Language resembles a synaesthetic way the experience of their object, rather than being arbitrary sounds
Language can potentially blind us to the intrinsically synaesthetic nature of experience. However, some of this must, in spite of language, be caught in the word-sounds arising from it. Our sensations unite and all converge in the area where distinguishing traits turn into sounds. Thus, what man sees with his eye and feels by touch can also become soundable. Yet with the rise of Saussurian linguistics in the twentieth century, it has become fashionable to insist on the arbitrary nature of the sign â a fascinating and counterintuitive move, designed to emphasise the âfreedomâ of language as far as possible from the trammels of the body and of the physical world it describes.
There is, however, plenty of evidence that the sounds of words are not arbitrary, but evocative, in a synaesthetic way, of the experience of the things they refer to. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, those with absolutely no knowledge of a language can nonetheless correctly guess which wordâwhich of these supposedly arbitrary signsâgoes with which object, in what has become known as the âkiki/boubaâ effect (âkikiâ suggesting a spiky-shaped object, where âboubaâ suggests a softly rounded object).
However much language may protest to the contrary, its origins lie in the body as a whole. And the existence of a close relationship between bodily gesture and verbal syntax implies that it is not just concrete nouns, the âthing-wordsâ, but even the most apparently formal and logical elements of language, that originate in the body and emotion. The deep structure of syntax is founded on the fixed sequences of limb movement in running creatures.
References
- McgilChrist, Iain. (2010). The Master and His Emissary CHAPTER 3 LANGUAGE TRUTH AND MUSIC (Epub p. 243). London, UK: Yale University Press.
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