Language Is Life

[jess tauber]

A couple of basic math notions are built into sound symbolism at the segmental level. For instance graves tend to represent wider, acutes narrower things or processes. Within the graves diffuse labials tend to represent 3D ideas, but compact velars (or uvulars depending on system) 2D (from 3D). Within acutes the diffuse dental/alveolar sets tend to represent creation of 0D (from 1D), while compact palatals (etc.) a more 1D (from 2D) situation. No dimensionality is 'pure'-each feeds off into the others. Consonantal manner also seems to have geometric/topological significance often- in Salishan the fricatives represent local 2D surface to surface contact with motion (Gladys Reichard first noticed this in Coeur d'Alene almost 80 years ago). And part of the work on Vantage Theory done by the late Robert MacLaury involved similar ideas in one of the Mesoamerican languages he was working on.

It has been widely recognized that reduplication also deals with numericity in a gross fashion- and it is interesting that it tends to interact very strongly with sound symbolic processes, especially augmentative/diminutive ones. So not just dimensionality but multiplicity and scale seem to be associated together strongly at this level. In some Chinook dialects augmentative/diminutive shifting operates along several different phonological dimensions- and its unlikely that each pair gives exactly the 'same' reading. But extinction means we'll never know now.

It would have been interesting to know how such deep (pre?)-math encodings would color the more formal systems that arise on top of them- for instance is there any link to numeral classifiers (as there is with shape classifying terms such as found in Mayan languages which, like expressive verbs, tend to be very transparent phonosemantically)? Formal math systems would fall into the grammatical side of the equation, whereas the much less tangible (but maybe more deeply felt?) sound symbolisms would be, in my model, 'antigrammatical'- that is, standing in processual opposition.

Jess Tauber