The turning point came in 2001, when Vilayanur S. “They were considered a curiosity and never properly explored,” says Gabriella Vigliocco, professor of the psychology of language at University College London. His work, first published in 1929, did not attract much attention, and though others returned to the subject every now and then, their findings were not taken seriously by the mainstream. Though Kohler didn’t say why this might be, the observation strongly suggested that some words really might fit the things they describe better than others. Most people chose takete for the spiky shape and baluba for the curvy one. While the German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler was staying in Tenerife, he presented subjects with line drawings of two meaningless shapes – one spiky, the other curved – and asked them to label the pictures either “takete” or “baluba”. The world of linguistics was mostly convinced, but a few people still challenged the status quo.
With few similarities between these and other such terms, it seemed clear to Saussure that the sounds of words do not inherently reflect their meanings. Consider, for instance, the differences between “ox” and “boeuf”, the English and French words for the same animal. In the 1910s, using an approach based in part on a comparison of different languages, he set out a strong case for the arbitrariness of language. The Greek philosophers never resolved the issue, but two millennia later the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure seemed to have done so. Cratylus, like Humpty Dumpty, believed words inherently reflect their meaning – although he seems to have found his insights into language disillusioning: Aristotle says Cratylus eventually became so disenchanted that he gave up speaking entirely. Hermogenes argued that language is arbitrary and the words people use are purely a matter of convention. More than 2000 years before Carroll suggested words might have some inherent meaning, Plato recorded a dialogue between two of Socrates’s friends, Cratylus and Hermogenes. These cross-sensory connections may even open a window onto the first words ever uttered by our ancestors, giving us a glimpse of the earliest language and how it emerged. And when you know where to look, these patterns crop up surprisingly often, allowing a monoglot English speaker to understand more Swahili or Japanese than you might imagine (see “Which sounds bigger?” at the bottom of this article). Others might bring to mind a spiky appearance, a bitter taste, or a sense of swift movement.
Some words really do evoke Humpty’s “handsome” rotundity. They suggest that we seem instinctively to link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions. Yet a spate of recent studies challenge this idea.
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