Ideophones: How does this word feel?

What’s an ideophone? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the place where sounds, meanings and the possible roots of language converge. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and today I want to start with a question. This
is gonna be one of those questions where you gaze
deep into your own belly, and if you ask it

(00:24):
out loud, you might annoy certain people around you. But
I promise you it's actually interesting once you give it
serious thought. And the question is is you take a
look at your hand and you think, why the heck
is this call to hand? Think about the sounds you
make with your mouth when you say the word hand,
or the marks you make on a page when you

(00:46):
spell the word, or even or in say like American
Sign language or another sign language, the gestures you would
make to signal the concept of a hand. Somehow, those
sounds you make with your mouth, or the marks you
make on the page, or the gestures cause other people's
brains to call up the concept of one of these
five legged meat spiders that's attached to the end of

(01:06):
our wrists. And in fact, I often think about this,
that one of the really creepy and astonishing things that
we usually just forget to notice about ourselves and our
bodies and our brains. And the power of language is
that in most cases, you are completely powerless to resist
the conjuring power of a word. You ever think about this, like,

(01:29):
unless you have some kind of unusual neurological condition, If
you understand the language I'm speaking, and I say a
giant crocodile crawling up the side of the Eiffel Tower
with a bouquet of roses in its mouth, you will
have no choice but to envision or at least understand
the concept of what I just said. Words have so
much power over your brain that most people, most of

(01:51):
the time can't even turn off their understanding of them
if they want to. We live in a world where like,
particular patterns of mouth, sounds, and marks on a page
are literally a way of controlling the contents of somebody
else's mind. Yeah, which were which? When you think of
it that way, it makes total sense that some people
are like, hey, I would prefer you not use a

(02:12):
bunch of vulgar language around me, you know, um would,
which I have always found it sometimes weird, And say
an office environment where uh, you know, certain individuals will
feel like, you know, they need to use a lot
of vulgarity when they're talking. But you're really in many
times taking like particularly vulgar images, and you were forcing
them into everybody's mind around you, and it's perfectly reasonable

(02:35):
to say no, thank you. Yeah. I'm of two minds
about this. I mean, on one hand, I I do
definitely have a strong sort of innate anti censorship streak.
But then on the other hand, I recognize that, like, yeah,
anybody who says, like, what's the big deal is just words?
That is really underselling the power of words. Words are
like one of the most powerful things in the universe. Yeah,

(02:58):
But to think about like just the casual way that
that that you can summon uh imagery with the word uh.
You brought up hand And I was thinking, all right,
what does some other kind of tape Like I basically
tried to understand the idea by breaking the idea, Like,
what's another important concept or notable concept to me involving
hand or something? You know? And uh, I thought, Okay,

(03:18):
but we have the movie Dark City where you have
the character of Mr. Hand that's Richard O'Brien. Yeah, yeah,
plays one of the strangers but but now that I
think about it, like, that's a great example of how
you can just call this character Mr. Hand and in
thinking about him looking at him, you also end up
contemplating what a hand is and what a hand does

(03:41):
in the form of the hand, and kind of melding
it with the idea of a shadowy individual. Absolutely, and
this is why, you know, metaphors and poetry and everything
are so powerful. It's like you when you use one
word to describe a thing that it doesn't isn't directly
assigned for you. You cause all this kind of like
cross linking within the brain that is often very evocative

(04:01):
and exciting. Yeah, Like if you say, introduced a character
in a work and his name was Dr Chainsaw, Right
that way that that brings there is a number of
conflicts arise, and I can't help it. Then try and
imagine who Dr Chainsaw is. That's funny. But what you say,
I think is more thoughtful and profound than than you
might realize at first glance. Well, we'll think about this

(04:22):
more as we go. Okay, So a lot of times
when we ask this question, like why do we call
a hand a hand? Why is that the sound we
make with our mouths, or the you know, H, A
and D, the marks on a page. Where does that
word come from? We're usually asking a historical question that
can have a relatively straightforward answer. Right. This is the
domain of etymologies, and we do this all the time

(04:43):
on the show. Right. We talk about some concept or
some character from myth and legend, and we break down
what their name means, where it comes from, right, and you.
You can do this with most words, like you can
trace it back through older versions of languages. One example
we've mentioned on the show before that I really enjoy
is how obsolete scientific hypotheses that are we know aren't

(05:04):
true anymore, or sometimes still included in our language. The
words we use for things. Take the English word malaria.
I mean, you know, this is a word for a
certain disease is caused by a protozoan parasite. But malaria
comes from the Italian words mal and area, meaning bad air.
So the name we use for this disease incorporates miasthma theory,

(05:26):
which proposed that diseases were caused by exposure to foul
smelling vapors that emanated from the Earth, or from planets,
or from things like rotting carrion. Did we do an
episode of miasma theory? Oh, yeah, we did. Yeah, it
was earlier. I think maybe it was last year. Uh.
And we talked in the episode about how the word malaria,
so it reflects miasma theory, this incorrect understanding of where

(05:48):
diseases come from from before germ theory took hold. And
the fact that even the French physician Charles Louis Alfonse
lover On, who discovered the fact that malaria was caused
by a parasitic organism in the blood, he hated the
word malaria. He didn't like that because he considered it unscientific.
So instead he recommended the term uh palladisma, which essentially

(06:10):
means like marsh or swamp fever or swamp disease, and
this is still the French word for the disease. So anyway,
many words can be tracked back through the history of
evolving languages like this, and in fact pretty much all
words can. But you can only follow this trail so
far because if you go back far enough, you run
out of ways to track words as straightforward cases of

(06:33):
evolving species or adoption from other languages, like at some
point words had to be created for things and concepts
that had no explicit word before and no analogies to
draw from, so that once you get back to like
the initial case, you have to wonder, how did this happen?
How is a word born? And does a word inherently

(06:55):
mean anything? Why did the speakers of the earliest words
pick one set of mouth sounds for hand and a
different set of mouth sounds for tree and a different
set of mouth sounds for mother. What do these sounds
mean anything? And if they do mean anything, what do
they mean interesting? So, I mean we're kind of dealing
with some of the same properties that we've discussed on

(07:17):
the show, and that we were regarding, say the evolution
of Chinese characters, where they in their very primitive origins
they were essentially tiny pictures of what you were talking about,
uh And then as they evolved they become more eleguent
in design, more abstract, uh not, and then sometimes it's

(07:39):
abstract and meaning as well. But but certainly they no
longer look exactly like the thing, like the word for,
you know, for a person is no longer looks like
a tiny person that sort of thing. So we might
be we're particially talking about the same thing with words themselves,
Like how if you trace it back far enough, do
you have simply a word is a sound for a thing.

(08:00):
It's not even a word yet, it's just the sound
for the thing. And then how did we get that sound?
How did you decide that that is the sound for
that thing. Yeah, it's a fascinating question, and I want
to go ahead and say we're not going to answer
this question today. I mean their whole this is a
whole field of study about the origins of language, where
it came from. You know, we could write whole books
on the subject, and I am sure we will revisit

(08:21):
this in the future. But we wanted to look at
one specific strange class of word today and and some
some lighted sheds on what words are and how we
how we use language. So a minute ago we asked
that idea of like do sounds inherently mean anything in
in the a lexigraphic sense? And one of the key
ideas of modern linguistic theory is that the answer to

(08:44):
that question is no. That the signs we use to
refer to concepts, so like the sounds you make with
your mouth, or the markings you make on a page
when you're indicating a concept like hand or mother or
something like that. These signs are arbitrary. They do not
have inherent meaning, and they're arbitrarily associated with the concepts
they call to mind. So to quote from the Swiss

(09:07):
semiotician and linguist Ferdinand de Sajur, who is often cited
as like the founder of the modern study of linguistics, quote,
the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
Since I mean by sign the whole that results from
the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can
simply say the linguistic sign is arbitrary. The idea of

(09:30):
sister is not linked by any inner relationship to the
succession of sounds. Uh. And then he spells out the
French for sister sir, which serves as its signifier in French.
That it could be represented equally by just any other
sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the

(09:51):
very existence of different languages. The signified OX has as
its signifier Boff on one side of the border is
in the French Frox is boff and OX on the other.
And so we know, like we know today that to
some extent what as here says here must be true, right,

(10:12):
at least to some extent, because of course, words are
not fixed in sound or in visual notation. Words evolve
over time where it's come to mean different things. They
come to be pronounced differently, often in multiple stages that
we can track through history. Right. I mean a recent
example of this on our show, trying to figure out
what puppy meant a form of insult in in in

(10:33):
ages prior Oh yeah, we're apparently Isaac Newton called this
guy he was harassing a puppy. Were like, what the
heck does that mean? But apparently it means like a
fop Like it's the same word basically means the same thing,
except in certain contexts, and then that has changed over time.
But those those minor differences we can acknowledge between, say
like early modern English and the English of today, can

(10:55):
become radical differences over longer periods of time. But might say, well,
wait a minute, doesn't the widespread literacy of the world
and the printing press changed all this. Aren't words fixed
once they're in print, obviously, They're not like just read
a play of Shakespeare or something else from the early
modern period, and compare that to the language of modern English.

(11:16):
This is just a few hundred years ago. This is
not that long ago. But you'll find tons of words
that have changed in meaning, spelling, connotation, or have simply
disappeared from everyday use. If you doubt this, I will
bet you forty ferkins of post it and barm on it. Yeah.
Or just try and read say the obbit yeah, to

(11:37):
to to to a child, and you're gonna run across
certain words where it's like, oh, well this just meant
uh that you know, now, this is a slur word,
but in its original context that Tolkien was using, he's
talking about a bundle of sticks. Another writer might be
using the word and they're talking about a cigarette or something.
So that the words can change sometimes for the worst. Oh,

(11:58):
that's absolutely true. In fact, I was just thinking about this.
Even happens, you know, with with letters. Have you ever
read the early seventeenth century poem The Flee by John Dunn,
who it's probably been a long time, you know done.
Was a great poet. I mean he wrote great like
devotional poetry, but he also wrote like seduction poetry. The
flea is just absolutely nasty it's a poem where he's

(12:22):
essentially begging for sex by making this questionable recourse to
the idea that if a flea bites two different people,
they've basically slept together already, and so they might as
well not resist any temptation. He says, quote Mark, but
this flee and Mark, in this how little that which
thou deniest me is it sucked me first and now

(12:45):
sucks thee And in this flee our two bloods mingled
be Yeah, he's he's really stretching, I think with that one. Yeah,
what a creep. But then it's even funnier if you
read it in older printed versions where s is making
the s sound don't look like they do today. Back
then they looked like a modern lower case F. So
so this would have impacted the words suck or sucked. Yes,

(13:08):
it would have become a much more by modern standings
vulgar term. That this is already I think, a pretty
nasty poem. It just gets a slight nastiness upgrade. But then,
in the same way that concepts are described by different
words across time, obviously they're also described by different words
at the same time between different languages. So the Basque
word for hand is escua, and the Melee word for

(13:30):
hand is tongue gun and so forth. So obviously the
concept of hand is in no way intrinsically linked to
the English H sound or the D consonant or anything
like that. This does seem to be truly arbitrary, and
part of that is that the hand does not make
a sound. You know. Well it can of course, but yeah,
it doesn't inherently make a sound. And that's a good

(13:52):
thing to point out, because while I think it's it's
pretty much inarguable that that sazure is correct in many
cases that, like most word in most languages, don't have
any inherent link between the sound you make with your
mouth and what the word means. There were some words
that inarguably do How about the word cockadoodle do? Oh, yeah,
this is a great one. Uh. This is always a

(14:13):
fun exercise anytime you travel somewhere where they speak a
different language, or even if they speak just a variant
of your own language, asked them what sound a rooster makes,
and the uh, it's always going to be some variation
of the same sound, but at times with surprising variety,
and exactly how that sound is realized in language. Oh yeah,

(14:35):
I love this, like it looking at different languages words
for like what a dog does, Like the dog doesn't
bark in every language, but in pretty much every language.
Whatever word they've got for what a dog sound is,
you can hear it. You're like, oh, yeah, that that's
what a dog sounds like. Yeah. David Saderis has a
fun bit where he talks about this, and I believe
it was a Christmas essay called six Day Black Men

(14:57):
about it mainly dealing with variations in the Santa Claus tradition,
the title referring to certain European traditions in which Santa
is attended by by personal slaves with black skin. But
he also talks a little bit about, you know, variations
in how people say what the rooster says. Man, it

(15:18):
is shocking how disturbing some of those Santa traditions are.
Oh yeah, it gets dark, but it is. It's the holidays,
you know. I guess it's supposed to be dark and weird.
But I got another word for you, one of my favorites. PLoP. Oh, PLoP,
that's a good one. It's the sound that a drop
makes when it hits another body. Of water. So if
you drop falls into a bucket, it plumps. So I
was thinking it's also the sound of a cat throwing

(15:40):
up on the hardwoods. That's probably the context I encounter
more often. Like you hear that PLoP, you know you're
cleaning up something, Well, you'd think it would be like
a splat, but no, it is a very polite sounding
kind of PLoP, which belies how gross it's going to be.
But yeah. So these are known as onomatopeia in English,
the words that make a sound that's close to the

(16:00):
sound of the concept being named. Uh so, like the
noun naming a rooster's called the cockadoodle do obviously is
meant to sound like the call itself. Same thing with plot,
it's meant to sound like with the concept you're talking about.
And you know, automotopia for some reason or just great
fun to say. Usually I love like glug, that's a
glug glug hiss, that's an automotopia. Quack oink, squeak toot

(16:26):
toot is a fun one, yeah, kind of yeah, burp
is perhaps one as well. What do you think about Yeah,
I think that could be an automotopia. Yeah, now I
think some of these could probably be false on amotopia,
where uh, I don't know, I sure, but if you
like looked up the etymology, you could find that they're
derived from some other word in history that doesn't actually sounds.
It's just a coincidence. But a lot of them clearly

(16:48):
are on Amotopia, like they're the word comes from the sound.
The thing makes I wonder about the How about the
sounds that are the words that flash on the screen
when Batman punches somebody? Yeah, you know, are those uh
what we talk about? Is that a case of automatopeia? Biffe, biff, biff, etcetera.
How about plink plunk, ploop, PLoP, slash, splash, Yeah, those

(17:12):
are those? Are those all seem pretty solid? I noticed
how a lot of English on a moatopia. Maybe this
is just because they're the words I could think of,
but it seems to me like a lot of them
are sounds for sounds that animals make, or words for
what water does or what happens in water. Another one
great one is twinkle. Wait a minute, did you catch
me there? It's a trick? I think, did you notice

(17:35):
that twinkle? And when I very first said it did
you think, yeah, that's a good one too. I probably
would have thought that that's a good on a mootopeia.
Pale stars twinkle in the night sky. What do you
hear when you envision that sentence. I hear a twinkling. Yeah,
I I picture stars twinkling, almost in a cinematic sense,
like twinkling more than they actually appear to twinkle in

(17:58):
the night sky. But there's a little almost on a
bell sound that goes with the word, don't you think, uh?
Like I think about when William Wordsworth rights continuous as
the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way.
Of course he's he's talking about flowers. He's talking about daffodils,
and he's comparing them to stars by the way they
move back and forth in the breeze. He says, ten

(18:19):
thousand I saw at a glance tossing their heads in
sprightly dance. Here's another one you might have heard before,
Twinkle twinkle, little star that you have. That's another another
famous version, which, by the way, here's a mind blower
for at least some listeners out there. I didn't, you know,
I didn't realize until the last couple of years that
it's the same song as the ABC song with just

(18:40):
different lyrics. Try that out for size. I gotta pick
my jaw up off the ground. I don't think I've
ever heard of that. I never know one ever made.
I never made that connection before. But then I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah,
if you yeah, that's exactly the same song. Did you
know that London Bridge is Falling Down is the same
tune as that classic old English full crime, Happy, Happy Halloween,

(19:02):
Halloween Halloween silver Shamrock. Yes, there there is that. You know.
One that's a less conventional use of twinkle that I
really like is in Walt Whitman. He's got a poem
about a shuttering locomotive. I think it's called Like to
a Locomotive in Winter, where he says thy knitted frame,
thy springs in valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels.

(19:23):
But the weirdness is twinkle feels like an automotopia to me,
it feels exactly like PLoP or or ploop or quack.
But it's not an ont amotopeia. I mean, we know that,
like the stars don't make a sound, but part of
me rebels. Of course, twinkles an automotopea. It really feels
like one twinkle twinkle is the sound that stars make

(19:45):
when their brightness fluctuates. And of course that isn't true,
but I I just know it's true, even though it's
not that stars don't make a sound, and yet that's
the sound they make. And I believe the sense of
the false on amotopeia of twinkle is even sort of
suggested in the way the word is used in some
rhymed poetry, like writers seem to sense a deeper parallel

(20:07):
between twinkle and a true on amotopia word, like in
ed garlan pose poem The Bells. Oh that's a great one.
Do you want to read it? Oh? Sure? Here the
sledges with the bells, silver bells, what a world of merriment.
Their melody fore tells how they twinkle, tinkle, tinkle in
the icy air of night, while the stars that oversprinkle
all the heavens seemed to twinkle with a crystalline delight.

(20:29):
So yeah, tinkle is like the anomotopia of the bells.
But then the stars also twinkle, as if that's like
the same thing. Fun fact. Folk singer phil oaks Uh
it was one of probably many people to set pose
poem to music. Oh, I don't think I've heard the
fun little folk song. What a world of merriment their
melody foretells, you know, it's a fun little tune. Cool

(20:51):
to look that up. But anyway, I like the idea
here that if a word is, like we were talking
about earlier, like a form of mind control, it's a
way of just with without a person's consent, controlling the
contents of their brain. Twinkle is a form of mind
control that drives us to believe. In a contradiction, the
word is like an automatopeic simulacrum. It's an attempt to

(21:13):
copy a thing that does not exist, the sound of
a bright light varying in intensity. And I just wonder
why do we feel this so deeply? I mean, maybe
everybody else doesn't feel it as strongly as I do,
but I feel like this is probably a common sensation. Yeah,
I'm trying to think of any that that resonate particularly
strongly with me. I guess sometimes there's a very strong

(21:33):
word for like various facial expressions, you know, And we
feel facial expressions very strongly because they are, you know,
non verbal forms of communication. Like, for instance, I don't
know that this may not hold up when we start
tearing it apart here, But for someone to gawk at something, yeah,
it's not like the face makes a sound the sound gawk.

(21:55):
But if you were to make that argument for me,
you know, like that this is a sound like it.
It almost feels like a sound sound in the mind
if you're seeing somebody that is visibly gawking at something. Yes,
it's a word that doesn't just have a lexical definition
that you understand, but it has it has like a
sensory force. It delivers a sensory feeling by saying the word. Now,

(22:17):
I'm just this is just coming off the top of
my head. So I'm sure later if I when I
look up gawk, I can you know you'll be able
to tease a part the history of the word and
where it comes from and what it's a linguistic origins
are well. As we said earlier, I mean, it's possible
for there to be like false on amunopeas where something
you would think is just copying the sound of something,

(22:38):
but actually you can show where it derives from other
words in a language that maybe don't even originally sound
so much like the thing. But anyway, So one answer
as to why we feel these kind of connections between
like the feeling or sound of a word and a
concept that is not actually a sound or does not
sound like the concept um one. One answer would simply
be that we're culturally conditioned to feel the strange kind

(23:00):
of synesthesia with the meaning of a word, simply because
we know what the word means, We've learned it, we've
learned to think of it this way, and it's just conditioning, right.
But the answer also might not be that simple, And
I think maybe we should take a break and then
come back and look at some words in other languages. Alright,
we're back. So I was inspired to talk about this

(23:22):
today in in this episode by an article that I
read an Eon magazine by a writer named David Robson.
And in this article, Robson begins this article with a
list of Japanese words and then asks non Japanese speaking
readers to guess what they mean. And given a couple
of like antonymic options, you know a word and its opposite.
So if you do not speak Japanese, consider the following

(23:46):
word nuru nuru. Okay, I'm sorry if I'm not saying
that exactly right, But it's something like that. Nuru nuru
Does that word mean dry or slimy? Um? It sounds
slimy to Yeah, It sounds slimy to me too, and
in fact, that is what it means. Here's another Japanese word, waku. Waku?

(24:08):
Does that mean excited or bored? That sounds excited to me?
It sounds excited to me too. Here's another one, pika.
Pika Does that mean dull or sparkly? That sounds sparkly.
It also sounds sparkly to me, and we're We're correct
in all three cases. Those are the real meanings. And if,
like us, you do not speak Japanese and yet you

(24:30):
can correctly guess the meanings of those words, you're not alone.
According to a sixteen study by in the psychology journal
Collabora by Lockwood, at all, almost three quarters of Dutch
participants were able to correctly identify the meanings of these
words without knowing them. But how is it possible if
you don't speak a language to know what words in

(24:53):
a language mean When they're not words for things with sounds,
they're not on amount of pea. It's not like moo
or something. Right, these are cases where it's coming down
more too. I mean the obvious point being the case
sounds right, those sharp ks which sound and it's hard
to even put that in words. Why but they sound pointy. Yeah, yeah,

(25:13):
they sound pointy. They sound sparkly bright somehow. Uh, And
that this is not just our opinion. Well, we'll come
back in cite some evidence about this in a minute.
But anyway, Robson cites these as examples of words that
are known as idiophones, and these are words that are
the way I would try to describe it, though this
is a concept that can be kind of hard to

(25:35):
define as well discuss as we go on. But their
words that are kind of like on a mootopia, but
there's no original sound that they're copying. Instead, they're described
by by Lockwood and co authors as quote sound symbolic words,
and I think this is a common way of describing
them in the in the scientific literature. And what that

(25:55):
means is that by the sound of the word, they
tend to strong evoke a sensation like a site or
a tactile feeling. And you don't need to know the
language or know the word already to understand what that
feeling is supposed to be, or at least get close
to what that feeling is supposed to be. You've never

(26:15):
heard the word nuru nuru before, but it definitely sounds
more slimy to you than it sounds like dry or
something else. And they're There are different kinds of ideophones
in different languages. Some languages are much richer in them
than other languages are. But like Japanese is an example
of a language, there's a good number of ideophones and uh.
Willem Lockwood, one of the authors of that paper I

(26:38):
cited a second a second ago in a blog post,
writes that these these words create a very vivid image
or this this strong feeling that normal lexical words just
don't quote. When a Japanese person hears the word kira
kira meaning sparkly, it is like they can actually see

(26:58):
the thing that is spark Really. How sound symbolism works, however,
is not quite clear, and there have not yet been
many neuroscience studies on it, but the research so far
suggests that hearing sound symbolic words might involve other forms
of sensory perception in a similar way to how people
with synesthesia associate colors with letters. Interesting, but you can

(27:21):
probably already tell just from us talking so far, that
this idea of the sound symbolic word is kind of
difficult to pin down exactly. It's gonna involve like related
concepts across different languages, because different languages have different qualities
that can be used to evoke these things. You know,
this or this reminds me of of you know, I've
read before about how you know, k sounds either hard

(27:44):
case or soft cash or even um, even like the
sound of of cheese. How these are inherently funny sounds,
you know. But but then again, you know, we're thinking
of like like sparkly excitement, Like those are also kind
of the signifiers of of things that are funny, right, Uh,
They're not dull, they're exciting, They're evocative in some form

(28:07):
or another. Yeah, but it's really hard to really tease
out exactly why. Well, to be very clear, we don't
want to suggest that all words are idiophonic, because I
think it's totally clear that probably most words in most
languages are actually arbitrary signs and the sound has nothing
to do with what they mean. And a word like
clown is potentially funny because the concept of the clown

(28:29):
is funny. She's itself is inherently funny. I mean, if
you had no word for what this was, it's still
like this soft, smushy thing that has a distinctive odor
to it, but it is also delicious. We screeze, we squeeze,
goat utters and we get the stuff out of it,
and then we'd like boil that and separated. It's basically
a practical joke of the gods as it is, so

(28:50):
you know, we can't help but laugh. But clearly, while
one of the interesting features of these ideas of idiophonic
words is that they are somewhat detectable across language. Different
is like you don't necessarily have to speak the language
to understand what some of them mean. There are ways
that languages are going to kind of change the way
they're used, right, Like you can think of like tonal

(29:10):
languages versus non tonal languages. Yeah, I was, I was
looking around at some of the papers that because the
thing is, when you start looking at papers on idiophones,
a number of them are you know, they're they're they're
focusing on one particular language or a couple of different languages,
and so I was looking around it some that that
looked at at ideophonic words and say Mandarin. Not that

(29:33):
I speak Mandarin, but I've at least read about it
enough that I have like some you know, base understanding
of of of what it is linguistically, and uh, I
did run across um. So it's says from chen Zi
Ming's uh idiophonic words in Mandarin and um. The author
points that there's perhaps some difficulty in settling on a

(29:54):
unified ideophone definition that works across all languages quote or
even within a language. Uh, they wrote, quote ideophones are
much likely to be proposed as different categories under different names,
in different in terms of different criteria within a certain language.
Uh So there is this kind of elusive nature to

(30:15):
to really like pinning it down, you know, well, certainly
to create any kind of like unified definition of ideophone.
That's one of the senses I'm getting from this paper.
And other said I looked at I think the closest
I can find is that the uh, the the sign
of the word itself, either the sound or the markings
on a page or whatever generates a sensation other than

(30:38):
a sonic one. Okay, Yeah, so that it could be
like a tactile feeling or the belief that you're seeing something,
or like just an association with feelings or images, or
or maybe even like smells or tastes or something. And
I think especially if that can be detected by people
who have never encountered the word before in use and

(31:00):
don't know what it means in context. I got another
exercise for us to protect us here to to figure
this out. So, Robert, I've attached a couple of images here.
You may have seen this experiment before, you may already
know where we're going with this, But um describe these
two images briefly. Okay. One is like a sharp pointed
kind of sharooken shape, and the other is, uh something

(31:23):
looks kind of like a splat, like a cartoon splat,
like a cartoon paintball shape, also kind of reminiscent of,
you know, a bizarre clover. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that's
a very good way of putting. An image on the
left is like kind of like a pointy star. Image
on the right sort of like a splatty cloud. Now,
let's say I give these two images names. I'm not

(31:45):
going to tell you which is which, But one is
named Molly and one is named Kate. Which is which. Well,
if we're going to go back to some of these
ideas we've been dealing with, Kate has that k sound,
it's gonna be sharper, it's going to be point here,
and Molly has that kind of I mean, I'm maybe overthinking.
That's kind of the problem with this, right you started

(32:06):
thinking about it too much. You're not dealing with the
direct um. We're not coming at this clean. We've already
been talking about the what sounds feel like. But I
feel like pretty instinctively we would say that Kate is
the one with the sharp angles and Molly is the
one with the rounded cloud edge, And a large portion
of people would actually agree that this is the answer

(32:26):
and it works not just for those names. That's just
one type of example, but uh, this, this experiment has
been done giving them names like Kiki and Buba. Oh yes,
the Kiki Buba and uh Takete and Maluma. And in
research that this has been multiple experiments over the past
century or so by like Wolfgang Cohler vs. Rama Schandren

(32:47):
and others. Cola definitely sharpened pointing well, it's both kind
of right because the K is sharpened pointy, but the
owl that sounds like round to me, So like, why
this inherent? And this apparently works in not all cases,
but in most cases that it's been tried across language differences.
So apparently sharp angles sound like T N K, and

(33:10):
round clouds sound like M and L and round vowels
like oh. And this isn't the only example. For some reason,
it just seems that across different cultures and different languages
were pretty consistent, not always consistent, but pretty consistent in
associating certain types of human mouth sounds with particular non
auditory sensations like sites and geometric angles and feelings and

(33:35):
so uh. To read a quote from Robson here from
his article, he's talking about a strain of linguistics that's
now taking idiophones more seriously as a subject. Quote. Language
is embodied a process that involves subtle feedback for both
listener and speaker between the sound of a word, the
vocal apparatus, and our own experience of human physicality. Taken together,

(33:59):
this dynamic helps to create a connection between certain sounds
and their attendant meanings. These associations appear to be universal
across all human societies. Interesting, So it sounded like when
we when we when we we're trying to comprehend some
of these, uh, these sound words, like we're potentially connecting

(34:19):
in like like the pre language verbal communication skills of
our species. Yeah, it's quite possible, and we should come
back to that at the end of the episode. Um,
but yeah, there appears to be some kind of primordial
association that somewhat transcends culture, that associates certain mouth sounds
with certain types of sites or feelings. And so we

(34:43):
know one example now is that like t s and
k's look like sharp angles, and and like bees, and
m's and l's feel like round, rounded edges. Here some more,
he Robson cites the research of a guy named Diedrich
Westerman who found that across different languages in Western Africa,
the e sound like in cheese or peak or twinkle,

(35:06):
was often associated with concepts that were light, fine, or bright,
while the back vowels in the mouth like walk or fast,
were associated with concepts of slowness, heaviness, and darkness. And
so at the same time, there were associations with consonants, right,
not just the vowels consonants like B and G, like

(35:28):
but and go were associated with heaviness and softness, while
voiceless consonants like P and K, put and cut were
associated with harder surfaces and lighter weight. And just contemplating
these again, we're not coming at this clean. We're you know,
having these observations already color our thinking. But I totally
feel like this rings true with my feeling of sound sensations,

(35:51):
at least as an English speaker. Like if we imagine
two totally new, made up words for animals in a
made up country. So we're we're going to an island
that's never been dis ever before, and we're seeing some
fauna there, uh one piece. One piece of fauna is
a tiny yellow crab that runs quickly across the sand.
And the other animal is a large, blubbery semi aquatic

(36:13):
mammal that looks kind of like a hippopotamus. And the
two names for these creatures are Peaky Kiki and Gubba Gubba.
Which one is which? Well, Gubba Gubba definitely has to
be that hippo creature for sure, exactly but why because
it just sounds like a like if yeah, it's it's

(36:34):
it's just that's that's the sound. Like to reverse those
names would be a cause for comedy itself, wouldn't it right?
I think it would. Yeah, Like if the if the
hippo was Peaky Kiki and the and the crab was
Gubba Gubba, that would be funny. That would almost seem like, well,
that's absurd, why would you call them that? Well, but
the thing is once if you if you establish them

(36:54):
as such. I I don't know, I might on some
level find it funny because those are funny word anyway,
shake it and then the idea of a crab having
a name is also inherently funny. But I would I
would probably just buy it, Like I would begin to
associate the name, like the sound of the name with
perhaps the personality of the creature. Like suddenly I go

(37:16):
beyond thinking like Gubba Gubba is just like this blubberry animal,
but maybe like Gubba Gubba sums up the personality of
this cartoon crab that we're introducing, you know, like it
it's it's it's easy to again over to overthink and overshoot,
just the sort of initial reaction that should be taking
place when we hear the sound. Yeah, Now to bring

(37:37):
it back to tonal languages like like Mandarin Chinese of
course as a tonal language. Robson writes that Westerman also
discovered sound symbolic connotations with the tones used in tonal languages,
so so it applies somewhat there too. For example, even
though English doesn't really employ tonality the signal meaning, in
the languages that do that Westerman was studying, you found

(37:57):
a general trend that quote words were representing slowness, dryness,
and heaviness tended to have lower tones, and the meanwhile,
things depicting quote speed, agility, and brightness were formed by
higher tones. I don't know if you have a general
sense of that in in your experience trying to speak Chinese,
But I can't say that I've progressed enough to where

(38:18):
I can really break that down now. Yeah, trying to
think of some good examples offhand. I'm sure they'll come
to me after the podcast, though. So The question, of course,
is what explains these really common and apparently often not always,
but pretty often cross linguistic associations. And one idea is
that there is some sort of mental feedback that's created

(38:39):
by the sensation in the body from making a sound. Right, So,
like with kiki and buba, one idea would be, well,
when you say buba, you say oh, and the mouth
there makes a round shape, and maybe we intuitively associate
the rounding of our lips with round soft edges in
an image as possible. Right. Yeah. Another example here would

(39:02):
be um matching sensations in the body in the case
of things we do with our noses that usually involve
nasal sounds. So U think about like snort, sniff, sneeze, snout, snore.
You can't say the end without the nose. Yeah, okay, sorry,
I keep I keep running Mandarin words I do know

(39:24):
through my head, trying to figure out like where they
would fall. Like bow comes to mind, you know, uh,
certainly has like a round soft consistency to it. What
does it mean though, it's you know, it's like the
food the bow, Oh, like a bun Yeah, okay um,
And then you know other words like like like bob
depending on how you hit it, totally like that that

(39:47):
can mean father, which doesn't quite really fall into what
we're talking about here. And I'm trying, I'm sort of
hurting my brain trying to think of some good, sharp
sounding words that aren't names. Uh, But at any rate,
Like again, I'm sure all this will will come to
me after we're done recording. It's interesting how we start
once we are asked to observe this. You start looking

(40:09):
forward in all the words, even though we know that
most words are not idiophones, but we still, like I
start seeing correlations there in all kinds of words where
it might just be you know, it met me losing
my mind here, but like, uh, I start thinking about like, oh,
what about all the the the words that start with
g r, you know, you know, just like growl, grunt, grown,

(40:31):
Like what is that that growl? Grunt, grown, grumble? They
all start with gr which sort of like almost evokes
this kind of natural sense of something being like a
problem or a burden, and the needed words like great.
How does that work? Yeah? So, I mean, clearly, I
think maybe the mind is going to places where but
where it's not quite fruitful. But anyway, it's hard to

(40:53):
really to take a word and think about it without
the context of its meaning and and how that meaning
kind of you know, dilutes through culture. But anyway, I
guess we should we should get back to the possible
explanations for why this. Another one that Robson mentioned in
this article is just the idea that when some types

(41:13):
of ideophones occur there is a kind of cross contamination
between sensations in brain regions. That this could be literal
just like cross linking or kind of bleed over in
the brain, right, a type of synesthesia, And of course
synaesthesia is quote a neurological condition in which stimulation of
one sensory or cognitive pathway, for example, hearing, leads to automatic,

(41:35):
involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway such
as vision. And that's a definition from psychology today. But
synesthesia is an interesting concept in itself, like how come
people associate certain like letters with colors, or like feelings
with with sounds or something that's interesting because it's without

(41:58):
having experience synaesthie issha it is. What's taking place in
the mind is um it does feel like that kind
of direct connection, you know. Um. The the difficulty in
describing it kind of seems to match up there well
for me, almost saying saying twinkle is like some of

(42:18):
the closest I get to sinis thesia, because that's it's
the sound of star makes again. And the star doesn't
make a sound, but I can sort of hear it,
and it's the word twinkle. It's like saying, why is
this note purple? That sort of thing? All right, well,
on that note, we're gonna take one more break and
then we're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about this
concept a little bit more. Alright, we're back. So I

(42:41):
was looking around for some commentary on idea phones, and
you know, I wanted to see, like, well, what's an
example of somebody's sort of poopooing on idio phones to
sort of use in an idea And I ran across
an article by linguist Paul Newman from Indiana University, and uh,
and he said the following quote, how far ideophones deviate

(43:02):
from the normal systems will vary from language to language,
in some cases more, in some languages less. But in
the final analysis, ideophones are part of the structure of
a specific language and have to be viewed in the
context of that language. Okay, So this is kind of
against the idea of like an overarching class of ideophones
and more like they're specific to the languages where they occur. Yeah,

(43:23):
I mean he's not. I don't want to make it
sounding like he's completely poop poing on the idea, but
like basically what he's he's maybe recommending caution and like
over analyzing their importance. I guess you would say. For instance,
he points out that ideophones are extremely important and certain
certain African languages as well as Asian and Native American languages,
but he argues that in focusing on what's different about ideophones,

(43:45):
he thinks that scholars tend to overlook quote the simple
notion that to a great extent, idiophones are part and
parcel of whatever language they belong to. So again he's not,
you know, saying I don't believe in ideophones, but he's
may he's questioning maybe to what, you know, what amount
of emphasis is is appropriate? Uh? And in looking around

(44:06):
for other tidbits on the topic, I ran across a
very interesting paper by Gary Lupin and Daniel Casisanto in
Language and Cognition from two thousand fourteen titled Meaningless Words
Promote meaningful categorization. Oh, I think I know where they're
going at this, I like this. Yeah. So the common
thread here is that we're talking about non arbitrary word

(44:27):
to meaning mappings. Okay, so this would be back to
kind of like new and newer, like if people are
detecting an inherent sliminess about the word just the sound
of the word itself, right, And so they start exploring
this in the context of just pure nonsense words. And
so they bring up the nonsense words of one of
the great nonsensical writers of all time, and at least

(44:48):
in terms of some of his word choices, that being
Lewis Carroll. Oh yeah, the jabberwock Yes. In fact, they
quote the Jabberwocke twas Brillig and the slivey toves did
guy Or and gimbal in the wave. So there's some
great nonsense in there, But to just focus on one
in particular, slithy is not a word and yet quote.

(45:09):
The nonsense words of Jabberwockie are made meaningful by a
combination of phonological queuing and syntactic and uh distributional information.
So slithy is used as an in an adjective frame
and has phonological neighbors lithe and slimy. Okay, So there
are some queues here, right, like the words in the Jabberwockie.

(45:32):
While they're not English words, it's also not just like
pure sound from out of nowhere, because they often are.
They sound a lot like other words that we do
know the meanings. Right. So it's kind of this idea
that like a new word and nonsense word doesn't quite
work in isolation. And this from actually brings back our

(45:53):
squirrel episode and sort of our uh really are unearthing
I guess of the term skug we're actually ug was
a proper name for a squirrel, right. It was what
Benjamin Franklin, Uh, basically believed that the people in England
called their pet squirrels. Like it's saying a bunch of
scugs would be two squirrels what it would be to
say like a bunch of rovers referring to dogs. And

(46:16):
so when I started using it in my household just
as a general term for squirrels, uh, my wife took
issue with it. It's like that sounds a little like
dirty or something, you know. It sounds like you're you're
you're using profanity against the squirrels. It sounds like an insult.
Or something, and so in cases like that you have
to realize, well, the word scug does not exist in isolation.

(46:37):
If it sounds a little bit like this word or
that word, or even just certain sounds from other words,
then well it does incorporate ug. As if you're going
like ug, yes, yeah, or I guess part of the
appeal of scug to me is like it also sounds
like skull and so much as that's tough. Yeah. So
much of those episodes dealt with how tough and uh
and how and how likely they are to eat the

(47:00):
intense of another animal skulp that sort of thing. Not
all of them, not all. Anyway, back to this paper,
they conducted a lab experiment using the words food and creelch.
Crelch is grape juice, it's my favorite brand, And they
apply these words to two distinct alien species um that
they made up for the experiment, and ascid participants to

(47:20):
come up with real adjectives to describe them. So they're
basically saying, hey, there's an alien known as the crelch.
Describe it. Come up with some adjectives to describe what
this creature looks like, or you there, think about the
foods and so they ended up the describing the creelches
as pointy and narrow. What do you know that's got

(47:41):
a hard case sound? And then guess what the foods
were shaped like, Well, there's an oo sounds those rounded
lips sort of front of the mouth, long vowel, that
makes me think of soft, pillowy. Yeah, yeah, round and plump.
That's what they said, yeah, they and they say quote.
The results expand the scope of research on sound symbolism
and support a non traditional view of word meaning, according

(48:02):
to which words do not have meanings by virtue of
a conventionalized form meaning pairing. Rather, the meaning of a
word is the effect that the word form has on
the user users mental activity, which I think a nice
way of summing up some of what we're talking about here,
like what does this word due to your mental activity?
Like what what additional adjective is, what additional words is?

(48:24):
It's summoning, and what basic characteristics is it's summoning into
your mind? And then you're forced to piece together like
I can imagine very faintly, like it's not a distinct picture,
but I without even reading any of the adjectives listed
in the paper, I kind of have an idea of
what the crouch looks like and what the food looks
like in a broader sense. You know what this makes
me think of? So I like the idea of what

(48:44):
they're suggesting here, that like words can have a sort
of like generalized mental activity impact even if they have
no lexical definition. Uh, it makes me think about the
way that I don't know if you remember, especially, I
had this experience all this time when I was a kid,
of finding jokes funny even though I didn't get them. Oh, yeah,

(49:07):
you know about this, Like when you would hear a
joke that was like an adult joke that had references
to things in it that you didn't understand. So a
joke is made by making sense of something, but you
don't get the sense, and yet it's funny anyway. Sometimes
it would be really funny even though you didn't get
it at all. Oh. I would get this all the
time watching Mystery Science Theater thwo thousand as a kid,

(49:30):
because a lot of they were a lot of pop
pop culture references to shows that I was maybe not
quite old enough to have seen, just because I wasn't
watching television. Uh as a child, you know, I wasn't
watching television when Joe Hodgson was watching television when he
was my age, that sort of thing. So I didn't
necessarily get the jokes, but I found them hilarious. And
to this day, there are still a lot of the

(49:51):
jokes I've I've researched or come up to speed on.
But occasionally I'll be rewatching an old episode of MST
and there'll be a joke where I'm I'm laughing out loud,
and I still have no idea what the connection is there.
I'm right there with you. That happens sometimes with MST especially,
but it just happens. Sometimes you don't get a joke,
but it's still involuntarily triggers laughter. It's just funny, and

(50:14):
it's not even always like you could maybe explain it,
like what if it's just like social laughter, like you're
in a group other people are laughing, but it I
don't know. It happens to me when I'm like, oh,
by myself, there's nobody else there, and it's funny. So yeah,
I think language has this power of it has an
effect on our brains, even when we don't fully understand

(50:35):
the lexical or syntactic significance of it and that's really interesting.
Or sometimes maybe we can only get vague hints of
the lexical significance, but it's it's like it's having an
impact anyway. It's the same way that, um, you know,
you can listen to poetry in another language and it
can be great, like you literally don't understand what they're

(50:56):
talking or you know, I think I can admit this,
especially since I've heard the Columbia linguists John mcward admit
this too, that like most of the time, if I'm like,
if I'm listening to Shakespeare performed, I'm not catching the
meaning of everything. I mean, like, I don't know if
you have this experience too, Like I I sort of
can basically follow the action, but you know, like half

(51:19):
the lines go over my head and I'm like, a way,
you know, I couldn't follow the sense for sense, meaning
of every statement made by a character in a Shakespeare
play because there's a lot of antiquated language in it
and sometimes like the the rhythm, you know, the diambic
pentameter or whatever, the rhythm and stuff in the in
the writing makes for very sonically beautiful writing that is

(51:43):
creating pleasurable feelings in my brain, but I'm not always
following the literal sense of what is being said. Yeah,
I would always have that experience in college taking Shakespeare classes,
you'd end up, I feel like I would end up
having like two different readings or two different viewings of
the same play or the same scene. There's the version
that you you take in before you've done a deeper reading,

(52:04):
and then you get in, you read the text, you
read all the footnotes about what what this word means
or what it's referring to, or what it would have
meant in the context of the time, and then you're
left with this, you know, ultimately enriched understanding of what
the play is. But it is a slightly different experience. Yeah,
that is really interesting. One thing that I think is
really funny that I mentioned that that comment by John mcward,

(52:27):
But I've heard him recommend watching Shakespeare plays in another language,
like where where somebody's gonna done a good translation into
another language of Shakespeare if you speak that other language,
like if you speak Vietnamese and somebody's done a good
Vietnamese translation of Hamlet, watch that He says that sometimes
that can be even better than watching Shakespeare in the

(52:49):
original English. How about watching the German language episodes of
Monty Python. Have you ever done that? No? They cut
at least one, maybe more. I don't remember the details
on it, but they cut at least one German language
episode where it wasn't dubbed in German. They performed all
these skits again in German. Is it funny? Um? Glad? Yeah?

(53:11):
I mean, it can't help but be funny given that concept,
I don't know if it's necessarily funny beyond just I mean,
if you speak a little German, you can certainly pick
up on some of the words, and of course there's
a lot of you know, a lot a lot of
similarity between the German language system and the English language system. Uh.
But ultimately I would say it it always felt just

(53:31):
kind of like surface level amusing to someone who doesn't
like speak German at all. You know, it is funny though,
is a non French speaker Eddie Iszard's bits in French? Okay?
You ever seen those? No? I haven't. It's a show
for an English speaking audience, but he does a long
stretch of the show just in French, and it's really funny.
But anyway, I wanted to come back at the end

(53:53):
here to just briefly discuss a little bit about like
what we might learn from idiophones. One interesting point that
Robson makes in his Eon article is about language acquisition
in infancy. You know, obviously idiophone type words are useful
to speakers falling ages. Everybody uses them, But he wonders,
you know, could they be especially useful when a baby

(54:15):
is acquiring language for the first time, Like if certain
sounds innately for some reason or another signal associations with
certain images or tactile sensations or types of movement. Could
it be that we instinctually use these associations to help
young children learn language without realizing it. Like think about

(54:38):
the ways that parents tend to say things when talking
to young children, like teensy weensy instead of small. Well,
I'm going to speak for at least some segment of
the parents out there and say I never used the
word eatsy weensy. Well, a lot of parents do, though.
I mean, you hear that kind of thing, Yeah, I
mean the whole Yeah, the whole topic of of for

(55:00):
lack of a better word, cute talk is is very
fascinating to me because I mean, I really I would
like to come back and do we've touched on it before,
talking about um a little bit about about talking cute.
I think we did. It came up a little bit
in the episode about whining whining. Yes, there's like there's
sort of like an embedded language between parent and child,

(55:23):
where like the parent uses like an elevated tone, like
higher pitch terms and certain kinds of things when talking
to a kid, and then the kid does it back
when wanting attention from the parent. Right, Yeah, but I
would like to come back and discuss this thing that
I'm going through now, is experiencing like, uh, my child
who's in first grade, Well, suddenly he'll need to talk

(55:45):
in this cute voice, like he'll be using terms that
are they're a little cute, see wootsie, you know, but
but speaking in a way that we never spoke. We
never spoke to him like that. We never spoke like
cartoon characters. We didn't encourage him to speak like a
cartoon character. And granted, you know, you can pick up
all this stuff from your classmates, from TV shows, et cetera.
There are so many different, uh, you know, ways you're

(56:06):
getting information at this age. But but uh, I know
there have been there, there have been papers written on
like try trying to figure out exactly why uh kids
about this age range why they do this, because it
seems to be a pretty widespread thing. So that's one
topic I would I would love to return to, if
if only for my own sanity. Well, I mean, I
think it's clear that some of these types of terms

(56:28):
that parents use in this qt C talk are sort
of sound symbolic, right, their versions of ideophones some one
way or another. Robson sites research by Mutsumi am I
at Kio University in Japan and so Taro Kita at
the University of Warwick and in the UK that UM
one and two year olds quote when given a sound

(56:48):
symbolic word, we're more likely to direct their attention at
the appropriate object or movement, and also that sound symbolic
words for things were easier for children of this age
to remember, lay it or after they had learned. And
then for a deeper dive, I guess I I'd recommend
people go and read this article themselves, but I just
wanted to mention he is sort of by talking about

(57:10):
the question which is just a hypothesis at this point
of whether sound symbolic types of words could have been
there at the genesis of human language. About this question,
we asked at the beginning, where did the first words
come from? When there were no words, but you know
that it existed before for things to derive from? The
question is would words that inherently, for one reason or

(57:32):
another evoke feelings and evoke sensations just by the sound
of them? With those kinds of words form a bridge
from humans with no language to the mostly arbitrary lexical
languages that would come later. So like a very simple
like survival basis, you could imagine like a like a
kiky sound is attention, attention, and then a buba sound

(57:55):
or whatever is calm down, it's chill, everything's good, like
bay sically get into some of the theories about like
the communication of laughter after being a way of of
instantly saying, Oh, the thing that I thought was gonna
kill us is not. It's not kiki, it's bubba after all. Ha. Yeah.
Well yeah, I mean like that the first sounds or
the first words could have been things that were like

(58:17):
phonemes that create a certain sensation or sort of evoke
a certain kind of image or feeling. And that later
on they have more fixed lexical definitions, and these sounds
perhaps are like potentially like some of the first building
blocks of of more powerful words and concepts, you know, yeah,
like it's it's something that's booba. Booba is like it's

(58:39):
super comforting and chill, and something that's kiki kikikiki is
like three times is rough, or something that's bubba kiki
is soft at first but has like a hidden bar,
you know, uh, you know. Obviously you can extrapolate from
there and imagine like language language systems building up based
on that. But the funny thing is, of course, I mean,
we have no idea is actually correct about this being

(59:02):
the origins of of language. But if that were in
some way true, the funny thing is we don't like
run out of uses for these types of words as
we get lexical languages. These words just continue to be
as useful as they ever were, were more and more
useful all the time. I just thought of a great
one in English. It I I there's no ikey sound

(59:25):
that ikey is mimicking, and yet ikey is like a
deeply evocative word that conjures a feeling. Yeah, yeah, And
then is the word moist. You know, that's a common
common topic of discussion. They're like, why do people have
a like a visceral reaction to that word. I don't know,
but we just lost a lot of listeners. Well it's

(59:47):
just as well because we're at the end of the episode.
We're going to wrap it up there. But again, this
is something we could come back to in the future.
There's plenty more to discuss about about the you know,
the potential origins of language and just how language works. UH.
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