If I told you that pikapika means ‘sparkling’ in Japanese, would you be surprised? Or would you just think that, to some extent, ‘it makes kinda sense’?
You got it, the most famous pokemon on the planet is called Pikachu, because pikapika means ‘sparkling’ - and ‘pika’ alone is sparkle -. Nevertheless, we are not here to compare our Pokemon GO! collection with you, let’s take a moment instead, to reflect on why this ‘pikapika’ actually sounds like something sparky, something like tiny thunderbolts popping here and there almost stinging us with their electrostatic efforts.
According to a certain contemporary wave of Linguists, this effect might not be casual. If you think that kiki sound somehow pointy and slender, while bouba reminds you of something smooth, swallowed or round, then you must know that the vast majority of people on this planet agrees with you, regardless of their mother tongue.
Pikapika is an Ideophone, a category of words that the predominant Eurocentric view of traditional Linguistics might have neglected for some time, but nowadays is taking the deserved attention of the scholars from all over the World.
Ideophone or Onomatopoeia?
If you had a look at Wikipedia’s definition of Ideophones, you’d find yourself reading a description matching the meaning of the onomatopoeia, almost depicting the latter as a subcategory of the former.
However, the two hold profound differences: Onomatopoeia is, in very simple words, lexical imitation of sounds. Animal noises such as meow or bark are simple examples. Fun fact: foxes ‘bark’ in English, literature says.
Ideophone, on the other hand, is a term that refers only to words that belong to a limited number of languages, in which it holds quite interesting morphological or lexical peculiarities that are often associated with onomatopoeia, but that are not actually the same. This second category -as David Robson states in his article for Aeon- “is considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. You do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning”.
Ideophones are usually identified with three main characteristics. They are ‘marked’, meaning that they stand out from other words. Secondly, they are Words or, better said, “conventionalised minimal free forms with specifiable meanings” and as a consequence to this, they are registered in dictionaries and thirdly, they are mainly Depictions of Sensory Imagery, meaning that the images they give out with their sounds often involve more than one of the five senses.
Another observed difference between onomatopoeias and ideophones is that English almost doesn't have the latter, while the use of the former is endemic to the language.
Both these two categories of words go under the phenomenon of Sound Symbolism, which is the resemblance between a sound and a meaning. These peculiar words, ideophones, can be found in many languages of the world, some from Central Africa, others from far East Asia or Turkish and Quechuan.
Perhaps, thanks to contemporary pop-culture, Ideophones of the Japanese and Korean languages might sound slightly more familiar to us, like wakuwaku (‘exciting’ in Japanese), but the amount of these forms is astonishing in other less-renowned languages.
Still quoting Robson, it has been proven that almost all spoken languages have onomatopoeic ideophones, while just some languages also have these funny words standing for non-auditory information, such as motion, shine, shape and texture. Some languages even have ideophones that depict colour!
In Your Face, De Saussure!
The recent growth in interest for ideophones and the resulting growth of studies in the matter, has put into question the Saussurean fundamentals of modern linguistics.
We know De Saussure for being the father of contemporary Linguistics and, specifically, for theorising “the first principle of linguistics' which stated the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs. This basically means that the link between signal and signification is completely random, the signal being the written or spoken word and the signification being the concept the word refers to. Hmm. Do you see where we are going?
These ideophones look like they completely go against De Saussure’s theory, stating that somehow, some concepts are linked to some sounds for a very specific reason, and not in a randomic, arbitrary way!
Could these quirky words actually confute the very first principle of modern linguistics, giving the way to a proof that the sign-significance link is actually shaped by some unspoken, subconscious behaviour, common to all human beings?
We don’t know yet. But it has been proven that there are sounds that give out a feeling that is shared by all speakers of the world, for example [i] represent concepts that feel light, fine or bright; while [ɔ] sound in ‘talk’ or the [ɑ] in ‘past’ are often linked to the ideas of slow, heavy or dark.
Last but not least, there might also be a universal, common perception off different tones:
“In many languages, the pitch at which a syllable is spoken can change a word’s meaning. Westermann found that words representing slowness, darkness and heaviness tended to have lower tones than those depicting speed, agility and brightness, which were formed of higher tones.”
This new theory could open a brand new world of research on humans shaped their languages throughout thousands of years of evolution.
Stay Lunatic
The last three decades have proven the turning point of Linguistics, thanks also to a renewed, more global perspective. The previous Eurocentic canon had been excluding Ideophones, to the point of defining the “lunatic fringe” of language.
However, thanks to this ‘lunatic’ side of language and thanks to a more inclusive approach of linguistics, it might be soon possible to discover some key passage of the evolution of human communication. How did we pass from gesticulation to grammar structure? How will these incredible words help us find out when we decided that words were a thing?
These questions might soon find their answer. For now, we can’t help being very wakuwaku about it.
