bit more intuitive, based on an experiment first done
in 1929. Take a minute and look at these two shapes. All right? Now, if I told you that
one of them is a molmo and the other is an ikitik, which would you think is which?
The vast majority of people will associate the blobby shape with lower, rounder vowels
like [ɑ] or [o], and voiced labial consonants like [m] or [b], and smooth liquid [l]s. The
sharp, pointy shape will probably get voiceless stops like [k] or [t], high vowels like [i]
and [ɪ], and other sharp, pointy sounds. And this effect has been shown in languages from
English to Spanish to Tamil! This suggests that there might be a deeper association between
sounds and shapes, which has led some people to believe that the words we associate with concepts
are somewhat less than random, and that may connect into the differences in learning ideophones.
And it also explains why so much effort goes into picking out new product names. When a
new brand or product is getting ready to go on the market, a really important part of
the process is coming up with a good name. You want people to get the right idea about
your product right off the bat.
A really solid name can be so potent and so effective that it changes the way people see
the world. Like, if you think of brands like Google or Kleenex, they've affected
everyday speech for many English speakers, so that you can “google something” when
using another search engine, and call nearly anything you can blow your nose with a “kleenex”.
But how do products get named? Obviously, it can’t be anything goofy or rude in your
target language, but there’s more to it than that. Pros of marketing and advertising
have got crafting the reality that surrounds their product and how people perceive it down
to a science. And linguistics is a big part of that. Big marketing companies often hire
linguists whose main role is to work out what kinds of ideas, emotions, and impressions
different possible brand names drum up.
Like, after doing studies with people in different parts of the world, researchers found that
some consonants give an impression of energy and vigor, like [k], [v], and [p]. So an imaginary
medication with a name like, say, Vivipec is probably marketed to recover your spirit
and vim, or a car called the Cortiva might sound like it’s sleek and sprightly, but
light on the bankbook.
So even if most words in language really are arbitrary, there may be more to pairing sounds
to meanings than first meets the eye. Onomatopoeia may nudge people towards understanding words
in surprising ways, even if the words themselves don’t immediately seem to be connected to
sound effects. And even sounds themselves might resonate with you in a certain way.
Sometimes, the way a word sounds might just lead you to a perfect match.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you found my consonants
energetic, you learned that most words in language have no deep connection between their
sound and meaning; that it can be easier to pick up words that do have connections to
their sounds; and that even individual sounds have visual or emotional associations that
can carry across languages.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we have some extra material on this topic. Also, try dropping by our store,
where we have our new Super Schwa shirt, and this shirt, and a bunch of other linguistics
stuff! Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding
your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Ma te wa!