0:03

Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from

0:05

how Stuff Works dot com.

0:12

Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name

0:14

is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,

0:17

and today I want to start with a question.

0:19

This is gonna be one of those questions where you gaze

0:21

deep into your own belly, and if

0:23

you ask it out loud, you might annoy certain

0:26

people around you. But I promise you it's

0:28

actually interesting once you give it serious

0:30

thought. And the question is

0:32

is you take a look at your hand and

0:34

you think, why the heck is this call to

0:36

hand? Think about

0:38

the sounds you make with your mouth

0:41

when you say the word hand, or

0:44

the marks you make on a page when you spell

0:46

the word, or even or in say like

0:48

American Sign language or another sign language,

0:50

the gestures you would make to signal the concept

0:53

of a hand. Somehow, those

0:55

sounds you make with your mouth, or the marks you

0:57

make on the page, or the gestures cause other

1:00

people's brains to call up the

1:02

concept of one of these five legged

1:04

meat spiders that's attached to the end of our

1:06

wrists. And in fact, I often

1:09

think about this, that one of the really creepy

1:12

and astonishing things that we usually

1:14

just forget to notice about

1:16

ourselves and our bodies and our brains. And the

1:18

power of language is that in most cases,

1:21

you are completely powerless

1:24

to resist the conjuring power

1:26

of a word. You ever think

1:28

about this, like, unless you have some kind of unusual

1:30

neurological condition, If

1:32

you understand the language I'm speaking, and

1:35

I say a giant crocodile

1:37

crawling up the side of the Eiffel Tower with

1:39

a bouquet of roses in its mouth, you

1:42

will have no choice but to envision

1:44

or at least understand the concept of what

1:46

I just said. Words have so much

1:49

power over your brain that most people, most

1:51

of the time can't even turn

1:53

off their understanding of them if they

1:55

want to. We live in a world where

1:57

like, particular patterns of mouth,

2:00

sounds, and marks on a page are

2:02

literally a way of controlling the contents

2:04

of somebody else's mind. Yeah,

2:07

which were which? When you think of it that way,

2:09

it makes total sense that some people

2:11

are like, hey, I would prefer you not use a bunch of vulgar

2:13

language around me, you know, um

2:16

would, which I have always found it sometimes

2:18

weird, And say an office environment where uh,

2:21

you know, certain individuals will feel like, you know, they

2:23

need to use a lot of vulgarity when they're talking.

2:25

But you're really in many times taking like

2:27

particularly vulgar images,

2:30

and you were forcing them into everybody's mind around

2:32

you, and it's perfectly

2:35

reasonable to say no, thank you. Yeah.

2:37

I'm of two minds about this. I mean, on one hand,

2:39

I I do definitely have a strong sort

2:41

of innate anti censorship streak. But

2:43

then on the other hand, I recognize

2:45

that, like, yeah, anybody who says,

2:47

like, what's the big deal is just words?

2:50

That is really underselling the power of

2:52

words. Words are like one of the most

2:54

powerful things in the universe.

2:57

Yeah, But to think about like just the

2:59

casual way that that that you

3:01

can summon uh imagery

3:04

with the word uh. You brought up hand

3:06

And I was thinking, all right, what does some other kind of tape Like I

3:08

basically tried to understand

3:10

the idea by breaking the idea, Like, what's another

3:13

important concept or notable concept

3:15

to me involving hand or something? You know? And

3:17

uh, I thought, Okay, but we have the movie

3:19

Dark City where you have the

3:22

character of Mr. Hand that's Richard O'Brien.

3:24

Yeah, yeah, plays one of the strangers but

3:26

but now that I think about it, like, that's

3:29

a great example of how you can just call this

3:31

character Mr. Hand and

3:34

in thinking about him looking at him, you also

3:36

end up contemplating what a

3:38

hand is and what a hand does in

3:41

the form of the hand, and kind of melding

3:43

it with the idea of a shadowy individual.

3:46

Absolutely, and this is why, you know, metaphors

3:48

and poetry and everything are so powerful. It's

3:50

like you when you use one word

3:52

to describe a thing that it doesn't isn't

3:55

directly assigned for you.

3:57

You cause all this kind of like cross linking within

3:59

the brain that is often very evocative and

4:01

exciting. Yeah, Like if

4:03

you say, introduced a character in a work and his

4:05

name was Dr Chainsaw, Right that way

4:08

that that brings there is a number of

4:11

conflicts arise, and I can't

4:13

help it. Then try and imagine who Dr

4:15

Chainsaw is. That's funny. But what you

4:17

say, I think is more thoughtful and profound

4:19

than than you might realize at first glance.

4:21

Well, we'll think about this more as we go. Okay, So

4:24

a lot of times when we ask this question, like why

4:26

do we call a hand a hand? Why is

4:29

that the sound we make with our mouths, or the you know,

4:31

H, A and D, the marks on a page. Where

4:33

does that word come from? We're usually

4:35

asking a historical question that can

4:37

have a relatively straightforward answer.

4:40

Right. This is the domain of etymologies,

4:42

and we do this all the time on the show. Right. We talk

4:44

about some concept or some character from

4:47

myth and legend, and we break down what their

4:49

name means, where it comes from, right,

4:51

and you. You can do this with most words, like you

4:54

can trace it back through older versions

4:56

of languages. One example we've

4:58

mentioned on the show before that I really enjoy is

5:00

how obsolete scientific hypotheses

5:03

that are we know aren't true anymore, or sometimes

5:05

still included in our language.

5:07

The words we use for things. Take

5:09

the English word malaria. I mean, you

5:11

know, this is a word for a certain disease is caused

5:14

by a protozoan parasite. But malaria

5:16

comes from the Italian words mal

5:19

and area, meaning bad air. So

5:21

the name we use for this disease incorporates

5:24

miasthma theory, which proposed

5:27

that diseases were caused by exposure

5:29

to foul smelling vapors that emanated

5:31

from the Earth, or from planets, or from

5:33

things like rotting carrion. Did we do an

5:35

episode of miasma theory? Oh, yeah, we did.

5:37

Yeah, it was earlier. I think

5:39

maybe it was last year. Uh. And

5:42

we talked in the episode about how the word

5:44

malaria, so it reflects miasma

5:46

theory, this incorrect understanding of where

5:48

diseases come from from before germ

5:51

theory took hold. And the fact that even

5:53

the French physician Charles Louis

5:55

Alfonse lover On, who discovered

5:57

the fact that malaria was caused by a parasitic

6:00

organism in the blood, he hated the word malaria.

6:02

He didn't like that because he considered

6:04

it unscientific. So instead he recommended

6:07

the term uh palladisma,

6:09

which essentially means like marsh

6:11

or swamp fever or swamp disease,

6:14

and this is still the French word for the disease.

6:17

So anyway, many words can be tracked back

6:19

through the history of evolving languages like

6:21

this, and in fact pretty much all words can.

6:24

But you can only follow this trail so

6:26

far because if you go back far enough, you

6:29

run out of ways to track words

6:32

as straightforward cases of evolving

6:34

species or adoption from other languages,

6:37

like at some point words had

6:39

to be created for things and concepts

6:41

that had no explicit word before

6:44

and no analogies to draw from,

6:47

so that once you get back to like the initial

6:49

case, you have to wonder, how did this happen?

6:51

How is a word born? And does

6:54

a word inherently mean anything?

6:56

Why did the speakers of the earliest

6:58

words pick one set of mouth

7:00

sounds for hand and a different

7:03

set of mouth sounds for tree and

7:05

a different set of mouth sounds for mother. What

7:07

do these sounds mean anything? And if

7:09

they do mean anything, what do they mean interesting?

7:12

So, I mean we're kind of dealing with some of the

7:15

same properties that we've discussed

7:17

on the show, and that we were regarding,

7:20

say the evolution of Chinese characters,

7:23

where they in their very primitive

7:25

origins they were essentially

7:28

tiny pictures of what you were

7:30

talking about, uh And

7:32

then as they evolved they become more

7:34

eleguent in design, more abstract,

7:37

uh not, and then sometimes it's abstract

7:39

and meaning as well. But but certainly

7:41

they no longer look exactly like the thing, like

7:44

the word for, you know, for a person

7:47

is no longer looks like a tiny person that sort

7:49

of thing. So we might be we're particially

7:51

talking about the same thing with words

7:53

themselves, Like how if you trace

7:55

it back far enough, do you have simply a

7:58

word is a sound for a thing. It's not even a

8:00

word yet, it's just the sound for the

8:02

thing. And then how did we get that sound?

8:04

How did you decide that that is the

8:06

sound for that thing. Yeah, it's a fascinating

8:09

question, and I want to go ahead and say we're not

8:11

going to answer this question today. I mean their

8:13

whole this is a whole field of study

8:15

about the origins of language, where it came from.

8:17

You know, we could write whole books on the subject, and I

8:20

am sure we will revisit this in the future.

8:22

But we wanted to look at one specific

8:24

strange class of word today

8:27

and and some some lighted sheds on

8:29

what words are and how

8:31

we how we use language. So

8:33

a minute ago we asked that idea of like do

8:36

sounds inherently mean anything

8:38

in in the a lexigraphic sense? And one

8:40

of the key ideas of modern linguistic

8:42

theory is that the answer

8:44

to that question is no. That the signs

8:47

we use to refer to concepts, so

8:49

like the sounds you make with your mouth, or

8:52

the markings you make on a page when you're indicating

8:54

a concept like hand or mother or

8:56

something like that. These signs are arbitrary.

8:59

They do not have inherent meaning, and

9:01

they're arbitrarily associated with

9:04

the concepts they call to mind. So to quote

9:06

from the Swiss semiotician and linguist

9:08

Ferdinand de Sajur, who

9:10

is often cited as like the founder of the modern

9:12

study of linguistics, quote, the

9:15

bond between the signifier and the

9:17

signified is arbitrary.

9:19

Since I mean by sign the whole

9:21

that results from the associating of the

9:23

signifier with the signified, I

9:26

can simply say the linguistic sign

9:28

is arbitrary. The idea

9:30

of sister is not linked

9:32

by any inner relationship to the

9:35

succession of sounds.

9:37

Uh. And then he spells out the French

9:39

for sister sir, which

9:41

serves as its signifier in French. That

9:44

it could be represented equally by just

9:46

any other sequence is proved by

9:49

differences among languages and

9:51

by the very existence of different

9:53

languages. The signified OX

9:55

has as its signifier Boff

9:58

on one side of the border is in the French

10:00

Frox is boff and OX

10:03

on the other. And so we know, like

10:06

we know today that to some extent

10:08

what as here says here

10:11

must be true, right, at least to some extent,

10:13

because of course, words are not fixed

10:16

in sound or in visual notation.

10:18

Words evolve over time where it's come

10:20

to mean different things. They come to be pronounced

10:23

differently, often in multiple stages that

10:25

we can track through history. Right. I mean a recent

10:27

example of this on our show, trying to figure

10:29

out what puppy meant a form

10:32

of insult in in in ages

10:34

prior Oh yeah, we're apparently Isaac Newton

10:36

called this guy he was harassing a puppy. Were

10:38

like, what the heck does that mean? But apparently it means

10:40

like a fop Like it's

10:43

the same word basically means the same

10:45

thing, except in certain contexts,

10:47

and then that has changed over time. But those

10:49

those minor differences we can acknowledge

10:52

between, say like early modern English

10:54

and the English of today, can become radical

10:56

differences over longer periods of time.

10:59

But might say, well, wait a minute, doesn't

11:01

the widespread literacy of the world

11:04

and the printing press changed all this. Aren't

11:06

words fixed once they're in print, obviously,

11:09

They're not like just read a play

11:11

of Shakespeare or something else from the early modern

11:13

period, and compare that to the language

11:16

of modern English. This is just a few hundred years ago.

11:18

This is not that long ago. But you'll find tons

11:21

of words that have changed in meaning,

11:23

spelling, connotation, or have simply

11:25

disappeared from everyday use. If

11:28

you doubt this, I will bet you forty

11:30

ferkins of post it and barm on it. Yeah.

11:33

Or just try and read say the

11:35

obbit yeah, to to

11:38

to to a child, and you're gonna run across

11:40

certain words where it's like, oh, well this just meant

11:42

uh that you know,

11:44

now, this is a slur word, but in

11:46

its original context that Tolkien was using,

11:48

he's talking about a bundle of sticks. Another

11:50

writer might be using the word and they're talking

11:52

about a cigarette or something. So

11:55

that the words can change sometimes for

11:57

the worst. Oh, that's absolutely true.

11:59

In fact, I was just thinking about this.

12:02

Even happens, you know, with with letters. Have you

12:04

ever read the early seventeenth century

12:06

poem The Flee by John Dunn,

12:08

who it's probably

12:10

been a long time, you know done. Was a great

12:13

poet. I mean he wrote great like devotional

12:15

poetry, but he also wrote like seduction poetry.

12:18

The flea is just absolutely

12:20

nasty it's a poem where he's essentially

12:23

begging for sex by making

12:25

this questionable recourse to the

12:27

idea that if a flea bites

12:29

two different people, they've basically slept

12:32

together already, and so

12:34

they might as well not resist any temptation.

12:37

He says, quote Mark, but this flee

12:39

and Mark, in this how little that which

12:42

thou deniest me is it sucked

12:44

me first and now sucks thee

12:46

And in this flee our two bloods mingled

12:48

be Yeah, he's he's really stretching, I think

12:50

with that one. Yeah, what a creep. But then

12:53

it's even funnier if you read it in older

12:55

printed versions where s is

12:58

making the s sound don't look like

13:00

they do today. Back then they looked like

13:02

a modern lower case F. So so

13:04

this would have impacted the words suck

13:07

or sucked. Yes, it would have become a much

13:09

more by modern standings vulgar

13:12

term. That this is already I think, a pretty

13:14

nasty poem. It just gets a slight nastiness

13:16

upgrade. But then, in the same way that concepts

13:18

are described by different words across time, obviously

13:21

they're also described by different words at the

13:23

same time between different languages. So the

13:26

Basque word for hand is

13:28

escua, and the Melee word

13:30

for hand is tongue gun and

13:32

so forth. So obviously the concept of

13:34

hand is in no way intrinsically

13:37

linked to the English H sound or

13:39

the D consonant or anything like

13:41

that. This does seem to be truly arbitrary,

13:44

and part of that is that the hand does not make

13:46

a sound. You know. Well

13:48

it can of course, but yeah, it doesn't inherently

13:50

make a sound. And that's a good thing to

13:52

point out, because while I think it's it's

13:54

pretty much inarguable that that sazure

13:57

is correct in many cases that, like most

13:59

word in most languages, don't

14:02

have any inherent link between the sound you

14:04

make with your mouth and what the word means. There

14:06

were some words that inarguably do How

14:09

about the word cockadoodle do? Oh,

14:11

yeah, this is a great one. Uh. This is always

14:13

a fun exercise anytime you travel

14:16

somewhere where they speak

14:18

a different language, or even if they speak

14:20

just a variant of your own language,

14:22

asked them what sound a rooster makes,

14:24

and the uh, it's always

14:26

going to be some variation of the same sound,

14:28

but at times with surprising

14:30

variety, and exactly how that sound

14:33

is realized in language. Oh yeah,

14:35

I love this, like it looking at different languages

14:37

words for like what a dog does,

14:40

Like the dog doesn't bark in every language,

14:43

but in pretty much every language. Whatever word

14:45

they've got for what a dog sound is, you

14:47

can hear it. You're like, oh, yeah, that that's what a dog

14:49

sounds like. Yeah. David Saderis has a

14:51

fun bit where he talks about this, and I believe

14:53

it was a Christmas essay called

14:56

six Day Black Men about it

14:59

mainly dealing with variations in the

15:01

Santa Claus tradition, the title

15:03

referring to certain European

15:05

traditions in which Santa is attended by

15:08

by personal slaves with black skin.

15:11

But he also talks a little bit about, you know, variations

15:13

in how people say what

15:16

the rooster says. Man, it is shocking

15:19

how disturbing some of those Santa traditions

15:21

are. Oh yeah, it gets dark, but it is.

15:23

It's the holidays, you know. I guess it's supposed

15:26

to be dark and weird. But I

15:28

got another word for you, one of my favorites. PLoP.

15:30

Oh, PLoP, that's a good one. It's the sound

15:32

that a drop makes when it hits another body.

15:35

Of water. So if you drop falls into a bucket,

15:37

it plumps. So I was thinking it's also the sound

15:39

of a cat throwing up on the hardwoods.

15:41

That's probably the context I encounter

15:43

more often. Like you hear that PLoP, you

15:46

know you're cleaning up something, Well, you'd think it

15:48

would be like a splat, but no, it is a very polite

15:50

sounding kind of PLoP, which belies

15:52

how gross it's going to be. But

15:54

yeah. So these are known as onomatopeia

15:57

in English, the words that make a sound

15:59

that's close to the sound of the concept

16:02

being named. Uh so, like the

16:04

noun naming a rooster's called the cockadoodle

16:06

do obviously is meant to sound like the call itself.

16:08

Same thing with plot, it's meant to sound like with the

16:10

concept you're talking about. And

16:13

you know, automotopia for some reason or just

16:15

great fun to say. Usually I

16:17

love like glug, that's a glug

16:20

glug hiss, that's

16:22

an automotopia. Quack oink,

16:24

squeak toot toot is a fun

16:27

one, yeah, kind of yeah, burp

16:29

is perhaps one as well. What do you think about

16:32

Yeah, I think that could be an automotopia. Yeah,

16:34

now I think some of these could probably be false

16:36

on amotopia, where uh,

16:38

I don't know, I sure, but if you like looked up the

16:40

etymology, you could find that they're derived

16:42

from some other word in history that doesn't

16:45

actually sounds. It's just a coincidence. But

16:47

a lot of them clearly are on Amotopia,

16:49

like they're the word comes from the sound. The

16:51

thing makes I wonder about the How

16:53

about the sounds that are the words that

16:56

flash on the screen when Batman punches somebody?

16:58

Yeah, you know, are those uh what

17:00

we talk about? Is that a case of automatopeia? Biffe,

17:04

biff, biff, etcetera. How

17:07

about plink plunk, ploop, PLoP,

17:10

slash, splash, Yeah, those

17:12

are those? Are those all seem pretty solid? I noticed

17:14

how a lot of English on a moatopia. Maybe

17:16

this is just because they're the words I could think of, but

17:18

it seems to me like a lot of them are sounds

17:20

for sounds that animals make,

17:23

or words for what water does or

17:25

what happens in water. Another

17:27

one great one is twinkle. Wait

17:30

a minute, did you catch

17:32

me there? It's a trick? I think, did

17:34

you notice that twinkle? And when

17:36

I very first said it did you think, yeah, that's a

17:38

good one too. I probably would have thought

17:40

that that's a good on a mootopeia. Pale

17:43

stars twinkle in the night sky. What do you

17:45

hear when you envision

17:48

that sentence. I hear a twinkling. Yeah, I

17:50

I picture stars

17:52

twinkling, almost in a cinematic sense,

17:54

like twinkling more than they actually appear

17:57

to twinkle in the night sky. But there's

17:59

a little almost on a bell sound that

18:01

goes with the word, don't you think, uh?

18:04

Like I think about when William Wordsworth

18:06

rights continuous as the stars

18:08

that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way.

18:11

Of course he's he's talking about flowers. He's talking

18:13

about daffodils, and he's comparing

18:15

them to stars by the way they move back

18:17

and forth in the breeze. He says, ten

18:19

thousand I saw at a glance tossing

18:22

their heads in sprightly dance. Here's

18:24

another one you might have heard before, Twinkle

18:26

twinkle, little star that

18:28

you have. That's another another famous version, which, by

18:31

the way, here's a mind blower for at least some

18:33

listeners out there. I didn't, you know, I didn't

18:35

realize until the last couple of years that it's

18:38

the same song as the ABC song with

18:40

just different lyrics. Try that out

18:42

for size. I gotta pick my jaw up

18:44

off the ground. I don't think I've ever

18:46

heard of that. I never know one ever made. I never made

18:49

that connection before. But then I'm like, oh, yeah,

18:51

yeah, if you yeah, that's exactly the same

18:53

song. Did you know that London Bridge

18:55

is Falling Down is the same tune as

18:58

that classic old English full crime,

19:00

Happy, Happy Halloween, Halloween Halloween

19:03

silver Shamrock. Yes, there

19:05

there is that. You

19:07

know. One that's a less conventional use of

19:09

twinkle that I really like is in Walt

19:12

Whitman. He's got a poem about a shuttering

19:14

locomotive. I think it's called Like to a Locomotive

19:16

in Winter, where he says thy knitted frame,

19:19

thy springs in valves, the tremulous

19:21

twinkle of thy wheels. But

19:23

the weirdness is twinkle feels

19:26

like an automotopia to me, it

19:29

feels exactly like PLoP or

19:31

or ploop or quack. But

19:33

it's not an ont amotopeia. I mean,

19:36

we know that, like the stars don't make a

19:38

sound, but part of me rebels. Of course, twinkles

19:40

an automotopea. It really feels like one

19:42

twinkle twinkle is the sound that stars

19:44

make when their brightness fluctuates. And

19:47

of course that isn't true, but I I just

19:49

know it's true, even though it's

19:51

not that stars don't make a sound,

19:54

and yet that's the sound they make. And

19:56

I believe the sense of the false on amotopeia

19:58

of twinkle is even sort of suggested

20:01

in the way the word is used in some rhymed

20:03

poetry, like writers seem

20:05

to sense a deeper parallel between

20:08

twinkle and a true on amotopia

20:10

word, like in ed garlan pose

20:12

poem The Bells. Oh that's a great one.

20:14

Do you want to read it? Oh? Sure? Here

20:16

the sledges with the bells, silver bells, what

20:19

a world of merriment. Their melody fore tells

20:21

how they twinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy

20:23

air of night, while the stars that oversprinkle

20:26

all the heavens seemed to twinkle with a crystalline

20:28

delight. So yeah, tinkle is like

20:30

the anomotopia of the bells. But

20:32

then the stars also twinkle, as

20:35

if that's like the same thing. Fun

20:37

fact. Folk singer phil oaks Uh

20:40

it was one of probably many people to set pose

20:42

poem to music. Oh, I don't think I've heard

20:44

the fun little folk song. What a world

20:46

of merriment their melody foretells,

20:49

you know, it's a fun little tune. Cool to

20:51

look that up. But anyway, I like the idea

20:53

here that if a word is, like we were talking

20:55

about earlier, like a form of mind control,

20:57

it's a way of just with without

21:00

a person's consent, controlling the contents

21:02

of their brain. Twinkle is

21:05

a form of mind control that drives

21:07

us to believe. In a contradiction, the

21:09

word is like an automatopeic simulacrum.

21:12

It's an attempt to copy a thing that does

21:14

not exist, the sound of a bright

21:17

light varying in intensity.

21:19

And I just wonder why do we feel this

21:21

so deeply? I mean, maybe everybody else doesn't

21:23

feel it as strongly as I do, but I feel like this is

21:26

probably a common sensation. Yeah, I'm

21:28

trying to think of any that that resonate particularly

21:30

strongly with me. I guess sometimes

21:32

there's a very strong word for like

21:35

various facial

21:37

expressions, you know, And we feel facial

21:39

expressions very strongly because they are,

21:42

you know, non verbal forms of communication.

21:45

Like, for instance, I don't know that this may

21:47

not hold up when we start tearing it apart

21:49

here, But for someone to gawk at something,

21:51

yeah, it's not like the face makes a sound

21:54

the sound gawk. But if you were to make that argument

21:56

for me, you know, like that this is a sound like it.

21:58

It almost feels like a sound sound in the mind

22:01

if you're seeing somebody that is visibly

22:03

gawking at something. Yes, it's a word

22:05

that doesn't just have a lexical definition

22:08

that you understand, but it has

22:11

it has like a sensory force.

22:13

It delivers a sensory feeling

22:16

by saying the word. Now, I'm just this

22:18

is just coming off the top of my head. So I'm sure

22:20

later if I when I look up gawk, I

22:23

can you know you'll be able to tease a part the history

22:25

of the word and where it comes from and what

22:27

it's a linguistic origins

22:30

are well. As we said earlier, I mean, it's possible

22:32

for there to be like false on amunopeas

22:34

where something you would think is just copying

22:37

the sound of something, but actually you can show where

22:39

it derives from other words in a language

22:41

that maybe don't even originally sound so much like the

22:43

thing. But anyway, So one answer

22:45

as to why we feel these kind of connections

22:48

between like the feeling or sound

22:50

of a word and a concept that is

22:52

not actually a sound or does not sound

22:55

like the concept um one. One

22:57

answer would simply be that we're culturally conditioned

22:59

to feel the strange kind of synesthesia

23:01

with the meaning of a word, simply because

23:03

we know what the word means, We've learned it, we've

23:06

learned to think of it this way, and it's just conditioning,

23:08

right. But the answer also might

23:10

not be that simple, And I think maybe we should

23:13

take a break and then come back and look at

23:15

some words in other languages. Alright,

23:19

we're back. So I was inspired

23:21

to talk about this today in in this episode

23:24

by an article that I read an Eon magazine

23:26

by a writer named David Robson. And

23:28

in this article, Robson begins this article

23:31

with a list of Japanese words

23:33

and then asks non Japanese speaking

23:36

readers to guess what they mean. And given a couple

23:38

of like antonymic options, you know a

23:41

word and its opposite. So if you do

23:43

not speak Japanese, consider

23:45

the following word nuru nuru.

23:48

Okay, I'm sorry if I'm not saying that exactly

23:51

right, But it's something like that. Nuru nuru Does

23:54

that word mean dry

23:56

or slimy? Um?

23:59

It sounds slimy to Yeah, It sounds

24:01

slimy to me too, and in fact, that

24:03

is what it means. Here's another Japanese

24:05

word, waku. Waku? Does

24:08

that mean excited or bored?

24:11

That sounds excited to me? It sounds excited

24:13

to me too. Here's another one, pika.

24:15

Pika Does that mean

24:18

dull or sparkly? That

24:20

sounds sparkly. It also sounds sparkly

24:22

to me, and we're We're correct in all three cases.

24:25

Those are the real meanings. And if,

24:27

like us, you do not speak Japanese

24:30

and yet you can correctly guess

24:32

the meanings of those words, you're not

24:34

alone. According to a sixteen

24:36

study by in the psychology journal

24:38

Collabora by Lockwood, at all, almost

24:41

three quarters of Dutch participants

24:43

were able to correctly identify the

24:45

meanings of these words without knowing

24:47

them. But how is it possible if

24:49

you don't speak a language to know

24:52

what words in a language mean When

24:54

they're not words for things with sounds,

24:56

they're not on amount of pea. It's not like moo or

24:58

something. Right, these are cases

25:00

where it's coming down more too. I

25:03

mean the obvious point being

25:05

the case sounds right, those sharp

25:07

ks which sound and

25:09

it's hard to even put that in words. Why but they

25:11

sound pointy. Yeah, yeah, they sound

25:14

pointy. They sound sparkly

25:16

bright somehow. Uh, And

25:18

that this is not just our opinion. Well, we'll

25:20

come back in cite some evidence

25:22

about this in a minute. But anyway, Robson

25:25

cites these as examples of words

25:27

that are known as idiophones, and

25:29

these are words that are the way I would

25:32

try to describe it, though this is a concept

25:34

that can be kind of hard to define as well discuss

25:36

as we go on. But their words

25:38

that are kind of like on a mootopia,

25:40

but there's no original sound that

25:43

they're copying. Instead, they're described

25:45

by by Lockwood and co authors as quote

25:48

sound symbolic words, and

25:50

I think this is a common way

25:52

of describing them in the in the scientific literature.

25:55

And what that means is that by the sound

25:57

of the word, they tend to strong

26:00

evoke a sensation like

26:02

a site or a tactile feeling.

26:05

And you don't need to know the language

26:07

or know the word already to understand

26:10

what that feeling is supposed to be, or at

26:12

least get close to what that feeling is supposed

26:14

to be. You've never heard the word nuru

26:17

nuru before, but it definitely

26:19

sounds more slimy to you than

26:21

it sounds like dry or something else.

26:24

And they're There are different kinds of ideophones in

26:26

different languages. Some languages are much richer

26:28

in them than other languages are. But like

26:31

Japanese is an example of a language, there's

26:33

a good number of ideophones and uh.

26:35

Willem Lockwood, one of the authors of

26:38

that paper I cited a second a second ago

26:40

in a blog post, writes that these

26:42

these words create a very vivid

26:45

image or this this strong

26:47

feeling that normal lexical words

26:50

just don't quote. When a Japanese

26:52

person hears the word kira kira

26:55

meaning sparkly, it is like they

26:57

can actually see the thing that is

26:59

spark Really. How sound symbolism

27:02

works, however, is not quite clear, and

27:04

there have not yet been many neuroscience studies

27:06

on it, but the research so far suggests

27:09

that hearing sound symbolic words

27:11

might involve other forms of sensory

27:13

perception in a similar way to

27:15

how people with synesthesia associate

27:18

colors with letters. Interesting,

27:21

but you can probably already tell just from us talking

27:23

so far, that this idea of the sound

27:25

symbolic word is kind of difficult

27:28

to pin down exactly. It's gonna

27:30

involve like related concepts across

27:32

different languages, because different languages have

27:34

different qualities that can be used to evoke

27:37

these things. You know, this or this reminds

27:39

me of of you know, I've

27:41

read before about how you know, k sounds either

27:44

hard case or soft cash or

27:46

even um, even like the sound

27:49

of of cheese. How these are

27:51

inherently funny sounds, you

27:54

know. But but then

27:56

again, you know, we're thinking of like like sparkly

27:58

excitement, Like those are also kind of the signifiers

28:01

of of things that are funny, right,

28:03

Uh, They're not dull, they're exciting, They're evocative

28:06

in some form or another. Yeah, but it's

28:08

really hard to really tease out

28:10

exactly why. Well, to be very

28:12

clear, we don't want to suggest that all

28:15

words are idiophonic, because

28:17

I think it's totally clear that probably most

28:20

words in most languages are actually

28:22

arbitrary signs and the sound has nothing

28:24

to do with what they mean. And a word like clown

28:26

is potentially funny because the concept of

28:28

the clown is funny. She's itself

28:31

is inherently funny. I mean, if you had no

28:34

word for what this was, it's still like this

28:36

soft, smushy thing that has a distinctive

28:38

odor to it, but it is also delicious. We

28:41

screeze, we squeeze, goat utters and we

28:43

get the stuff out of it, and then we'd like boil

28:45

that and separated. It's basically a practical

28:48

joke of the gods as it is, so you

28:50

know, we can't help but laugh. But clearly, while

28:52

one of the interesting features of these ideas

28:55

of idiophonic words is that they

28:57

are somewhat detectable across language.

28:59

Different is like you don't necessarily have to

29:02

speak the language to understand what some

29:04

of them mean. There are

29:06

ways that languages are going to kind of change

29:08

the way they're used, right, Like you can think of like tonal

29:10

languages versus non tonal languages.

29:13

Yeah, I was, I was looking around at

29:15

some of the papers that because the thing is, when you start

29:18

looking at papers on idiophones, a number

29:20

of them are you know, they're they're they're focusing

29:22

on one particular language or a couple

29:24

of different languages, and so I

29:26

was looking around it some that that looked

29:29

at at ideophonic words

29:31

and say Mandarin. Not that

29:33

I speak Mandarin, but I've at least read about

29:35

it enough that I have like some you know,

29:37

base understanding of of of

29:39

what it is linguistically, and

29:42

uh, I did run across um. So

29:44

it's says from chen Zi Ming's uh

29:47

idiophonic words in Mandarin and

29:49

um. The author

29:52

points that there's perhaps some difficulty in settling

29:54

on a unified ideophone definition

29:56

that works across all languages quote or

29:58

even within a language. Uh,

30:00

they wrote, quote ideophones are

30:02

much likely to be proposed as different categories

30:05

under different names, in different in

30:07

terms of different criteria within

30:09

a certain language. Uh

30:12

So there is this kind of elusive nature

30:14

to to really like pinning it down,

30:17

you know, well, certainly to create any kind

30:19

of like unified definition of ideophone.

30:21

That's one of the senses I'm getting from this paper.

30:24

And other said I looked at I think the closest

30:26

I can find is that the uh,

30:28

the the sign of

30:30

the word itself, either the sound or the

30:33

markings on a page or whatever generates

30:35

a sensation other

30:38

than a sonic one. Okay,

30:40

Yeah, so that it could be like a tactile

30:43

feeling or the belief

30:45

that you're seeing something, or like just

30:47

an association with feelings

30:49

or images, or or maybe

30:51

even like smells or tastes or something.

30:54

And I think especially if that can be

30:56

detected by people who have never encountered

30:59

the word before in use and don't know

31:01

what it means in context. I got

31:03

another exercise for us to protect

31:05

us here to to figure this out. So, Robert, I've attached

31:07

a couple of images here. You may have seen this

31:09

experiment before, you may already know where we're going

31:11

with this, But um describe

31:14

these two images briefly. Okay.

31:16

One is like a sharp

31:19

pointed kind of sharooken shape, and

31:21

the other is, uh something looks

31:24

kind of like a splat, like

31:26

a cartoon splat, like a cartoon paintball

31:29

shape, also kind of reminiscent of, you

31:33

know, a bizarre clover. Yeah. Yeah, I'd

31:35

say that's a very good way of putting. An image on the left

31:37

is like kind of like a pointy star. Image

31:39

on the right sort of like a splatty

31:42

cloud. Now, let's say I give these

31:44

two images names. I'm not going to tell you which

31:46

is which, But one is named Molly and

31:48

one is named Kate. Which

31:50

is which. Well, if we're going to go back

31:53

to some of these ideas we've been dealing with, Kate

31:55

has that k sound, it's gonna be sharper,

31:57

it's going to be point here, and Molly

32:00

has that kind of I

32:03

mean, I'm maybe overthinking. That's kind

32:05

of the problem with this, right you started thinking about it too

32:07

much. You're not dealing with the direct um.

32:09

We're not coming at this clean. We've already been

32:11

talking about the what sounds feel like. But

32:14

I feel like pretty instinctively we would

32:16

say that Kate is the one with the sharp

32:18

angles and Molly is the one with

32:21

the rounded cloud edge, And a

32:23

large portion of people would actually agree

32:25

that this is the answer and it works not

32:27

just for those names. That's just one type of example,

32:29

but uh, this, this experiment has

32:31

been done giving them names like Kiki

32:34

and Buba. Oh yes, the Kiki Buba

32:37

and uh Takete and Maluma.

32:40

And in research that this has been multiple

32:42

experiments over the past century or so by like

32:44

Wolfgang Cohler vs. Rama Schandren

32:47

and others. Cola definitely sharpened

32:49

pointing well,

32:51

it's both kind of right because the K is

32:53

sharpened pointy, but the owl that

32:56

sounds like round to me, So

32:58

like, why this inherent? And this apparently

33:00

works in not all cases, but in

33:03

most cases that it's been tried across

33:05

language differences. So apparently

33:07

sharp angles sound like T N K,

33:10

and round clouds sound like M

33:12

and L and round vowels like oh.

33:15

And this isn't the only example. For some reason,

33:17

it just seems that across different cultures

33:19

and different languages were pretty

33:21

consistent, not always consistent, but

33:23

pretty consistent in associating

33:25

certain types of human mouth sounds

33:28

with particular non auditory

33:30

sensations like sites and geometric

33:33

angles and feelings and

33:35

so uh. To read a quote from Robson

33:38

here from his article, he's talking about a strain of linguistics

33:40

that's now taking idiophones more seriously

33:42

as a subject. Quote. Language

33:45

is embodied a process

33:47

that involves subtle feedback for both

33:49

listener and speaker between the

33:52

sound of a word, the vocal apparatus,

33:55

and our own experience of human physicality.

33:58

Taken together, this dynamic helps

34:00

to create a connection between certain sounds

34:02

and their attendant meanings. These

34:05

associations appear to be universal

34:07

across all human societies. Interesting,

34:09

So it sounded like when

34:12

we when we when we we're

34:14

trying to comprehend some of these, uh, these

34:16

sound words, like we're potentially

34:18

connecting in like like the

34:21

pre language verbal

34:23

communication skills of our species.

34:26

Yeah, it's quite possible, and we should

34:28

come back to that at the end of the episode. Um,

34:30

but yeah, there appears to be some kind of

34:32

primordial association that

34:35

somewhat transcends culture, that

34:37

associates certain mouth sounds with certain

34:40

types of sites or feelings.

34:42

And so we know one example now is that like

34:44

t s and k's look like sharp angles,

34:46

and and like bees, and m's and l's feel

34:49

like round, rounded edges. Here

34:52

some more, he Robson cites

34:54

the research of a guy named Diedrich Westerman

34:57

who found that across different languages in

34:59

Western Africa, the e sound

35:02

like in cheese or peak

35:04

or twinkle, was often associated

35:07

with concepts that were light, fine,

35:10

or bright, while the back vowels

35:12

in the mouth like walk or fast,

35:15

were associated with concepts of slowness,

35:18

heaviness, and darkness. And

35:21

so at the same time, there were associations with

35:24

consonants, right, not just the vowels consonants

35:26

like B and G, like but

35:29

and go were associated with heaviness

35:31

and softness, while voiceless

35:34

consonants like P and K, put and

35:36

cut were associated with harder

35:38

surfaces and lighter weight. And

35:40

just contemplating these again, we're

35:42

not coming at this clean. We're you know, having these

35:45

observations already color our thinking. But I totally

35:47

feel like this rings true with my feeling

35:50

of sound sensations, at least as an

35:52

English speaker. Like if we imagine

35:54

two totally new, made up words

35:56

for animals in a made up country. So we're we're going

35:58

to an island that's never been dis ever before, and

36:00

we're seeing some fauna there, uh

36:03

one piece. One piece of fauna

36:05

is a tiny yellow crab that runs

36:07

quickly across the sand. And

36:10

the other animal is a large, blubbery

36:12

semi aquatic mammal that looks kind of like a

36:15

hippopotamus. And the two names

36:17

for these creatures are Peaky

36:19

Kiki and Gubba Gubba. Which

36:22

one is which? Well, Gubba Gubba definitely

36:25

has to be that hippo creature for sure, exactly

36:27

but why because

36:29

it just sounds like a like if

36:33

yeah, it's it's it's just that's

36:35

that's the sound. Like to reverse

36:37

those names would be a cause for comedy

36:40

itself, wouldn't it right? I think it would.

36:42

Yeah, Like if the if the hippo was Peaky

36:44

Kiki and the and the crab

36:47

was Gubba Gubba, that would be funny. That would

36:49

almost seem like, well, that's absurd, why would

36:51

you call them that? Well, but the thing is once if you if

36:53

you establish them as such. I

36:55

I don't know, I might on some level find it

36:58

funny because those are funny word anyway,

37:00

shake it and then the idea of a crab

37:03

having a name is also inherently funny.

37:05

But I would I would probably just buy

37:08

it, Like I would begin to associate the

37:10

name, like the sound of the

37:12

name with perhaps the personality of the

37:14

creature. Like suddenly I go beyond thinking

37:17

like Gubba Gubba is just like this blubberry

37:20

animal, but maybe like Gubba Gubba

37:22

sums up the personality of this cartoon

37:24

crab that we're introducing, you know, like

37:27

it it's it's it's easy to again over

37:30

to overthink and overshoot, just the

37:32

sort of initial reaction that should be taking

37:34

place when we hear the sound. Yeah,

37:36

Now to bring it back to tonal languages

37:39

like like Mandarin Chinese of course as a tonal

37:41

language. Robson writes that Westerman

37:44

also discovered sound symbolic connotations

37:46

with the tones used in tonal languages,

37:48

so so it applies somewhat there too. For

37:50

example, even though English doesn't really

37:53

employ tonality the signal meaning, in

37:55

the languages that do that Westerman was studying,

37:57

you found a general trend that quote words

37:59

were representing slowness, dryness,

38:02

and heaviness tended to have lower

38:04

tones, and the meanwhile, things depicting

38:06

quote speed, agility, and brightness

38:09

were formed by higher tones. I

38:11

don't know if you have a general sense of

38:13

that in in your experience trying to speak

38:15

Chinese, But I can't say that I've progressed

38:18

enough to where I can really break that down now. Yeah, trying

38:20

to think of some good examples offhand. I'm sure

38:22

they'll come to me after the podcast,

38:24

though. So The question, of course, is what

38:27

explains these really common and

38:29

apparently often not always, but pretty

38:31

often cross linguistic associations.

38:34

And one idea is that there is some

38:36

sort of mental feedback that's

38:39

created by the sensation in the

38:41

body from making a sound. Right, So,

38:44

like with kiki and buba, one

38:46

idea would be, well, when you say buba,

38:48

you say oh, and the mouth

38:50

there makes a round shape,

38:53

and maybe we intuitively associate

38:55

the rounding of our lips with round

38:57

soft edges in an image as possible.

39:00

Right. Yeah. Another example here would

39:02

be um matching sensations

39:04

in the body in the case of things we do

39:06

with our noses that usually involve nasal

39:09

sounds. So U think

39:11

about like snort, sniff, sneeze,

39:14

snout, snore. You can't

39:16

say the end without the nose. Yeah,

39:19

okay, sorry, I keep I

39:21

keep running Mandarin words I

39:23

do know through my head, trying to figure

39:26

out like where they would fall. Like bow comes to mind,

39:28

you know, uh, certainly has

39:30

like a round soft consistency to it.

39:33

What does it mean though, it's you know, it's like the

39:35

food the bow, Oh, like a

39:37

bun Yeah, okay um, And

39:39

then you know other words like like like

39:41

bob depending on how you hit

39:44

it, totally

39:46

like that that can mean father, which doesn't

39:49

quite really fall into

39:51

what we're talking about here. And I'm trying,

39:53

I'm sort of hurting

39:55

my brain trying to think of some good, sharp sounding

39:58

words that aren't names. Uh,

40:00

But at any rate, Like again, I'm sure all this

40:02

will will come to me after we're done recording.

40:05

It's interesting how we start once we

40:07

are asked to observe this. You start looking

40:09

forward in all the words, even though we know that most

40:11

words are not idiophones, but

40:14

we still, like I start

40:16

seeing correlations there in all kinds

40:18

of words where it might just be you know, it

40:20

met me losing my mind here, but like, uh,

40:23

I start thinking about like, oh, what about all the

40:25

the the words that start with g

40:27

r, you know, you know, just like growl,

40:30

grunt, grown, Like what is

40:32

that that growl? Grunt, grown,

40:34

grumble? They all start with gr

40:36

which sort of like almost evokes this

40:39

kind of natural sense of something being

40:41

like a problem or a burden, and

40:43

the needed words like great. How

40:45

does that work? Yeah? So, I mean,

40:47

clearly, I think maybe the mind is going to places

40:50

where but where it's not quite fruitful.

40:52

But anyway, it's hard to really to

40:54

take a word and think about it without

40:56

the context of its meaning and

40:59

and how that meaning kind of you

41:01

know, dilutes through culture. But

41:04

anyway, I guess we should we should get back to the possible

41:06

explanations for why this. Another

41:08

one that Robson mentioned in this article is

41:11

just the idea that when some types

41:13

of ideophones occur there is a kind

41:15

of cross contamination between sensations

41:18

in brain regions. That this could be literal

41:20

just like cross linking or kind of

41:22

bleed over in the brain, right, a type

41:24

of synesthesia, And of course synaesthesia

41:27

is quote a neurological condition

41:29

in which stimulation of one sensory

41:31

or cognitive pathway, for example, hearing,

41:34

leads to automatic, involuntary

41:36

experiences in a second sensory

41:39

or cognitive pathway such as vision.

41:41

And that's a definition from psychology

41:43

today. But synesthesia is an interesting concept

41:46

in itself, like how come people associate

41:48

certain like letters

41:51

with colors, or like feelings

41:53

with with sounds or something that's

41:56

interesting because it's without having

41:58

experience synaesthie issha it

42:01

is. What's taking place in

42:03

the mind is um it

42:06

does feel like that kind of direct connection, you

42:08

know. Um. The the

42:11

difficulty in describing it kind of

42:13

seems to match up there well for me, almost

42:16

saying saying twinkle is like some

42:18

of the closest I get to sinis thesia,

42:21

because that's it's the

42:23

sound of star makes again. And the star

42:25

doesn't make a sound, but I can sort of hear it, and

42:27

it's the word twinkle. It's like saying, why is

42:29

this note purple? That sort

42:31

of thing? All right, well, on that note, we're gonna take one

42:33

more break and then we're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about this concept

42:35

a little bit more. Alright,

42:39

we're back. So I

42:41

was looking around for some commentary

42:43

on idea phones, and you know, I wanted

42:46

to see, like, well, what's an example of somebody's sort of

42:48

poopooing on idio phones to sort

42:50

of use in an idea And

42:53

I ran across an article by linguist Paul Newman

42:56

from Indiana University, and uh,

42:58

and he said the following quote, how

43:00

far ideophones deviate

43:02

from the normal systems will vary from language

43:04

to language, in some cases more, in some

43:07

languages less. But in the final analysis,

43:09

ideophones are part of the structure of a specific

43:11

language and have to be viewed in the context

43:14

of that language. Okay, So this is kind of against

43:16

the idea of like an overarching class

43:19

of ideophones and more like they're specific

43:21

to the languages where they occur. Yeah, I

43:23

mean he's not. I don't want to make

43:25

it sounding like he's completely poop poing on the idea, but like

43:27

basically what he's he's maybe recommending

43:30

caution and like over analyzing

43:33

their importance. I guess you would say. For instance,

43:35

he points out that ideophones are extremely important

43:37

and certain certain African languages as well

43:39

as Asian and Native American languages, but

43:42

he argues that in focusing on what's different

43:44

about ideophones, he thinks that scholars

43:46

tend to overlook quote the simple notion

43:48

that to a great extent, idiophones

43:51

are part and parcel of whatever

43:53

language they belong to. So again

43:55

he's not, you know, saying I

43:57

don't believe in ideophones, but he's may

43:59

he's questioning maybe to what, you know,

44:01

what amount of emphasis is is appropriate?

44:05

Uh? And in looking around for other tidbits on the

44:07

topic, I ran across a very interesting paper

44:09

by Gary Lupin and

44:12

Daniel Casisanto in Language and Cognition

44:15

from two thousand fourteen titled Meaningless

44:17

Words Promote meaningful categorization.

44:19

Oh, I think I know where they're going at this, I like

44:22

this. Yeah. So the common

44:24

thread here is that we're talking about non arbitrary

44:26

word to meaning mappings. Okay,

44:28

so this would be back to kind of like new and newer,

44:31

like if people are detecting

44:33

an inherent sliminess about the

44:35

word just the sound of the word itself,

44:37

right, And so they start exploring this in the

44:39

context of just pure nonsense

44:42

words. And so they bring up the nonsense

44:44

words of one of the great nonsensical writers

44:47

of all time, and at least in terms

44:49

of some of his word choices, that being Lewis

44:51

Carroll. Oh yeah, the jabberwock Yes.

44:53

In fact, they quote the Jabberwocke

44:56

twas Brillig and the slivey

44:58

toves did guy Or and gimbal in

45:00

the wave. So there's

45:02

some great nonsense in there, But to just focus

45:05

on one in particular, slithy is

45:07

not a word and yet quote.

45:09

The nonsense words of Jabberwockie are made

45:11

meaningful by a combination of

45:14

phonological queuing and syntactic

45:17

and uh distributional information.

45:20

So slithy is used as an in

45:22

an adjective frame and has

45:24

phonological neighbors lithe

45:26

and slimy. Okay, So there are some

45:28

queues here, right, like the words

45:31

in the Jabberwockie. While they're not English

45:34

words, it's also not

45:36

just like pure sound from out of

45:38

nowhere, because they often are. They

45:41

sound a lot like other words

45:43

that we do know the meanings. Right. So it's kind

45:45

of this idea that like a new word

45:47

and nonsense word doesn't quite work

45:50

in isolation. And this from actually brings

45:52

back our squirrel episode

45:54

and sort of our uh really

45:56

are unearthing I guess of the term skug

45:59

we're actually ug was a proper name

46:01

for a squirrel, right. It was what Benjamin

46:04

Franklin, Uh, basically believed

46:06

that the people in England called their pet

46:08

squirrels. Like it's saying a bunch of scugs

46:10

would be two squirrels what it would be to

46:13

say like a bunch of rovers referring to

46:15

dogs. And so when

46:17

I started using it in my household just

46:19

as a general term for squirrels, uh,

46:22

my wife took issue with it.

46:24

It's like that sounds a little like dirty or something, you know.

46:26

It sounds like you're you're you're

46:29

using profanity against the squirrels. It sounds

46:31

like an insult. Or something, and so in cases

46:33

like that you have to realize, well, the word scug

46:35

does not exist in isolation. If

46:37

it sounds a little bit like this word or that word,

46:40

or even just certain sounds from other words, then

46:43

well it does incorporate ug. As if you're

46:45

going like ug, yes, yeah,

46:47

or I guess part of the appeal of scug

46:49

to me is like it also sounds like skull and

46:52

so much as that's tough. Yeah. So much of those episodes

46:54

dealt with how tough and uh

46:57

and how and how likely they are

46:59

to eat the intense of another animal skulp

47:01

that sort of thing. Not all of them,

47:04

not all. Anyway, back to this paper, they conducted

47:06

a lab experiment using the words food

47:08

and creelch. Crelch is grape

47:10

juice, it's my favorite brand, And they

47:13

apply these words to two distinct

47:15

alien species um that

47:17

they made up for the experiment, and ascid participants

47:20

to come up with real adjectives

47:22

to describe them. So they're basically saying, hey,

47:24

there's an alien known as the

47:26

crelch. Describe it. Come up with some adjectives

47:29

to describe what this creature looks like, or

47:31

you there, think about the foods and

47:34

so they ended up the

47:36

describing the creelches as pointy

47:39

and narrow. What do you know that's got a hard case

47:41

sound? And then guess what the foods

47:44

were shaped like, Well, there's an oo sounds

47:46

those rounded lips sort of front of the mouth,

47:48

long vowel, that makes me think of soft,

47:51

pillowy. Yeah, yeah, round and plump.

47:53

That's what they said, yeah, they and they

47:55

say quote. The results expand the scope

47:58

of research on sound symbolism and support a

48:00

non traditional view of word meaning, according

48:02

to which words do not have meanings

48:05

by virtue of a conventionalized

48:07

form meaning pairing. Rather, the meaning

48:09

of a word is the effect that the word

48:11

form has on the user users mental

48:14

activity, which I think a nice

48:16

way of summing up some of what we're talking about here,

48:18

like what does this word due to your mental activity?

48:20

Like what what additional

48:22

adjective is, what additional words is? It's summoning,

48:25

and what basic characteristics is it's summoning

48:27

into your mind? And then you're forced to piece together

48:29

like I can imagine very

48:32

faintly, like it's not a distinct picture, but

48:34

I without even reading any of the adjectives

48:36

listed in the paper, I kind of have an idea of what

48:38

the crouch looks like and what the food looks like

48:41

in a broader sense. You know what this makes me

48:43

think of? So I like the idea of what they're suggesting

48:45

here, that like words can have a

48:47

sort of like generalized

48:49

mental activity impact even if

48:51

they have no lexical definition. Uh,

48:55

it makes me think about the way that I don't

48:57

know if you remember, especially, I had this experience

48:59

all this time when I was a kid, of

49:02

finding jokes funny even

49:04

though I didn't get them. Oh, yeah,

49:07

you know about this, Like when you would

49:09

hear a joke that was like an adult joke that

49:12

had references to things in it that you didn't

49:14

understand. So a joke

49:16

is made by making sense of something,

49:18

but you don't get the sense, and yet it's funny

49:21

anyway. Sometimes it would be really

49:23

funny even though you didn't get it at

49:25

all. Oh. I would get this all the time watching

49:28

Mystery Science Theater thwo thousand as a kid, because

49:30

a lot of they were a lot of pop pop culture

49:32

references to shows

49:35

that I was maybe not quite old enough to have seen,

49:37

just because I wasn't watching television. Uh

49:40

as a child, you know, I wasn't watching television when Joe

49:42

Hodgson was watching television when he was my

49:44

age, that sort of thing. So I didn't necessarily

49:46

get the jokes, but I found them hilarious.

49:48

And to this day, there are still a

49:51

lot of the jokes I've I've researched or

49:53

come up to speed on. But occasionally I'll be rewatching

49:56

an old episode of MST and there'll

49:58

be a joke where I'm I'm laughing out loud, and

50:00

I still have no idea what the connection

50:02

is there. I'm right there with you. That happens sometimes

50:05

with MST especially, but it just happens.

50:07

Sometimes you don't get a joke,

50:10

but it's still involuntarily

50:12

triggers laughter. It's just funny,

50:14

and it's not even always like you could maybe

50:16

explain it, like what if it's just like social laughter,

50:19

like you're in a group other people are laughing,

50:21

but it I don't know. It happens to me when I'm like,

50:23

oh, by myself, there's nobody else there,

50:26

and it's funny. So yeah,

50:28

I think language has this power

50:30

of it has an effect on our brains,

50:33

even when we don't fully understand

50:35

the lexical or syntactic significance

50:37

of it and that's really interesting. Or

50:40

sometimes maybe we can only get vague hints

50:43

of the lexical significance, but it's

50:45

it's like it's having an impact

50:47

anyway. It's the same way that, um,

50:49

you know, you can listen to poetry in

50:51

another language and it can be great,

50:54

like you literally don't understand what they're talking

50:57

or you know, I think I can admit this, especially

50:59

since I've heard the Columbia linguists John

51:01

mcward admit this too, that like

51:04

most of the time, if I'm like, if

51:06

I'm listening to Shakespeare

51:08

performed, I'm not catching

51:10

the meaning of everything. I mean, like,

51:12

I don't know if you have this experience too,

51:14

Like I I sort of can basically

51:17

follow the action, but you know, like half

51:19

the lines go over my head and

51:22

I'm like, a way, you know, I couldn't follow

51:25

the sense for sense, meaning of every

51:27

statement made by a character in a Shakespeare

51:29

play because there's a lot of antiquated language

51:31

in it and sometimes like the the rhythm,

51:34

you know, the diambic pentameter or whatever,

51:36

the rhythm and stuff in the in the writing makes

51:39

for very sonically beautiful

51:41

writing that is creating

51:43

pleasurable feelings in my brain, but I'm

51:45

not always following the literal sense

51:48

of what is being said. Yeah, I would

51:50

always have that experience in college

51:52

taking Shakespeare classes, you'd end up, I feel

51:54

like I would end up having like two different

51:56

readings or two different viewings of the same play

51:59

or the same scene. There's the version

52:01

that you you take in before

52:03

you've done a deeper reading, and then you get in, you read

52:06

the text, you read all the footnotes about what

52:08

what this word means or

52:10

what it's referring to, or what it would have meant in

52:12

the context of the time, and then you're

52:14

left with this, you know, ultimately enriched understanding

52:17

of what the play is. But it is a slightly different

52:19

experience. Yeah, that is really

52:22

interesting. One thing that I think is really

52:24

funny that I mentioned that that comment

52:26

by John mcward, But I've heard him recommend

52:29

watching Shakespeare plays in

52:31

another language, like where where

52:33

somebody's gonna done a good translation

52:36

into another language of Shakespeare if

52:38

you speak that other language, like if you

52:40

speak Vietnamese and somebody's done a

52:42

good Vietnamese translation of Hamlet, watch

52:45

that He says that sometimes that can be

52:47

even better than watching Shakespeare in the

52:49

original English. How about watching

52:52

the German language episodes

52:55

of Monty Python. Have you ever done that?

52:57

No? They cut at least one, maybe

52:59

more. I don't remember the details on it, but they

53:02

cut at least one German language

53:04

episode where it wasn't dubbed in German. They

53:06

performed all these skits again in German.

53:09

Is it funny? Um? Glad? Yeah?

53:11

I mean, it can't help but be funny given

53:13

that concept, I don't know if it's necessarily

53:16

funny beyond just I

53:18

mean, if you speak a little German, you can certainly pick up

53:20

on some of the words, and of course there's a lot of you

53:23

know, a lot a lot of similarity between the German

53:25

language system and the English language system.

53:28

Uh. But ultimately I would say it it

53:31

always felt just kind of like surface level amusing

53:34

to someone who doesn't like speak German

53:37

at all. You know, it is funny though,

53:39

is a non French speaker Eddie Iszard's

53:42

bits in French? Okay? You

53:44

ever seen those? No? I haven't. It's a show for an English

53:46

speaking audience, but he does a long stretch of the show

53:48

just in French, and it's really funny. But

53:51

anyway, I wanted to come back at the end here

53:53

to just briefly discuss a little bit about

53:55

like what we might learn from idiophones.

53:58

One interesting point that Robson makes in his

54:01

Eon article is about language

54:03

acquisition in infancy. You

54:06

know, obviously idiophone type words

54:08

are useful to speakers falling ages.

54:10

Everybody uses them, But he wonders,

54:12

you know, could they be especially useful when

54:14

a baby is acquiring

54:16

language for the first time, Like

54:19

if certain sounds innately

54:21

for some reason or another signal associations

54:24

with certain images or tactile sensations

54:27

or types of movement. Could it

54:29

be that we instinctually use

54:31

these associations to help

54:33

young children learn language without

54:36

realizing it. Like

54:38

think about the ways that parents tend

54:41

to say things when talking to young children,

54:43

like teensy weensy instead

54:45

of small. Well, I'm

54:47

going to speak for at least some segment

54:49

of the parents out there and say I

54:52

never used the word eatsy

54:54

weensy. Well, a lot of parents do, though.

54:56

I mean, you hear that kind of thing, Yeah, I mean

54:58

the whole Yeah, the whole topic of of for

55:00

lack of a better word, cute talk is

55:03

is very fascinating to me because I

55:06

mean, I really I would like to come back and do

55:08

we've touched on it before, talking about

55:11

um a little bit about

55:13

about talking cute. I think we did. It

55:16

came up a little bit in the episode about whining

55:18

whining. Yes, there's like there's sort of

55:20

like an embedded language between parent

55:22

and child, where like the parent

55:25

uses like an elevated tone, like

55:27

higher pitch terms and certain kinds

55:29

of things when talking to a kid, and then the kid

55:31

does it back when wanting attention from the parent.

55:34

Right, Yeah, but I would like to come back and

55:36

discuss this thing that I'm going through now, is

55:38

experiencing like, uh, my

55:40

child who's in first grade, Well,

55:43

suddenly he'll need to talk in this cute

55:45

voice, like he'll be using terms that

55:48

are they're a little cute, see wootsie,

55:50

you know, but but speaking in a

55:52

way that we never spoke. We never spoke to him

55:54

like that. We never spoke like cartoon characters. We

55:56

didn't encourage him to speak like a cartoon character.

55:59

And granted, you know, you can pick up all this stuff

56:01

from your classmates, from TV shows, et cetera.

56:03

There are so many different, uh, you know, ways

56:06

you're getting information at this age. But

56:08

but uh, I know there have been there,

56:10

there have been papers written on like try trying to figure

56:12

out exactly why uh kids

56:15

about this age range why they do this,

56:18

because it seems to be a pretty widespread thing.

56:20

So that's one topic I would I would love to return

56:22

to, if if only for my own sanity. Well,

56:25

I mean, I think it's clear that some of these

56:27

types of terms that parents use in

56:29

this qt C talk are sort of sound symbolic,

56:31

right, their versions of ideophones

56:34

some one way or another. Robson sites

56:36

research by Mutsumi am I at

56:39

Kio University in Japan and so Taro

56:41

Kita at the University of Warwick

56:43

and in the UK that UM

56:45

one and two year olds quote when given

56:48

a sound symbolic word, we're more likely

56:50

to direct their attention at the appropriate

56:52

object or movement, and also

56:54

that sound symbolic words for things

56:57

were easier for children of this age

56:59

to remember, lay it or after they had learned.

57:02

And then for a deeper dive, I guess I I'd

57:04

recommend people go and read this article themselves,

57:07

but I just wanted to mention he is sort of by

57:09

talking about the question which is just a hypothesis

57:11

at this point of whether sound

57:14

symbolic types of words could have been

57:16

there at the genesis of human language.

57:18

About this question, we asked at the beginning, where

57:21

did the first words come from? When there

57:23

were no words, but you know that

57:25

it existed before for things to derive from?

57:28

The question is would words that inherently,

57:31

for one reason or another evoke

57:33

feelings and evoke sensations

57:35

just by the sound of them? With those

57:38

kinds of words form a bridge

57:40

from humans with no language to

57:42

the mostly arbitrary lexical languages

57:45

that would come later. So like

57:47

a very simple like survival basis,

57:49

you could imagine like a like a kiky

57:51

sound is attention, attention,

57:54

and then a buba sound or whatever is

57:57

calm down, it's chill, everything's good, like

57:59

bay sically get into some of the theories about like the

58:01

communication of laughter after being

58:04

a way of of instantly saying, Oh,

58:06

the thing that I thought was gonna kill us is not. It's

58:08

not kiki, it's bubba after all. Ha. Yeah.

58:11

Well yeah, I mean like that

58:13

the first sounds or the first words

58:15

could have been things that were like phonemes

58:18

that create a certain sensation

58:21

or sort of evoke a certain kind of image

58:24

or feeling. And that later on they

58:26

have more fixed lexical definitions,

58:29

and these sounds perhaps are like potentially

58:32

like some of the first building blocks of of more

58:34

powerful words and concepts, you know, yeah,

58:36

like it's it's something that's booba. Booba is

58:39

like it's super comforting and chill,

58:41

and something that's kiki kikikiki is like three

58:43

times is rough, or something that's bubba kiki

58:46

is soft at first but has like a hidden

58:48

bar, you know, uh, you know. Obviously

58:51

you can extrapolate from there and imagine

58:54

like language language systems building up

58:56

based on that. But the funny thing is, of course,

58:58

I mean, we have no idea is actually

59:00

correct about this being the

59:02

origins of of language. But if that

59:04

were in some way true, the funny thing is

59:07

we don't like run out of uses for

59:09

these types of words as we get lexical

59:11

languages. These words just continue to be

59:14

as useful as they ever were, were more and more

59:16

useful all the time. I just

59:18

thought of a great one in English. It

59:20

I I there's

59:24

no ikey sound that ikey

59:26

is mimicking, and yet ikey is

59:28

like a deeply evocative word

59:30

that conjures a feeling. Yeah,

59:33

yeah, And then is the word moist. You

59:35

know, that's a common common topic

59:38

of discussion. They're like, why do

59:40

people have a like a visceral reaction

59:42

to that word. I don't know, but we just lost

59:44

a lot of listeners. Well

59:47

it's just as well because we're at the end

59:49

of the episode. We're going to wrap it up there. But again,

59:51

this is something we could come back to in the future. There's

59:53

plenty more to discuss about about

59:56

the you know, the potential origins of language and just

59:58

how language works. UH.

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