# Phonosemantics **Domain:** Linguistics / Cognition / Meaning **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Phonosemantics**, also called **sound symbolism**, studies the ways sounds themselves carry meaning. The linguist J. R. Firth coined *phonaestheme* in 1930 for sound clusters that recur with related senses: *gl-* in words of light (*glow, gleam, glint, glitter*), *sn-* in words of the nose (*sniff, snout, sneeze, snore*), *-ump* in words of heavy mass (*lump, bump, hump*). Sound symbolism complicates [[wiki/Ferdinand de Saussure|Ferdinand de Saussure]]'s principle that the link between sound and meaning is arbitrary. Experiments such as the [[wiki/Bouba-Kiki Effect|Bouba-Kiki Effect]] show that people across languages match certain sounds to certain shapes with striking consistency. ## Corpus Context Phonosemantics is the scientific counterpart to the intuitions in [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]], such as hearing a cutting quality in the "S" sounds of *decide*, *incision*, and *scissors*. ## Relationships - **Evidence:** [[wiki/Bouba-Kiki Effect|Bouba-Kiki Effect]]. - **Classical debate:** [[wiki/Cratylus|Cratylus]]. - **Contrast:** [[wiki/Ferdinand de Saussure|Ferdinand de Saussure]]'s arbitrariness of the sign. - **Practice:** [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph. ## Sources - J. R. Firth, *Speech* (Benn, 1930). - Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, and John J. Ohala, eds., *Sound Symbolism* (Cambridge University Press, 1994). ## See Also [[wiki/Phonetics|Phonetics]] · [[wiki/Green Language|Green Language]]