Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and today I want to start with a question. This
Speaker 1: is gonna be one of those questions where you gaze
Speaker 1: deep into your own belly, and if you ask it
Speaker 1: out loud, you might annoy certain people around you. But
Speaker 1: I promise you it's actually interesting once you give it
Speaker 1: serious thought. And the question is is you take a
Speaker 1: look at your hand and you think, why the heck
Speaker 1: is this call to hand? Think about the sounds you
Speaker 1: make with your mouth when you say the word hand,
Speaker 1: or the marks you make on a page when you
Speaker 1: spell the word, or even or in say like American
Speaker 1: Sign language or another sign language, the gestures you would
Speaker 1: make to signal the concept of a hand. Somehow, those
Speaker 1: sounds you make with your mouth, or the marks you
Speaker 1: make on the page, or the gestures cause other people's
Speaker 1: brains to call up the concept of one of these
Speaker 1: five legged meat spiders that's attached to the end of
Speaker 1: our wrists. And in fact, I often think about this,
Speaker 1: that one of the really creepy and astonishing things that
Speaker 1: we usually just forget to notice about ourselves and our
Speaker 1: bodies and our brains. And the power of language is
Speaker 1: that in most cases, you are completely powerless to resist
Speaker 1: the conjuring power of a word. You ever think about this, like,
Speaker 1: unless you have some kind of unusual neurological condition, If
Speaker 1: you understand the language I'm speaking, and I say a
Speaker 1: giant crocodile crawling up the side of the Eiffel Tower
Speaker 1: with a bouquet of roses in its mouth, you will
Speaker 1: have no choice but to envision or at least understand
Speaker 1: the concept of what I just said. Words have so
Speaker 1: much power over your brain that most people, most of
Speaker 1: the time can't even turn off their understanding of them
Speaker 1: if they want to. We live in a world where like,
Speaker 1: particular patterns of mouth, sounds, and marks on a page
Speaker 1: are literally a way of controlling the contents of somebody
Speaker 1: else's mind. Yeah, which were which? When you think of
Speaker 1: it that way, it makes total sense that some people
Speaker 1: are like, hey, I would prefer you not use a
Speaker 1: bunch of vulgar language around me, you know, um would,
Speaker 1: which I have always found it sometimes weird, And say
Speaker 1: an office environment where uh, you know, certain individuals will
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, they need to use a lot
Speaker 1: of vulgarity when they're talking. But you're really in many
Speaker 1: times taking like particularly vulgar images, and you were forcing
Speaker 1: them into everybody's mind around you, and it's perfectly reasonable
Speaker 1: to say no, thank you. Yeah. I'm of two minds
Speaker 1: about this. I mean, on one hand, I I do
Speaker 1: definitely have a strong sort of innate anti censorship streak.
Speaker 1: But then on the other hand, I recognize that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: anybody who says, like, what's the big deal is just words?
Speaker 1: That is really underselling the power of words. Words are
Speaker 1: like one of the most powerful things in the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But to think about like just the casual way that
Speaker 1: that that you can summon uh imagery with the word uh.
Speaker 1: You brought up hand And I was thinking, all right,
Speaker 1: what does some other kind of tape Like I basically
Speaker 1: tried to understand the idea by breaking the idea, Like,
Speaker 1: what's another important concept or notable concept to me involving
Speaker 1: hand or something? You know? And uh, I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: but we have the movie Dark City where you have
Speaker 1: the character of Mr. Hand that's Richard O'Brien. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: plays one of the strangers but but now that I
Speaker 1: think about it, like, that's a great example of how
Speaker 1: you can just call this character Mr. Hand and in
Speaker 1: thinking about him looking at him, you also end up
Speaker 1: contemplating what a hand is and what a hand does
Speaker 1: in the form of the hand, and kind of melding
Speaker 1: it with the idea of a shadowy individual. Absolutely, and
Speaker 1: this is why, you know, metaphors and poetry and everything
Speaker 1: are so powerful. It's like you when you use one
Speaker 1: word to describe a thing that it doesn't isn't directly
Speaker 1: assigned for you. You cause all this kind of like
Speaker 1: cross linking within the brain that is often very evocative
Speaker 1: and exciting. Yeah, Like if you say, introduced a character
Speaker 1: in a work and his name was Dr Chainsaw, Right
Speaker 1: that way that that brings there is a number of
Speaker 1: conflicts arise, and I can't help it. Then try and
Speaker 1: imagine who Dr Chainsaw is. That's funny. But what you say,
Speaker 1: I think is more thoughtful and profound than than you
Speaker 1: might realize at first glance. Well, we'll think about this
Speaker 1: more as we go. Okay, So a lot of times
Speaker 1: when we ask this question, like why do we call
Speaker 1: a hand a hand? Why is that the sound we
Speaker 1: make with our mouths, or the you know, H, A
Speaker 1: and D, the marks on a page. Where does that
Speaker 1: word come from? We're usually asking a historical question that
Speaker 1: can have a relatively straightforward answer. Right. This is the
Speaker 1: domain of etymologies, and we do this all the time
Speaker 1: on the show. Right. We talk about some concept or
Speaker 1: some character from myth and legend, and we break down
Speaker 1: what their name means, where it comes from, right, and you.
Speaker 1: You can do this with most words, like you can
Speaker 1: trace it back through older versions of languages. One example
Speaker 1: we've mentioned on the show before that I really enjoy
Speaker 1: is how obsolete scientific hypotheses that are we know aren't
Speaker 1: true anymore, or sometimes still included in our language. The
Speaker 1: words we use for things. Take the English word malaria.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, this is a word for a
Speaker 1: certain disease is caused by a protozoan parasite. But malaria
Speaker 1: comes from the Italian words mal and area, meaning bad air.
Speaker 1: So the name we use for this disease incorporates miasthma theory,
Speaker 1: which proposed that diseases were caused by exposure to foul
Speaker 1: smelling vapors that emanated from the Earth, or from planets,
Speaker 1: or from things like rotting carrion. Did we do an
Speaker 1: episode of miasma theory? Oh, yeah, we did. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was earlier. I think maybe it was last year. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we talked in the episode about how the word malaria,
Speaker 1: so it reflects miasma theory, this incorrect understanding of where
Speaker 1: diseases come from from before germ theory took hold. And
Speaker 1: the fact that even the French physician Charles Louis Alfonse
Speaker 1: lover On, who discovered the fact that malaria was caused
Speaker 1: by a parasitic organism in the blood, he hated the
Speaker 1: word malaria. He didn't like that because he considered it unscientific.
Speaker 1: So instead he recommended the term uh palladisma, which essentially
Speaker 1: means like marsh or swamp fever or swamp disease, and
Speaker 1: this is still the French word for the disease. So anyway,
Speaker 1: many words can be tracked back through the history of
Speaker 1: evolving languages like this, and in fact pretty much all
Speaker 1: words can. But you can only follow this trail so
Speaker 1: far because if you go back far enough, you run
Speaker 1: out of ways to track words as straightforward cases of
Speaker 1: evolving species or adoption from other languages, like at some
Speaker 1: point words had to be created for things and concepts
Speaker 1: that had no explicit word before and no analogies to
Speaker 1: draw from, so that once you get back to like
Speaker 1: the initial case, you have to wonder, how did this happen?
Speaker 1: How is a word born? And does a word inherently
Speaker 1: mean anything? Why did the speakers of the earliest words
Speaker 1: pick one set of mouth sounds for hand and a
Speaker 1: different set of mouth sounds for tree and a different
Speaker 1: set of mouth sounds for mother. What do these sounds
Speaker 1: mean anything? And if they do mean anything, what do
Speaker 1: they mean interesting? So, I mean we're kind of dealing
Speaker 1: with some of the same properties that we've discussed on
Speaker 1: the show, and that we were regarding, say the evolution
Speaker 1: of Chinese characters, where they in their very primitive origins
Speaker 1: they were essentially tiny pictures of what you were talking about,
Speaker 1: uh And then as they evolved they become more eleguent
Speaker 1: in design, more abstract, uh not, and then sometimes it's
Speaker 1: abstract and meaning as well. But but certainly they no
Speaker 1: longer look exactly like the thing, like the word for,
Speaker 1: you know, for a person is no longer looks like
Speaker 1: a tiny person that sort of thing. So we might
Speaker 1: be we're particially talking about the same thing with words themselves,
Speaker 1: Like how if you trace it back far enough, do
Speaker 1: you have simply a word is a sound for a thing.
Speaker 1: It's not even a word yet, it's just the sound
Speaker 1: for the thing. And then how did we get that sound?
Speaker 1: How did you decide that that is the sound for
Speaker 1: that thing. Yeah, it's a fascinating question, and I want
Speaker 1: to go ahead and say we're not going to answer
Speaker 1: this question today. I mean their whole this is a
Speaker 1: whole field of study about the origins of language, where
Speaker 1: it came from. You know, we could write whole books
Speaker 1: on the subject, and I am sure we will revisit
Speaker 1: this in the future. But we wanted to look at
Speaker 1: one specific strange class of word today and and some
Speaker 1: some lighted sheds on what words are and how we
Speaker 1: how we use language. So a minute ago we asked
Speaker 1: that idea of like do sounds inherently mean anything in
Speaker 1: in the a lexigraphic sense? And one of the key
Speaker 1: ideas of modern linguistic theory is that the answer to
Speaker 1: that question is no. That the signs we use to
Speaker 1: refer to concepts, so like the sounds you make with
Speaker 1: your mouth, or the markings you make on a page
Speaker 1: when you're indicating a concept like hand or mother or
Speaker 1: something like that. These signs are arbitrary. They do not
Speaker 1: have inherent meaning, and they're arbitrarily associated with the concepts
Speaker 1: they call to mind. So to quote from the Swiss
Speaker 1: semiotician and linguist Ferdinand de Sajur, who is often cited
Speaker 1: as like the founder of the modern study of linguistics, quote,
Speaker 1: the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
Speaker 1: Since I mean by sign the whole that results from
Speaker 1: the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can
Speaker 1: simply say the linguistic sign is arbitrary. The idea of
Speaker 1: sister is not linked by any inner relationship to the
Speaker 1: succession of sounds. Uh. And then he spells out the
Speaker 1: French for sister sir, which serves as its signifier in French.
Speaker 1: That it could be represented equally by just any other
Speaker 1: sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the
Speaker 1: very existence of different languages. The signified OX has as
Speaker 1: its signifier Boff on one side of the border is
Speaker 1: in the French Frox is boff and OX on the other.
Speaker 1: And so we know, like we know today that to
Speaker 1: some extent what as here says here must be true, right,
Speaker 1: at least to some extent, because of course, words are
Speaker 1: not fixed in sound or in visual notation. Words evolve
Speaker 1: over time where it's come to mean different things. They
Speaker 1: come to be pronounced differently, often in multiple stages that
Speaker 1: we can track through history. Right. I mean a recent
Speaker 1: example of this on our show, trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what puppy meant a form of insult in in in
Speaker 1: ages prior Oh yeah, we're apparently Isaac Newton called this
Speaker 1: guy he was harassing a puppy. Were like, what the
Speaker 1: heck does that mean? But apparently it means like a
Speaker 1: fop Like it's the same word basically means the same thing,
Speaker 1: except in certain contexts, and then that has changed over time.
Speaker 1: But those those minor differences we can acknowledge between, say
Speaker 1: like early modern English and the English of today, can
Speaker 1: become radical differences over longer periods of time. But might say, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, doesn't the widespread literacy of the world
Speaker 1: and the printing press changed all this. Aren't words fixed
Speaker 1: once they're in print, obviously, They're not like just read
Speaker 1: a play of Shakespeare or something else from the early
Speaker 1: modern period, and compare that to the language of modern English.
Speaker 1: This is just a few hundred years ago. This is
Speaker 1: not that long ago. But you'll find tons of words
Speaker 1: that have changed in meaning, spelling, connotation, or have simply
Speaker 1: disappeared from everyday use. If you doubt this, I will
Speaker 1: bet you forty ferkins of post it and barm on it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Or just try and read say the obbit yeah, to
Speaker 1: to to to a child, and you're gonna run across
Speaker 1: certain words where it's like, oh, well this just meant
Speaker 1: uh that you know, now, this is a slur word,
Speaker 1: but in its original context that Tolkien was using, he's
Speaker 1: talking about a bundle of sticks. Another writer might be
Speaker 1: using the word and they're talking about a cigarette or something.
Speaker 1: So that the words can change sometimes for the worst. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely true. In fact, I was just thinking about this.
Speaker 1: Even happens, you know, with with letters. Have you ever
Speaker 1: read the early seventeenth century poem The Flee by John Dunn,
Speaker 1: who it's probably been a long time, you know done.
Speaker 1: Was a great poet. I mean he wrote great like
Speaker 1: devotional poetry, but he also wrote like seduction poetry. The
Speaker 1: flea is just absolutely nasty it's a poem where he's
Speaker 1: essentially begging for sex by making this questionable recourse to
Speaker 1: the idea that if a flea bites two different people,
Speaker 1: they've basically slept together already, and so they might as
Speaker 1: well not resist any temptation. He says, quote Mark, but
Speaker 1: this flee and Mark, in this how little that which
Speaker 1: thou deniest me is it sucked me first and now
Speaker 1: sucks thee And in this flee our two bloods mingled
Speaker 1: be Yeah, he's he's really stretching, I think with that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what a creep. But then it's even funnier if you
Speaker 1: read it in older printed versions where s is making
Speaker 1: the s sound don't look like they do today. Back
Speaker 1: then they looked like a modern lower case F. So
Speaker 1: so this would have impacted the words suck or sucked. Yes,
Speaker 1: it would have become a much more by modern standings
Speaker 1: vulgar term. That this is already I think, a pretty
Speaker 1: nasty poem. It just gets a slight nastiness upgrade. But then,
Speaker 1: in the same way that concepts are described by different
Speaker 1: words across time, obviously they're also described by different words
Speaker 1: at the same time between different languages. So the Basque
Speaker 1: word for hand is escua, and the Melee word for
Speaker 1: hand is tongue gun and so forth. So obviously the
Speaker 1: concept of hand is in no way intrinsically linked to
Speaker 1: the English H sound or the D consonant or anything
Speaker 1: like that. This does seem to be truly arbitrary, and
Speaker 1: part of that is that the hand does not make
Speaker 1: a sound. You know. Well it can of course, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't inherently make a sound. And that's a good
Speaker 1: thing to point out, because while I think it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty much inarguable that that sazure is correct in many
Speaker 1: cases that, like most word in most languages, don't have
Speaker 1: any inherent link between the sound you make with your
Speaker 1: mouth and what the word means. There were some words
Speaker 1: that inarguably do How about the word cockadoodle do? Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a great one. Uh. This is always a
Speaker 1: fun exercise anytime you travel somewhere where they speak a
Speaker 1: different language, or even if they speak just a variant
Speaker 1: of your own language, asked them what sound a rooster makes,
Speaker 1: and the uh, it's always going to be some variation
Speaker 1: of the same sound, but at times with surprising variety,
Speaker 1: and exactly how that sound is realized in language. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I love this, like it looking at different languages words
Speaker 1: for like what a dog does, Like the dog doesn't
Speaker 1: bark in every language, but in pretty much every language.
Speaker 1: Whatever word they've got for what a dog sound is,
Speaker 1: you can hear it. You're like, oh, yeah, that that's
Speaker 1: what a dog sounds like. Yeah. David Saderis has a
Speaker 1: fun bit where he talks about this, and I believe
Speaker 1: it was a Christmas essay called six Day Black Men
Speaker 1: about it mainly dealing with variations in the Santa Claus tradition,
Speaker 1: the title referring to certain European traditions in which Santa
Speaker 1: is attended by by personal slaves with black skin. But
Speaker 1: he also talks a little bit about, you know, variations
Speaker 1: in how people say what the rooster says. Man, it
Speaker 1: is shocking how disturbing some of those Santa traditions are.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it gets dark, but it is. It's the holidays,
Speaker 1: you know. I guess it's supposed to be dark and weird.
Speaker 1: But I got another word for you, one of my favorites. PLoP. Oh, PLoP,
Speaker 1: that's a good one. It's the sound that a drop
Speaker 1: makes when it hits another body. Of water. So if
Speaker 1: you drop falls into a bucket, it plumps. So I
Speaker 1: was thinking it's also the sound of a cat throwing
Speaker 1: up on the hardwoods. That's probably the context I encounter
Speaker 1: more often. Like you hear that PLoP, you know you're
Speaker 1: cleaning up something, Well, you'd think it would be like
Speaker 1: a splat, but no, it is a very polite sounding
Speaker 1: kind of PLoP, which belies how gross it's going to be.
Speaker 1: But yeah. So these are known as onomatopeia in English,
Speaker 1: the words that make a sound that's close to the
Speaker 1: sound of the concept being named. Uh so, like the
Speaker 1: noun naming a rooster's called the cockadoodle do obviously is
Speaker 1: meant to sound like the call itself. Same thing with plot,
Speaker 1: it's meant to sound like with the concept you're talking about.
Speaker 1: And you know, automotopia for some reason or just great
Speaker 1: fun to say. Usually I love like glug, that's a
Speaker 1: glug glug hiss, that's an automotopia. Quack oink, squeak toot
Speaker 1: toot is a fun one, yeah, kind of yeah, burp
Speaker 1: is perhaps one as well. What do you think about Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that could be an automotopia. Yeah, now I
Speaker 1: think some of these could probably be false on amotopia,
Speaker 1: where uh, I don't know, I sure, but if you
Speaker 1: like looked up the etymology, you could find that they're
Speaker 1: derived from some other word in history that doesn't actually sounds.
Speaker 1: It's just a coincidence. But a lot of them clearly
Speaker 1: are on Amotopia, like they're the word comes from the sound.
Speaker 1: The thing makes I wonder about the How about the
Speaker 1: sounds that are the words that flash on the screen
Speaker 1: when Batman punches somebody? Yeah, you know, are those uh
Speaker 1: what we talk about? Is that a case of automatopeia? Biffe, biff, biff, etcetera.
Speaker 1: How about plink plunk, ploop, PLoP, slash, splash, Yeah, those
Speaker 1: are those? Are those all seem pretty solid? I noticed
Speaker 1: how a lot of English on a moatopia. Maybe this
Speaker 1: is just because they're the words I could think of,
Speaker 1: but it seems to me like a lot of them
Speaker 1: are sounds for sounds that animals make, or words for
Speaker 1: what water does or what happens in water. Another one
Speaker 1: great one is twinkle. Wait a minute, did you catch
Speaker 1: me there? It's a trick? I think, did you notice
Speaker 1: that twinkle? And when I very first said it did
Speaker 1: you think, yeah, that's a good one too. I probably
Speaker 1: would have thought that that's a good on a mootopeia.
Speaker 1: Pale stars twinkle in the night sky. What do you
Speaker 1: hear when you envision that sentence. I hear a twinkling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I picture stars twinkling, almost in a cinematic sense,
Speaker 1: like twinkling more than they actually appear to twinkle in
Speaker 1: the night sky. But there's a little almost on a
Speaker 1: bell sound that goes with the word, don't you think, uh?
Speaker 1: Like I think about when William Wordsworth rights continuous as
Speaker 1: the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: Of course he's he's talking about flowers. He's talking about daffodils,
Speaker 1: and he's comparing them to stars by the way they
Speaker 1: move back and forth in the breeze. He says, ten
Speaker 1: thousand I saw at a glance tossing their heads in
Speaker 1: sprightly dance. Here's another one you might have heard before,
Speaker 1: Twinkle twinkle, little star that you have. That's another another
Speaker 1: famous version, which, by the way, here's a mind blower
Speaker 1: for at least some listeners out there. I didn't, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize until the last couple of years that
Speaker 1: it's the same song as the ABC song with just
Speaker 1: different lyrics. Try that out for size. I gotta pick
Speaker 1: my jaw up off the ground. I don't think I've
Speaker 1: ever heard of that. I never know one ever made.
Speaker 1: I never made that connection before. But then I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you yeah, that's exactly the same song. Did you
Speaker 1: know that London Bridge is Falling Down is the same
Speaker 1: tune as that classic old English full crime, Happy, Happy Halloween,
Speaker 1: Halloween Halloween silver Shamrock. Yes, there there is that. You know.
Speaker 1: One that's a less conventional use of twinkle that I
Speaker 1: really like is in Walt Whitman. He's got a poem
Speaker 1: about a shuttering locomotive. I think it's called Like to
Speaker 1: a Locomotive in Winter, where he says thy knitted frame,
Speaker 1: thy springs in valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels.
Speaker 1: But the weirdness is twinkle feels like an automotopia to me,
Speaker 1: it feels exactly like PLoP or or ploop or quack.
Speaker 1: But it's not an ont amotopeia. I mean, we know that,
Speaker 1: like the stars don't make a sound, but part of
Speaker 1: me rebels. Of course, twinkles an automotopea. It really feels
Speaker 1: like one twinkle twinkle is the sound that stars make
Speaker 1: when their brightness fluctuates. And of course that isn't true,
Speaker 1: but I I just know it's true, even though it's
Speaker 1: not that stars don't make a sound, and yet that's
Speaker 1: the sound they make. And I believe the sense of
Speaker 1: the false on amotopeia of twinkle is even sort of
Speaker 1: suggested in the way the word is used in some
Speaker 1: rhymed poetry, like writers seem to sense a deeper parallel
Speaker 1: between twinkle and a true on amotopia word, like in
Speaker 1: ed garlan pose poem The Bells. Oh that's a great one.
Speaker 1: Do you want to read it? Oh? Sure? Here the
Speaker 1: sledges with the bells, silver bells, what a world of merriment.
Speaker 1: Their melody fore tells how they twinkle, tinkle, tinkle in
Speaker 1: the icy air of night, while the stars that oversprinkle
Speaker 1: all the heavens seemed to twinkle with a crystalline delight.
Speaker 1: So yeah, tinkle is like the anomotopia of the bells.
Speaker 1: But then the stars also twinkle, as if that's like
Speaker 1: the same thing. Fun fact. Folk singer phil oaks Uh
Speaker 1: it was one of probably many people to set pose
Speaker 1: poem to music. Oh, I don't think I've heard the
Speaker 1: fun little folk song. What a world of merriment their
Speaker 1: melody foretells, you know, it's a fun little tune. Cool
Speaker 1: to look that up. But anyway, I like the idea
Speaker 1: here that if a word is, like we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, like a form of mind control, it's a
Speaker 1: way of just with without a person's consent, controlling the
Speaker 1: contents of their brain. Twinkle is a form of mind
Speaker 1: control that drives us to believe. In a contradiction, the
Speaker 1: word is like an automatopeic simulacrum. It's an attempt to
Speaker 1: copy a thing that does not exist, the sound of
Speaker 1: a bright light varying in intensity. And I just wonder
Speaker 1: why do we feel this so deeply? I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: everybody else doesn't feel it as strongly as I do,
Speaker 1: but I feel like this is probably a common sensation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of any that that resonate particularly
Speaker 1: strongly with me. I guess sometimes there's a very strong
Speaker 1: word for like various facial expressions, you know, And we
Speaker 1: feel facial expressions very strongly because they are, you know,
Speaker 1: non verbal forms of communication. Like, for instance, I don't
Speaker 1: know that this may not hold up when we start
Speaker 1: tearing it apart here, But for someone to gawk at something, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like the face makes a sound the sound gawk.
Speaker 1: But if you were to make that argument for me,
Speaker 1: you know, like that this is a sound like it.
Speaker 1: It almost feels like a sound sound in the mind
Speaker 1: if you're seeing somebody that is visibly gawking at something. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a word that doesn't just have a lexical definition
Speaker 1: that you understand, but it has it has like a
Speaker 1: sensory force. It delivers a sensory feeling by saying the word. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm just this is just coming off the top of
Speaker 1: my head. So I'm sure later if I when I
Speaker 1: look up gawk, I can you know you'll be able
Speaker 1: to tease a part the history of the word and
Speaker 1: where it comes from and what it's a linguistic origins
Speaker 1: are well. As we said earlier, I mean, it's possible
Speaker 1: for there to be like false on amunopeas where something
Speaker 1: you would think is just copying the sound of something,
Speaker 1: but actually you can show where it derives from other
Speaker 1: words in a language that maybe don't even originally sound
Speaker 1: so much like the thing. But anyway, So one answer
Speaker 1: as to why we feel these kind of connections between
Speaker 1: like the feeling or sound of a word and a
Speaker 1: concept that is not actually a sound or does not
Speaker 1: sound like the concept um one. One answer would simply
Speaker 1: be that we're culturally conditioned to feel the strange kind
Speaker 1: of synesthesia with the meaning of a word, simply because
Speaker 1: we know what the word means, We've learned it, we've
Speaker 1: learned to think of it this way, and it's just conditioning, right.
Speaker 1: But the answer also might not be that simple, And
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should take a break and then
Speaker 1: come back and look at some words in other languages. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So I was inspired to talk about this
Speaker 1: today in in this episode by an article that I
Speaker 1: read an Eon magazine by a writer named David Robson.
Speaker 1: And in this article, Robson begins this article with a
Speaker 1: list of Japanese words and then asks non Japanese speaking
Speaker 1: readers to guess what they mean. And given a couple
Speaker 1: of like antonymic options, you know a word and its opposite.
Speaker 1: So if you do not speak Japanese, consider the following
Speaker 1: word nuru nuru. Okay, I'm sorry if I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that exactly right, But it's something like that. Nuru nuru
Speaker 1: Does that word mean dry or slimy? Um? It sounds
Speaker 1: slimy to Yeah, It sounds slimy to me too, and
Speaker 1: in fact, that is what it means. Here's another Japanese word, waku. Waku?
Speaker 1: Does that mean excited or bored? That sounds excited to me?
Speaker 1: It sounds excited to me too. Here's another one, pika.
Speaker 1: Pika Does that mean dull or sparkly? That sounds sparkly.
Speaker 1: It also sounds sparkly to me, and we're We're correct
Speaker 1: in all three cases. Those are the real meanings. And if,
Speaker 1: like us, you do not speak Japanese and yet you
Speaker 1: can correctly guess the meanings of those words, you're not alone.
Speaker 1: According to a sixteen study by in the psychology journal
Speaker 1: Collabora by Lockwood, at all, almost three quarters of Dutch
Speaker 1: participants were able to correctly identify the meanings of these
Speaker 1: words without knowing them. But how is it possible if
Speaker 1: you don't speak a language to know what words in
Speaker 1: a language mean When they're not words for things with sounds,
Speaker 1: they're not on amount of pea. It's not like moo
Speaker 1: or something. Right, these are cases where it's coming down
Speaker 1: more too. I mean the obvious point being the case
Speaker 1: sounds right, those sharp ks which sound and it's hard
Speaker 1: to even put that in words. Why but they sound pointy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they sound pointy. They sound sparkly bright somehow. Uh, And
Speaker 1: that this is not just our opinion. Well, we'll come
Speaker 1: back in cite some evidence about this in a minute.
Speaker 1: But anyway, Robson cites these as examples of words that
Speaker 1: are known as idiophones, and these are words that are
Speaker 1: the way I would try to describe it, though this
Speaker 1: is a concept that can be kind of hard to
Speaker 1: define as well discuss as we go on. But their
Speaker 1: words that are kind of like on a mootopia, but
Speaker 1: there's no original sound that they're copying. Instead, they're described
Speaker 1: by by Lockwood and co authors as quote sound symbolic words,
Speaker 1: and I think this is a common way of describing
Speaker 1: them in the in the scientific literature. And what that
Speaker 1: means is that by the sound of the word, they
Speaker 1: tend to strong evoke a sensation like a site or
Speaker 1: a tactile feeling. And you don't need to know the
Speaker 1: language or know the word already to understand what that
Speaker 1: feeling is supposed to be, or at least get close
Speaker 1: to what that feeling is supposed to be. You've never
Speaker 1: heard the word nuru nuru before, but it definitely sounds
Speaker 1: more slimy to you than it sounds like dry or
Speaker 1: something else. And they're There are different kinds of ideophones
Speaker 1: in different languages. Some languages are much richer in them
Speaker 1: than other languages are. But like Japanese is an example
Speaker 1: of a language, there's a good number of ideophones and uh.
Speaker 1: Willem Lockwood, one of the authors of that paper I
Speaker 1: cited a second a second ago in a blog post,
Speaker 1: writes that these these words create a very vivid image
Speaker 1: or this this strong feeling that normal lexical words just
Speaker 1: don't quote. When a Japanese person hears the word kira
Speaker 1: kira meaning sparkly, it is like they can actually see
Speaker 1: the thing that is spark Really. How sound symbolism works, however,
Speaker 1: is not quite clear, and there have not yet been
Speaker 1: many neuroscience studies on it, but the research so far
Speaker 1: suggests that hearing sound symbolic words might involve other forms
Speaker 1: of sensory perception in a similar way to how people
Speaker 1: with synesthesia associate colors with letters. Interesting, but you can
Speaker 1: probably already tell just from us talking so far, that
Speaker 1: this idea of the sound symbolic word is kind of
Speaker 1: difficult to pin down exactly. It's gonna involve like related
Speaker 1: concepts across different languages, because different languages have different qualities
Speaker 1: that can be used to evoke these things. You know,
Speaker 1: this or this reminds me of of you know, I've
Speaker 1: read before about how you know, k sounds either hard
Speaker 1: case or soft cash or even um, even like the
Speaker 1: sound of of cheese. How these are inherently funny sounds,
Speaker 1: you know. But but then again, you know, we're thinking
Speaker 1: of like like sparkly excitement, Like those are also kind
Speaker 1: of the signifiers of of things that are funny, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: They're not dull, they're exciting, They're evocative in some form
Speaker 1: or another. Yeah, but it's really hard to really tease
Speaker 1: out exactly why. Well, to be very clear, we don't
Speaker 1: want to suggest that all words are idiophonic, because I
Speaker 1: think it's totally clear that probably most words in most
Speaker 1: languages are actually arbitrary signs and the sound has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with what they mean. And a word like
Speaker 1: clown is potentially funny because the concept of the clown
Speaker 1: is funny. She's itself is inherently funny. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you had no word for what this was, it's still
Speaker 1: like this soft, smushy thing that has a distinctive odor
Speaker 1: to it, but it is also delicious. We screeze, we squeeze,
Speaker 1: goat utters and we get the stuff out of it,
Speaker 1: and then we'd like boil that and separated. It's basically
Speaker 1: a practical joke of the gods as it is, so
Speaker 1: you know, we can't help but laugh. But clearly, while
Speaker 1: one of the interesting features of these ideas of idiophonic
Speaker 1: words is that they are somewhat detectable across language. Different
Speaker 1: is like you don't necessarily have to speak the language
Speaker 1: to understand what some of them mean. There are ways
Speaker 1: that languages are going to kind of change the way
Speaker 1: they're used, right, Like you can think of like tonal
Speaker 1: languages versus non tonal languages. Yeah, I was, I was
Speaker 1: looking around at some of the papers that because the
Speaker 1: thing is, when you start looking at papers on idiophones,
Speaker 1: a number of them are you know, they're they're they're
Speaker 1: focusing on one particular language or a couple of different languages,
Speaker 1: and so I was looking around it some that that
Speaker 1: looked at at ideophonic words and say Mandarin. Not that
Speaker 1: I speak Mandarin, but I've at least read about it
Speaker 1: enough that I have like some you know, base understanding
Speaker 1: of of of what it is linguistically, and uh, I
Speaker 1: did run across um. So it's says from chen Zi
Speaker 1: Ming's uh idiophonic words in Mandarin and um. The author
Speaker 1: points that there's perhaps some difficulty in settling on a
Speaker 1: unified ideophone definition that works across all languages quote or
Speaker 1: even within a language. Uh, they wrote, quote ideophones are
Speaker 1: much likely to be proposed as different categories under different names,
Speaker 1: in different in terms of different criteria within a certain language.
Speaker 1: Uh So there is this kind of elusive nature to
Speaker 1: to really like pinning it down, you know, well, certainly
Speaker 1: to create any kind of like unified definition of ideophone.
Speaker 1: That's one of the senses I'm getting from this paper.
Speaker 1: And other said I looked at I think the closest
Speaker 1: I can find is that the uh, the the sign
Speaker 1: of the word itself, either the sound or the markings
Speaker 1: on a page or whatever generates a sensation other than
Speaker 1: a sonic one. Okay, Yeah, so that it could be
Speaker 1: like a tactile feeling or the belief that you're seeing something,
Speaker 1: or like just an association with feelings or images, or
Speaker 1: or maybe even like smells or tastes or something. And
Speaker 1: I think especially if that can be detected by people
Speaker 1: who have never encountered the word before in use and
Speaker 1: don't know what it means in context. I got another
Speaker 1: exercise for us to protect us here to to figure
Speaker 1: this out. So, Robert, I've attached a couple of images here.
Speaker 1: You may have seen this experiment before, you may already
Speaker 1: know where we're going with this, But um describe these
Speaker 1: two images briefly. Okay. One is like a sharp pointed
Speaker 1: kind of sharooken shape, and the other is, uh something
Speaker 1: looks kind of like a splat, like a cartoon splat,
Speaker 1: like a cartoon paintball shape, also kind of reminiscent of,
Speaker 1: you know, a bizarre clover. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that's
Speaker 1: a very good way of putting. An image on the
Speaker 1: left is like kind of like a pointy star. Image
Speaker 1: on the right sort of like a splatty cloud. Now,
Speaker 1: let's say I give these two images names. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to tell you which is which, But one is
Speaker 1: named Molly and one is named Kate. Which is which. Well,
Speaker 1: if we're going to go back to some of these
Speaker 1: ideas we've been dealing with, Kate has that k sound,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be sharper, it's going to be point here,
Speaker 1: and Molly has that kind of I mean, I'm maybe overthinking.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the problem with this, right you started
Speaker 1: thinking about it too much. You're not dealing with the
Speaker 1: direct um. We're not coming at this clean. We've already
Speaker 1: been talking about the what sounds feel like. But I
Speaker 1: feel like pretty instinctively we would say that Kate is
Speaker 1: the one with the sharp angles and Molly is the
Speaker 1: one with the rounded cloud edge, And a large portion
Speaker 1: of people would actually agree that this is the answer
Speaker 1: and it works not just for those names. That's just
Speaker 1: one type of example, but uh, this, this experiment has
Speaker 1: been done giving them names like Kiki and Buba. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: the Kiki Buba and uh Takete and Maluma. And in
Speaker 1: research that this has been multiple experiments over the past
Speaker 1: century or so by like Wolfgang Cohler vs. Rama Schandren
Speaker 1: and others. Cola definitely sharpened pointing well, it's both kind
Speaker 1: of right because the K is sharpened pointy, but the
Speaker 1: owl that sounds like round to me, So like, why
Speaker 1: this inherent? And this apparently works in not all cases,
Speaker 1: but in most cases that it's been tried across language differences.
Speaker 1: So apparently sharp angles sound like T N K, and
Speaker 1: round clouds sound like M and L and round vowels
Speaker 1: like oh. And this isn't the only example. For some reason,
Speaker 1: it just seems that across different cultures and different languages
Speaker 1: were pretty consistent, not always consistent, but pretty consistent in
Speaker 1: associating certain types of human mouth sounds with particular non
Speaker 1: auditory sensations like sites and geometric angles and feelings and
Speaker 1: so uh. To read a quote from Robson here from
Speaker 1: his article, he's talking about a strain of linguistics that's
Speaker 1: now taking idiophones more seriously as a subject. Quote. Language
Speaker 1: is embodied a process that involves subtle feedback for both
Speaker 1: listener and speaker between the sound of a word, the
Speaker 1: vocal apparatus, and our own experience of human physicality. Taken together,
Speaker 1: this dynamic helps to create a connection between certain sounds
Speaker 1: and their attendant meanings. These associations appear to be universal
Speaker 1: across all human societies. Interesting, So it sounded like when
Speaker 1: we when we when we we're trying to comprehend some
Speaker 1: of these, uh, these sound words, like we're potentially connecting
Speaker 1: in like like the pre language verbal communication skills of
Speaker 1: our species. Yeah, it's quite possible, and we should come
Speaker 1: back to that at the end of the episode. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, there appears to be some kind of primordial
Speaker 1: association that somewhat transcends culture, that associates certain mouth sounds
Speaker 1: with certain types of sites or feelings. And so we
Speaker 1: know one example now is that like t s and
Speaker 1: k's look like sharp angles, and and like bees, and
Speaker 1: m's and l's feel like round, rounded edges. Here some more,
Speaker 1: he Robson cites the research of a guy named Diedrich
Speaker 1: Westerman who found that across different languages in Western Africa,
Speaker 1: the e sound like in cheese or peak or twinkle,
Speaker 1: was often associated with concepts that were light, fine, or bright,
Speaker 1: while the back vowels in the mouth like walk or fast,
Speaker 1: were associated with concepts of slowness, heaviness, and darkness. And
Speaker 1: so at the same time, there were associations with consonants, right,
Speaker 1: not just the vowels consonants like B and G, like
Speaker 1: but and go were associated with heaviness and softness, while
Speaker 1: voiceless consonants like P and K, put and cut were
Speaker 1: associated with harder surfaces and lighter weight. And just contemplating
Speaker 1: these again, we're not coming at this clean. We're you know,
Speaker 1: having these observations already color our thinking. But I totally
Speaker 1: feel like this rings true with my feeling of sound sensations,
Speaker 1: at least as an English speaker. Like if we imagine
Speaker 1: two totally new, made up words for animals in a
Speaker 1: made up country. So we're we're going to an island
Speaker 1: that's never been dis ever before, and we're seeing some
Speaker 1: fauna there, uh one piece. One piece of fauna is
Speaker 1: a tiny yellow crab that runs quickly across the sand.
Speaker 1: And the other animal is a large, blubbery semi aquatic
Speaker 1: mammal that looks kind of like a hippopotamus. And the
Speaker 1: two names for these creatures are Peaky Kiki and Gubba Gubba.
Speaker 1: Which one is which? Well, Gubba Gubba definitely has to
Speaker 1: be that hippo creature for sure, exactly but why because
Speaker 1: it just sounds like a like if yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's just that's that's the sound. Like to reverse those
Speaker 1: names would be a cause for comedy itself, wouldn't it right?
Speaker 1: I think it would. Yeah, Like if the if the
Speaker 1: hippo was Peaky Kiki and the and the crab was
Speaker 1: Gubba Gubba, that would be funny. That would almost seem like, well,
Speaker 1: that's absurd, why would you call them that? Well, but
Speaker 1: the thing is once if you if you establish them
Speaker 1: as such. I I don't know, I might on some
Speaker 1: level find it funny because those are funny word anyway,
Speaker 1: shake it and then the idea of a crab having
Speaker 1: a name is also inherently funny. But I would I
Speaker 1: would probably just buy it, Like I would begin to
Speaker 1: associate the name, like the sound of the name with
Speaker 1: perhaps the personality of the creature. Like suddenly I go
Speaker 1: beyond thinking like Gubba Gubba is just like this blubberry animal,
Speaker 1: but maybe like Gubba Gubba sums up the personality of
Speaker 1: this cartoon crab that we're introducing, you know, like it
Speaker 1: it's it's it's easy to again over to overthink and overshoot,
Speaker 1: just the sort of initial reaction that should be taking
Speaker 1: place when we hear the sound. Yeah, Now to bring
Speaker 1: it back to tonal languages like like Mandarin Chinese of
Speaker 1: course as a tonal language. Robson writes that Westerman also
Speaker 1: discovered sound symbolic connotations with the tones used in tonal languages,
Speaker 1: so so it applies somewhat there too. For example, even
Speaker 1: though English doesn't really employ tonality the signal meaning, in
Speaker 1: the languages that do that Westerman was studying, you found
Speaker 1: a general trend that quote words were representing slowness, dryness,
Speaker 1: and heaviness tended to have lower tones, and the meanwhile,
Speaker 1: things depicting quote speed, agility, and brightness were formed by
Speaker 1: higher tones. I don't know if you have a general
Speaker 1: sense of that in in your experience trying to speak Chinese,
Speaker 1: But I can't say that I've progressed enough to where
Speaker 1: I can really break that down now. Yeah, trying to
Speaker 1: think of some good examples offhand. I'm sure they'll come
Speaker 1: to me after the podcast, though. So The question, of course,
Speaker 1: is what explains these really common and apparently often not always,
Speaker 1: but pretty often cross linguistic associations. And one idea is
Speaker 1: that there is some sort of mental feedback that's created
Speaker 1: by the sensation in the body from making a sound. Right, So,
Speaker 1: like with kiki and buba, one idea would be, well,
Speaker 1: when you say buba, you say oh, and the mouth
Speaker 1: there makes a round shape, and maybe we intuitively associate
Speaker 1: the rounding of our lips with round soft edges in
Speaker 1: an image as possible. Right. Yeah. Another example here would
Speaker 1: be um matching sensations in the body in the case
Speaker 1: of things we do with our noses that usually involve
Speaker 1: nasal sounds. So U think about like snort, sniff, sneeze, snout, snore.
Speaker 1: You can't say the end without the nose. Yeah, okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: I keep I keep running Mandarin words I do know
Speaker 1: through my head, trying to figure out like where they
Speaker 1: would fall. Like bow comes to mind, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: certainly has like a round soft consistency to it. What
Speaker 1: does it mean though, it's you know, it's like the
Speaker 1: food the bow, Oh, like a bun Yeah, okay um,
Speaker 1: And then you know other words like like like bob
Speaker 1: depending on how you hit it, totally like that that
Speaker 1: can mean father, which doesn't quite really fall into what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here. And I'm trying, I'm sort of
Speaker 1: hurting my brain trying to think of some good, sharp
Speaker 1: sounding words that aren't names. Uh, But at any rate,
Speaker 1: Like again, I'm sure all this will will come to
Speaker 1: me after we're done recording. It's interesting how we start
Speaker 1: once we are asked to observe this. You start looking
Speaker 1: forward in all the words, even though we know that
Speaker 1: most words are not idiophones, but we still, like I
Speaker 1: start seeing correlations there in all kinds of words where
Speaker 1: it might just be you know, it met me losing
Speaker 1: my mind here, but like, uh, I start thinking about like, oh,
Speaker 1: what about all the the the words that start with
Speaker 1: g r, you know, you know, just like growl, grunt, grown,
Speaker 1: Like what is that that growl? Grunt, grown, grumble? They
Speaker 1: all start with gr which sort of like almost evokes
Speaker 1: this kind of natural sense of something being like a
Speaker 1: problem or a burden, and the needed words like great.
Speaker 1: How does that work? Yeah? So, I mean, clearly, I
Speaker 1: think maybe the mind is going to places where but
Speaker 1: where it's not quite fruitful. But anyway, it's hard to
Speaker 1: really to take a word and think about it without
Speaker 1: the context of its meaning and and how that meaning
Speaker 1: kind of you know, dilutes through culture. But anyway, I
Speaker 1: guess we should we should get back to the possible
Speaker 1: explanations for why this. Another one that Robson mentioned in
Speaker 1: this article is just the idea that when some types
Speaker 1: of ideophones occur there is a kind of cross contamination
Speaker 1: between sensations in brain regions. That this could be literal
Speaker 1: just like cross linking or kind of bleed over in
Speaker 1: the brain, right, a type of synesthesia, And of course
Speaker 1: synaesthesia is quote a neurological condition in which stimulation of
Speaker 1: one sensory or cognitive pathway, for example, hearing, leads to automatic,
Speaker 1: involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway such
Speaker 1: as vision. And that's a definition from psychology today. But
Speaker 1: synesthesia is an interesting concept in itself, like how come
Speaker 1: people associate certain like letters with colors, or like feelings
Speaker 1: with with sounds or something that's interesting because it's without
Speaker 1: having experience synaesthie issha it is. What's taking place in
Speaker 1: the mind is um it does feel like that kind
Speaker 1: of direct connection, you know. Um. The the difficulty in
Speaker 1: describing it kind of seems to match up there well
Speaker 1: for me, almost saying saying twinkle is like some of
Speaker 1: the closest I get to sinis thesia, because that's it's
Speaker 1: the sound of star makes again. And the star doesn't
Speaker 1: make a sound, but I can sort of hear it,
Speaker 1: and it's the word twinkle. It's like saying, why is
Speaker 1: this note purple? That sort of thing? All right, well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna take one more break and
Speaker 1: then we're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about this
Speaker 1: concept a little bit more. Alright, we're back. So I
Speaker 1: was looking around for some commentary on idea phones, and
Speaker 1: you know, I wanted to see, like, well, what's an
Speaker 1: example of somebody's sort of poopooing on idio phones to
Speaker 1: sort of use in an idea And I ran across
Speaker 1: an article by linguist Paul Newman from Indiana University, and uh,
Speaker 1: and he said the following quote, how far ideophones deviate
Speaker 1: from the normal systems will vary from language to language,
Speaker 1: in some cases more, in some languages less. But in
Speaker 1: the final analysis, ideophones are part of the structure of
Speaker 1: a specific language and have to be viewed in the
Speaker 1: context of that language. Okay, So this is kind of
Speaker 1: against the idea of like an overarching class of ideophones
Speaker 1: and more like they're specific to the languages where they occur. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean he's not. I don't want to make it
Speaker 1: sounding like he's completely poop poing on the idea, but
Speaker 1: like basically what he's he's maybe recommending caution and like
Speaker 1: over analyzing their importance. I guess you would say. For instance,
Speaker 1: he points out that ideophones are extremely important and certain
Speaker 1: certain African languages as well as Asian and Native American languages,
Speaker 1: but he argues that in focusing on what's different about ideophones,
Speaker 1: he thinks that scholars tend to overlook quote the simple
Speaker 1: notion that to a great extent, idiophones are part and
Speaker 1: parcel of whatever language they belong to. So again he's not,
Speaker 1: you know, saying I don't believe in ideophones, but he's
Speaker 1: may he's questioning maybe to what, you know, what amount
Speaker 1: of emphasis is is appropriate? Uh? And in looking around
Speaker 1: for other tidbits on the topic, I ran across a
Speaker 1: very interesting paper by Gary Lupin and Daniel Casisanto in
Speaker 1: Language and Cognition from two thousand fourteen titled Meaningless Words
Speaker 1: Promote meaningful categorization. Oh, I think I know where they're
Speaker 1: going at this, I like this. Yeah. So the common
Speaker 1: thread here is that we're talking about non arbitrary word
Speaker 1: to meaning mappings. Okay, so this would be back to
Speaker 1: kind of like new and newer, like if people are
Speaker 1: detecting an inherent sliminess about the word just the sound
Speaker 1: of the word itself, right, And so they start exploring
Speaker 1: this in the context of just pure nonsense words. And
Speaker 1: so they bring up the nonsense words of one of
Speaker 1: the great nonsensical writers of all time, and at least
Speaker 1: in terms of some of his word choices, that being
Speaker 1: Lewis Carroll. Oh yeah, the jabberwock Yes. In fact, they
Speaker 1: quote the Jabberwocke twas Brillig and the slivey toves did
Speaker 1: guy Or and gimbal in the wave. So there's some
Speaker 1: great nonsense in there, But to just focus on one
Speaker 1: in particular, slithy is not a word and yet quote.
Speaker 1: The nonsense words of Jabberwockie are made meaningful by a
Speaker 1: combination of phonological queuing and syntactic and uh distributional information.
Speaker 1: So slithy is used as an in an adjective frame
Speaker 1: and has phonological neighbors lithe and slimy. Okay, So there
Speaker 1: are some queues here, right, like the words in the Jabberwockie.
Speaker 1: While they're not English words, it's also not just like
Speaker 1: pure sound from out of nowhere, because they often are.
Speaker 1: They sound a lot like other words that we do
Speaker 1: know the meanings. Right. So it's kind of this idea
Speaker 1: that like a new word and nonsense word doesn't quite
Speaker 1: work in isolation. And this from actually brings back our
Speaker 1: squirrel episode and sort of our uh really are unearthing
Speaker 1: I guess of the term skug we're actually ug was
Speaker 1: a proper name for a squirrel, right. It was what
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin, Uh, basically believed that the people in England
Speaker 1: called their pet squirrels. Like it's saying a bunch of
Speaker 1: scugs would be two squirrels what it would be to
Speaker 1: say like a bunch of rovers referring to dogs. And
Speaker 1: so when I started using it in my household just
Speaker 1: as a general term for squirrels, uh, my wife took
Speaker 1: issue with it. It's like that sounds a little like
Speaker 1: dirty or something, you know. It sounds like you're you're
Speaker 1: you're using profanity against the squirrels. It sounds like an insult.
Speaker 1: Or something, and so in cases like that you have
Speaker 1: to realize, well, the word scug does not exist in isolation.
Speaker 1: If it sounds a little bit like this word or
Speaker 1: that word, or even just certain sounds from other words,
Speaker 1: then well it does incorporate ug. As if you're going
Speaker 1: like ug, yes, yeah, or I guess part of the
Speaker 1: appeal of scug to me is like it also sounds
Speaker 1: like skull and so much as that's tough. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: much of those episodes dealt with how tough and uh
Speaker 1: and how and how likely they are to eat the
Speaker 1: intense of another animal skulp that sort of thing. Not
Speaker 1: all of them, not all. Anyway, back to this paper,
Speaker 1: they conducted a lab experiment using the words food and creelch.
Speaker 1: Crelch is grape juice, it's my favorite brand, And they
Speaker 1: apply these words to two distinct alien species um that
Speaker 1: they made up for the experiment, and ascid participants to
Speaker 1: come up with real adjectives to describe them. So they're
Speaker 1: basically saying, hey, there's an alien known as the crelch.
Speaker 1: Describe it. Come up with some adjectives to describe what
Speaker 1: this creature looks like, or you there, think about the
Speaker 1: foods and so they ended up the describing the creelches
Speaker 1: as pointy and narrow. What do you know that's got
Speaker 1: a hard case sound? And then guess what the foods
Speaker 1: were shaped like, Well, there's an oo sounds those rounded
Speaker 1: lips sort of front of the mouth, long vowel, that
Speaker 1: makes me think of soft, pillowy. Yeah, yeah, round and plump.
Speaker 1: That's what they said, yeah, they and they say quote.
Speaker 1: The results expand the scope of research on sound symbolism
Speaker 1: and support a non traditional view of word meaning, according
Speaker 1: to which words do not have meanings by virtue of
Speaker 1: a conventionalized form meaning pairing. Rather, the meaning of a
Speaker 1: word is the effect that the word form has on
Speaker 1: the user users mental activity, which I think a nice
Speaker 1: way of summing up some of what we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: like what does this word due to your mental activity?
Speaker 1: Like what what additional adjective is, what additional words is?
Speaker 1: It's summoning, and what basic characteristics is it's summoning into
Speaker 1: your mind? And then you're forced to piece together like
Speaker 1: I can imagine very faintly, like it's not a distinct picture,
Speaker 1: but I without even reading any of the adjectives listed
Speaker 1: in the paper, I kind of have an idea of
Speaker 1: what the crouch looks like and what the food looks
Speaker 1: like in a broader sense. You know what this makes
Speaker 1: me think of? So I like the idea of what
Speaker 1: they're suggesting here, that like words can have a sort
Speaker 1: of like generalized mental activity impact even if they have
Speaker 1: no lexical definition. Uh, it makes me think about the
Speaker 1: way that I don't know if you remember, especially, I
Speaker 1: had this experience all this time when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: of finding jokes funny even though I didn't get them. Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know about this, Like when you would hear a
Speaker 1: joke that was like an adult joke that had references
Speaker 1: to things in it that you didn't understand. So a
Speaker 1: joke is made by making sense of something, but you
Speaker 1: don't get the sense, and yet it's funny anyway. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it would be really funny even though you didn't get
Speaker 1: it at all. Oh. I would get this all the
Speaker 1: time watching Mystery Science Theater thwo thousand as a kid,
Speaker 1: because a lot of they were a lot of pop
Speaker 1: pop culture references to shows that I was maybe not
Speaker 1: quite old enough to have seen, just because I wasn't
Speaker 1: watching television. Uh as a child, you know, I wasn't
Speaker 1: watching television when Joe Hodgson was watching television when he
Speaker 1: was my age, that sort of thing. So I didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily get the jokes, but I found them hilarious. And
Speaker 1: to this day, there are still a lot of the
Speaker 1: jokes I've I've researched or come up to speed on.
Speaker 1: But occasionally I'll be rewatching an old episode of MST
Speaker 1: and there'll be a joke where I'm I'm laughing out loud,
Speaker 1: and I still have no idea what the connection is there.
Speaker 1: I'm right there with you. That happens sometimes with MST especially,
Speaker 1: but it just happens. Sometimes you don't get a joke,
Speaker 1: but it's still involuntarily triggers laughter. It's just funny, and
Speaker 1: it's not even always like you could maybe explain it,
Speaker 1: like what if it's just like social laughter, like you're
Speaker 1: in a group other people are laughing, but it I
Speaker 1: don't know. It happens to me when I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: by myself, there's nobody else there, and it's funny. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think language has this power of it has an
Speaker 1: effect on our brains, even when we don't fully understand
Speaker 1: the lexical or syntactic significance of it and that's really interesting.
Speaker 1: Or sometimes maybe we can only get vague hints of
Speaker 1: the lexical significance, but it's it's like it's having an
Speaker 1: impact anyway. It's the same way that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: you can listen to poetry in another language and it
Speaker 1: can be great, like you literally don't understand what they're
Speaker 1: talking or you know, I think I can admit this,
Speaker 1: especially since I've heard the Columbia linguists John mcward admit
Speaker 1: this too, that like most of the time, if I'm like,
Speaker 1: if I'm listening to Shakespeare performed, I'm not catching the
Speaker 1: meaning of everything. I mean, like, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you have this experience too, Like I I sort of
Speaker 1: can basically follow the action, but you know, like half
Speaker 1: the lines go over my head and I'm like, a way,
Speaker 1: you know, I couldn't follow the sense for sense, meaning
Speaker 1: of every statement made by a character in a Shakespeare
Speaker 1: play because there's a lot of antiquated language in it
Speaker 1: and sometimes like the the rhythm, you know, the diambic
Speaker 1: pentameter or whatever, the rhythm and stuff in the in
Speaker 1: the writing makes for very sonically beautiful writing that is
Speaker 1: creating pleasurable feelings in my brain, but I'm not always
Speaker 1: following the literal sense of what is being said. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would always have that experience in college taking Shakespeare classes,
Speaker 1: you'd end up, I feel like I would end up
Speaker 1: having like two different readings or two different viewings of
Speaker 1: the same play or the same scene. There's the version
Speaker 1: that you you take in before you've done a deeper reading,
Speaker 1: and then you get in, you read the text, you
Speaker 1: read all the footnotes about what what this word means
Speaker 1: or what it's referring to, or what it would have
Speaker 1: meant in the context of the time, and then you're
Speaker 1: left with this, you know, ultimately enriched understanding of what
Speaker 1: the play is. But it is a slightly different experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is really interesting. One thing that I think is
Speaker 1: really funny that I mentioned that that comment by John mcward,
Speaker 1: But I've heard him recommend watching Shakespeare plays in another language,
Speaker 1: like where where somebody's gonna done a good translation into
Speaker 1: another language of Shakespeare if you speak that other language,
Speaker 1: like if you speak Vietnamese and somebody's done a good
Speaker 1: Vietnamese translation of Hamlet, watch that He says that sometimes
Speaker 1: that can be even better than watching Shakespeare in the
Speaker 1: original English. How about watching the German language episodes of
Speaker 1: Monty Python. Have you ever done that? No? They cut
Speaker 1: at least one, maybe more. I don't remember the details
Speaker 1: on it, but they cut at least one German language
Speaker 1: episode where it wasn't dubbed in German. They performed all
Speaker 1: these skits again in German. Is it funny? Um? Glad? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean, it can't help but be funny given that concept,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's necessarily funny beyond just I mean,
Speaker 1: if you speak a little German, you can certainly pick
Speaker 1: up on some of the words, and of course there's
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, a lot a lot of
Speaker 1: similarity between the German language system and the English language system. Uh.
Speaker 1: But ultimately I would say it it always felt just
Speaker 1: kind of like surface level amusing to someone who doesn't
Speaker 1: like speak German at all. You know, it is funny though,
Speaker 1: is a non French speaker Eddie Iszard's bits in French? Okay?
Speaker 1: You ever seen those? No? I haven't. It's a show
Speaker 1: for an English speaking audience, but he does a long
Speaker 1: stretch of the show just in French, and it's really funny.
Speaker 1: But anyway, I wanted to come back at the end
Speaker 1: here to just briefly discuss a little bit about like
Speaker 1: what we might learn from idiophones. One interesting point that
Speaker 1: Robson makes in his Eon article is about language acquisition
Speaker 1: in infancy. You know, obviously idiophone type words are useful
Speaker 1: to speakers falling ages. Everybody uses them, But he wonders,
Speaker 1: you know, could they be especially useful when a baby
Speaker 1: is acquiring language for the first time, Like if certain
Speaker 1: sounds innately for some reason or another signal associations with
Speaker 1: certain images or tactile sensations or types of movement. Could
Speaker 1: it be that we instinctually use these associations to help
Speaker 1: young children learn language without realizing it. Like think about
Speaker 1: the ways that parents tend to say things when talking
Speaker 1: to young children, like teensy weensy instead of small. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to speak for at least some segment of
Speaker 1: the parents out there and say I never used the
Speaker 1: word eatsy weensy. Well, a lot of parents do, though.
Speaker 1: I mean, you hear that kind of thing, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean the whole Yeah, the whole topic of of for
Speaker 1: lack of a better word, cute talk is is very
Speaker 1: fascinating to me because I mean, I really I would
Speaker 1: like to come back and do we've touched on it before,
Speaker 1: talking about um a little bit about about talking cute.
Speaker 1: I think we did. It came up a little bit
Speaker 1: in the episode about whining whining. Yes, there's like there's
Speaker 1: sort of like an embedded language between parent and child,
Speaker 1: where like the parent uses like an elevated tone, like
Speaker 1: higher pitch terms and certain kinds of things when talking
Speaker 1: to a kid, and then the kid does it back
Speaker 1: when wanting attention from the parent. Right, Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: would like to come back and discuss this thing that
Speaker 1: I'm going through now, is experiencing like, uh, my child
Speaker 1: who's in first grade, Well, suddenly he'll need to talk
Speaker 1: in this cute voice, like he'll be using terms that
Speaker 1: are they're a little cute, see wootsie, you know, but
Speaker 1: but speaking in a way that we never spoke. We
Speaker 1: never spoke to him like that. We never spoke like
Speaker 1: cartoon characters. We didn't encourage him to speak like a
Speaker 1: cartoon character. And granted, you know, you can pick up
Speaker 1: all this stuff from your classmates, from TV shows, et cetera.
Speaker 1: There are so many different, uh, you know, ways you're
Speaker 1: getting information at this age. But but uh, I know
Speaker 1: there have been there, there have been papers written on
Speaker 1: like try trying to figure out exactly why uh kids
Speaker 1: about this age range why they do this, because it
Speaker 1: seems to be a pretty widespread thing. So that's one
Speaker 1: topic I would I would love to return to, if
Speaker 1: if only for my own sanity. Well, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it's clear that some of these types of terms
Speaker 1: that parents use in this qt C talk are sort
Speaker 1: of sound symbolic, right, their versions of ideophones some one
Speaker 1: way or another. Robson sites research by Mutsumi am I
Speaker 1: at Kio University in Japan and so Taro Kita at
Speaker 1: the University of Warwick and in the UK that UM
Speaker 1: one and two year olds quote when given a sound
Speaker 1: symbolic word, we're more likely to direct their attention at
Speaker 1: the appropriate object or movement, and also that sound symbolic
Speaker 1: words for things were easier for children of this age
Speaker 1: to remember, lay it or after they had learned. And
Speaker 1: then for a deeper dive, I guess I I'd recommend
Speaker 1: people go and read this article themselves, but I just
Speaker 1: wanted to mention he is sort of by talking about
Speaker 1: the question which is just a hypothesis at this point
Speaker 1: of whether sound symbolic types of words could have been
Speaker 1: there at the genesis of human language. About this question,
Speaker 1: we asked at the beginning, where did the first words
Speaker 1: come from? When there were no words, but you know
Speaker 1: that it existed before for things to derive from? The
Speaker 1: question is would words that inherently, for one reason or
Speaker 1: another evoke feelings and evoke sensations just by the sound
Speaker 1: of them? With those kinds of words form a bridge
Speaker 1: from humans with no language to the mostly arbitrary lexical
Speaker 1: languages that would come later. So like a very simple
Speaker 1: like survival basis, you could imagine like a like a
Speaker 1: kiky sound is attention, attention, and then a buba sound
Speaker 1: or whatever is calm down, it's chill, everything's good, like
Speaker 1: bay sically get into some of the theories about like
Speaker 1: the communication of laughter after being a way of of
Speaker 1: instantly saying, Oh, the thing that I thought was gonna
Speaker 1: kill us is not. It's not kiki, it's bubba after all. Ha. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean like that the first sounds or
Speaker 1: the first words could have been things that were like
Speaker 1: phonemes that create a certain sensation or sort of evoke
Speaker 1: a certain kind of image or feeling. And that later
Speaker 1: on they have more fixed lexical definitions, and these sounds
Speaker 1: perhaps are like potentially like some of the first building
Speaker 1: blocks of of more powerful words and concepts, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's something that's booba. Booba is like it's
Speaker 1: super comforting and chill, and something that's kiki kikikiki is
Speaker 1: like three times is rough, or something that's bubba kiki
Speaker 1: is soft at first but has like a hidden bar,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know. Obviously you can extrapolate from
Speaker 1: there and imagine like language language systems building up based
Speaker 1: on that. But the funny thing is, of course, I mean,
Speaker 1: we have no idea is actually correct about this being
Speaker 1: the origins of of language. But if that were in
Speaker 1: some way true, the funny thing is we don't like
Speaker 1: run out of uses for these types of words as
Speaker 1: we get lexical languages. These words just continue to be
Speaker 1: as useful as they ever were, were more and more
Speaker 1: useful all the time. I just thought of a great
Speaker 1: one in English. It I I there's no ikey sound
Speaker 1: that ikey is mimicking, and yet ikey is like a
Speaker 1: deeply evocative word that conjures a feeling. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: then is the word moist. You know, that's a common
Speaker 1: common topic of discussion. They're like, why do people have
Speaker 1: a like a visceral reaction to that word. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but we just lost a lot of listeners. Well it's
Speaker 1: just as well because we're at the end of the episode.
Speaker 1: We're going to wrap it up there. But again, this
Speaker 1: is something we could come back to in the future.
Speaker 1: There's plenty more to discuss about about the you know,
Speaker 1: the potential origins of language and just how language works. UH.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you want to check out other
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