Talk:Sound symbolism

Wrong definition

Hi, sound symbolism is not

the resemblance of sound and its meaning.

Instead it is

In linguistics, sound symbolism is the resemblance between the sound of name of an object and symbol(s) that can be activated about that object in one's brain.

So please inspect my new definition. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 07:48, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

@주이안 Please read above and discuss about wrong definition here. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 11:04, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Sound symbolism is not limited to object names Counterexample: Japanese pata-pata ‘sound of flapping wings’, which depicts the sounds of an action and not the name of an object.

Also “symbols” are not activated in the human brain. 주이안 (talk) 09:31, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

@주이안 You are right about «object». I think «concept» is the correct replacement. But «human brain» in my opinion is correct, if you disagree please give some counter-examples. All symbols are activated in human brain (by some sense), for example there is no softness or magnitude in physics, they are some how artifacts of human brain.

So I propose this definition:

In linguistics, sound symbolism is the resemblance between the sound of name of a concept and symbol(s) that can be activated about that concept in one's brain.

Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 11:56, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Ideophone

The section in the main article cites Thai and Cantonese as language where ideophones are heavily present. This is false, unless lexicographers are all deliberately omitting such forms from published dictionaries. In fact, so far as I can tell, only languages from the Austroasiatic and Austronesian language families have (or CAN have) large numbers of ideophones. No Sinitic 'dialect' has more than a few hundred of them, nor do any of the Tibeto-Burman languages in the southern part of the 'Sinosphere' areal assemblage. Similarly they are relatively rare in 'Paleosiberian' languages in the northeast of Asia. Mongolic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages, however, are very rich in ideophones, with Seoul Korean having at least 29 THOUSAND of them according to one lexicographer, who is a native speaker. Ainu, on the other hand, and Nivkh (a.k.a Gilyak), have only a few hundred as well. And Turkic languages aren't well represented as having large numbers of ideophones either, possibly due to their more northerly origins closer to Paleosiberian. On the other hand, Nanai, one of the (Manchu-) Tungus languages, in the southern part of their easterly territory to the north of Japan, has a great many. The phonosemantic mappings of individual phonological segments in areally-historically related languages with large inventories of ideophones are largely nearly identical, if one allows for differences in size and composition of their phonologies. For example plain voicless labial stops are, when ideophone-initial, largely concerned with smooth surfaces of bounded objects with internal positive pressure greater than that found without, where said boundary is in danger of or has actually, in fact, encountered 'containment failure' as they say in the various Star Trek television series. Palatal affricate in similar positional context makes reference to the opposite featural configuration, where instead of maximal unfolding is found, we instead see maximal infolding, as when, for example, a grape dries into a raisin and becomes wrinkled, creased, this due to development of a pressure deficit relative to the environment beyond an external boundary. All phonosemantic mappings are subject to similar kinds of positionally based oppositions orally (in terms of articulation) or acoustically. And one sees such oppositions crosslinguistically, and worldwide, in any language with large ideophone inventories, with mappings relating either to physics and mechanics, on the one hand, or on social relations, on the other. 24.187.223.42 (talk) 18:37, 15 June 2024 (UTC)