Sound Symbolism & Reflective Abstractions
ARMENIAN MORA PHONEMES AND SYLLABLE. THE SOUND TS = PRPOGATE
propagate
verb
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Abstractions and levels of abstraction play an important role in the theory of general semantics originated by Alfred Korzybski. Anatol Rapoport wrote: "Abstracting is a mechanism by which an infinite variety of experiences can be mapped on short noises (words)."
In history
Francis Fukuyama defines history as "a deliberate attempt of abstraction in which we separate out important from unimportant events".
Francis Fukuyama defines history as "a deliberate attempt of abstraction in which we separate out important from unimportant events".
In linguistics Main article: Abstraction (linguistics)
Researchers in linguistics frequently apply abstraction so as to allow analysis of the phenomena of language at the desired level of detail. A commonly used abstraction, the phoneme, abstracts speech sounds in such a way as to neglect details that cannot serve to differentiate meaning. Other analogous kinds of abstractions (sometimes called "emic units") considered by linguists include morphemes, graphemes, and lexemes.
Abstraction also arises in the relation between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Pragmatics involves considerations that make reference to the user of the language; semantics considers expressions and what they denote (the designata) abstracted from the language user; and syntax considers only the expressions themselves, abstracted from the designata.
In mathematics[edit]
Main article: Abstraction (mathematics)
Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying structures, patterns or properties of a mathematical concept or object, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalizing it so that it has wider applications or matching among other abstract descriptions of equivalent phenomena.
The advantages of abstraction in mathematics are:
It reveals deep connections between different areas of mathematics.
Known results in one area can suggest conjectures in another related area.
Techniques and methods from one area can be applied to prove results in other related area.
Patterns from one mathematical object can be generalized to other similar objects in the same class.
The main disadvantage of abstraction is that highly abstract concepts are more difficult to learn, and might require a degree of mathematical maturity and experience before they can be assimilated.
Researchers in linguistics frequently apply abstraction so as to allow analysis of the phenomena of language at the desired level of detail. A commonly used abstraction, the phoneme, abstracts speech sounds in such a way as to neglect details that cannot serve to differentiate meaning. Other analogous kinds of abstractions (sometimes called "emic units") considered by linguists include morphemes, graphemes, and lexemes.
Abstraction also arises in the relation between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Pragmatics involves considerations that make reference to the user of the language; semantics considers expressions and what they denote (the designata) abstracted from the language user; and syntax considers only the expressions themselves, abstracted from the designata.
In mathematics[edit]
Main article: Abstraction (mathematics)
Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying structures, patterns or properties of a mathematical concept or object, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalizing it so that it has wider applications or matching among other abstract descriptions of equivalent phenomena.
The advantages of abstraction in mathematics are:
It reveals deep connections between different areas of mathematics.
Known results in one area can suggest conjectures in another related area.
Techniques and methods from one area can be applied to prove results in other related area.
Patterns from one mathematical object can be generalized to other similar objects in the same class.
The main disadvantage of abstraction is that highly abstract concepts are more difficult to learn, and might require a degree of mathematical maturity and experience before they can be assimilated.
In music
In music, the term abstraction can be used to describe improvisatory approaches to interpretation, and may sometimes indicate abandonment of tonality. Atonal music has no key signature, and is characterized by the exploration of internal numeric relationships.[19]
In neurology
Further information: Intelligence, Mental rotation, and Mental operations
A recent meta-analysis suggests that the verbal system has greater engagement for abstract concepts when the perceptual system is more engaged for processing of concrete concepts. This is because abstract concepts elicit greater brain activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus compared to concrete concepts which elicit greater activity in the posterior cingulate, precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal gyrus. Other research into the human brain suggests that the left and right hemispheres differ in their handling of abstraction. For example, one meta-analysis reviewing human brain lesions has shown a left hemisphere bias during tool usageIn linguistics, sound symbolism is the resemblance between sound and meaning. It is a form of linguistic iconicity.
Sound symbolism in basic vocabulary[edit]
Blasi et al. (2016),[5] Joo (2020),[6] and Johansson et al. (2020)[7] demonstrated that in the languages around the world, certain concepts in the basic vocabulary (such as the Swadesh List or the Leipzig-Jakarta list) tend to be represented by words containing certain sounds. Below are some of the phonosemantic associations confirmed by the three studies:
ConceptSound. Breast Nasal sounds (e. g. /m/). Knee Rounded vowels (e. g. /o/). Tongue Lateral consonants (e. g. /l/).
In music, the term abstraction can be used to describe improvisatory approaches to interpretation, and may sometimes indicate abandonment of tonality. Atonal music has no key signature, and is characterized by the exploration of internal numeric relationships.[19]
In neurology
Further information: Intelligence, Mental rotation, and Mental operations
A recent meta-analysis suggests that the verbal system has greater engagement for abstract concepts when the perceptual system is more engaged for processing of concrete concepts. This is because abstract concepts elicit greater brain activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus compared to concrete concepts which elicit greater activity in the posterior cingulate, precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal gyrus. Other research into the human brain suggests that the left and right hemispheres differ in their handling of abstraction. For example, one meta-analysis reviewing human brain lesions has shown a left hemisphere bias during tool usageIn linguistics, sound symbolism is the resemblance between sound and meaning. It is a form of linguistic iconicity.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is considered to be the founder of modern 'scientific' linguistics. Central to what de Saussure says about words are two related statements: First, he says that "the sign is arbitrary". He considers the words that we use to indicate things and concepts could be any words – they are essentially just a consensus agreed upon by the speakers of a language and have no discernible pattern or relationship to the thing. Second, he says that, because words are arbitrary, they have meaning only in relation to other words. A dog is a dog because it is not a cat or a mouse or a horse, etc. These ideas have permeated the study of words since the 19th century.
However, when it comes to the idea that there was an original imposer of names in Cratylus, Plato has Socrates commenting on the origins and correctness of various names and words as follows: "Now the letter rho, as I was saying, appeared to the imposer of names an excellent instrument for the expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose: for example, in the actual words rein and roe he represents motion by rho; also in the words tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words such as krouein (strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein (break), kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of movements he generally finds an expression in the letter R, because, as I imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order to express motion".
The Upanishads and Vyākaraṇa contain a lot of material about sound symbolism, for instance:
The mute consonants represent the earth, the sibilants the sky, the vowels heaven. The mute consonants represent fire, the sibilants air, the vowels the sun… The mute consonants represent the eye, the sibilants the ear, the vowels the mind. — Aitareya Aranyaka III.2.6.2.
The Upanishads and Vyākaraṇa contain a lot of material about sound symbolism, for instance:
The mute consonants represent the earth, the sibilants the sky, the vowels heaven. The mute consonants represent fire, the sibilants air, the vowels the sun… The mute consonants represent the eye, the sibilants the ear, the vowels the mind. — Aitareya Aranyaka III.2.6.2.
Leibniz on the other hand concludes that 'clearly there is no perfect correspondence between words and things, but neither is the relationship completely arbitrary.'
Onomatopoeia refers to words that imitate sounds. An ideophone is "a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery".[4] Unlike onomatopoeia, an ideophone refers to words that depict any sensory domain, such as vision or touch. Examples are Korean mallang-mallang 말랑말랑 'soft' and Japanese kira-kira キラキラ 'shiny'. A phonaestheme is a sub-morphemic sequence of sounds that are associated to a certain range of meanings. A well-known example is English gl-, which is present in many words related to light or vision, such as gleam, glow, or glare. Since is submorphemic, gl- itself is not a morpheme, and it does not form compounds with other morphemes: -eam, -ow, and -are have no meaning of their own. Phonaesthemes, however, are not necessarily iconic, as they may be language-specific and may not iconically resemble the meaning they are associated to.
Magnitude symbolism: High front vowels, such as /i/, are known to be perceptually associated to small size, whereas low and/or back vowels, such as /u/ or /a/, are usually associated with big size. This phenomenon is known as magnitude symbolism. Sapir (1929) showed that, when asked which of the two tables, named mil and mal, is bigger than the other, many people choose mal to be bigger than mil. This phenomenon is not only observable in pseudowords, but also present throughout English vocabulary as well.
Sound symbolism in basic vocabulary[edit]
Blasi et al. (2016),[5] Joo (2020),[6] and Johansson et al. (2020)[7] demonstrated that in the languages around the world, certain concepts in the basic vocabulary (such as the Swadesh List or the Leipzig-Jakarta list) tend to be represented by words containing certain sounds. Below are some of the phonosemantic associations confirmed by the three studies:
ConceptSound. Breast Nasal sounds (e. g. /m/). Knee Rounded vowels (e. g. /o/). Tongue Lateral consonants (e. g. /l/).
There are two major approaches to understanding semantic knowledge, the one 'embodied cognition' which emphasizes the importance of perceptual, motor and emotional experiences in our conceptual structure and word meanings and the other is what we gloss as amodal cognition, which emphasizes the role of symbolic and non-perceptual representations.
So to the question how abstract is language? The answer is that abstractness pervades every corner of language.
In the light of the ubiquity of letters and abstract words, the need to understand where and how abstract meanings come from becomes acute. The best source of knowledge about abstract meanings seems to be language itself. It seems that arbitrariness allows language to better convey abstract meanings. I believe there is a tension between abstractness and iconicity, such that to successfully convey abstract meanings, it is ‘better’ for a word to be arbitrary, not iconic. It seems with language, or a language that is more iconic makes it more difficult to express abstract ideas and meanings and may even make it more difficult to learn abstract meanings in the first place.
Iconicity refers to cases where a word form bears some resemblance to its meaning. This resemblance may be easy to detect, as in onomatopoetic words such as tweet, chirp, click and bang, or more subtle, as in a word like teeny, which is iconic because people have a robust association between smallness and the sound but it limits the freedom of imagination.Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in iconicity. This new research shows iconicity to be more than a linguistic quirk limited to onomatopoeic words like buzz. Rather, it is a widespread design feature of both signed and spoken languages. For example, the ability of speakers of one language to guess the meaning of iconic words in other languages is higher than one might suppose. The original question of whether language is predominantly arbitrary or predominantly iconic is now increasingly viewed as a false dichotomy, with researchers recognizing multiple interacting forms of iconicity that are interwoven with arbitrariness between two communicative design principles that are mutually compatible.
Abstract words are defined as those that refer to ‘meanings that cannot be experienced directly, but which we know because the meanings can be defined by other words'. An abstract word ‘refers to something that you cannot experience directly through your senses or actions. Its meaning depends on language. The easiest way to explain it is by using other words’. A design feature of language that facilitates abstraction like the alphabet itself, has fundamentally a form-to-meaning arbitrariness. Although arbitrariness in language is often taken for granted, the extent to which languages are arbitrary should not be surprising given the limitations of non-arbitrary (iconic) word forms.
It may be helpful here to clarify the relationship between the mirror/mind and the reflection. The mirror marks one end of a spectrum of reflectivity, and is often thought of as embodying a one-to-one relationship between the image created in the mirror and physical reality. Experience of the mirror beyond the iconic recognition of the self, extends to include other distortions, perspectives, and transformations. The mirror can provide recognizable images, but an image that is not a simple copy or reproduction of an object in the world goes beyond physical reality. Every mirror alters what it reflects to some extent; at the least it reverses things. At the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, it is simply the reflection—as opposed to the absorption—of light.
The reflective mind in totality could thus be said to contain a sequence of possible images, from the “photographically realistic” to the most extremely “non-objective” or abstract. It is an amalgam of the subjective and objective—experience of it is subjective, but what makes up that experience are the objective actions of reflected light in a specific place and time. If “the reflective” can be described as a medium, it is one in which the viewer becomes the author, because without the viewer it is impossible to discern the something, or even the nothing, that is there.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his poems and fictions about mirrors, made clear that reflections of the self are not only constructions of the mind, but that they have a disarmingly palpable presence in the world. Importantly, he put forward the notion that all materials that reflect light at any level can become active mirrors in relation to our experience of the world. He observed that the activating force of reflections (and therefore of possible mirroring) appears not only in chromed sculpture or glass mirrors, specifically crafted for their highly reflective capacities. He saw that this force also arises out of the “merely” reflective thing—whether or not that thing has been specifically created for this effect—and of course in natural materials and or phenomena.
I have a notion that abstraction is based on reflectivity. If you sit down and reflect on a philosophical idea, you enter a certain kind of state in your mind. If you look at a reflective object and become involved with looking at it, your mind enters a very similar kind of state. So, looking at a reflective object and reflecting on an idea might be a very similar experience. My idea is that a metaphor for how language works, because basically at the fundamental level it’s origin looking at an object, a symbol associated to a phoneme that is reflecting an idea.notion that abstraction was based on reflectivity. If you sit down and reflect on a philosophical idea, you enter a certain kind of state in your mind. If you look at a reflective object and become involved with looking at it, your mind enters a very similar kind of state. So, looking at a reflective object and reflecting on an idea might be very similar experiences. My idea was that this could become a metaphor for how art worked, because basically it’s looking at an object and reflecting an idea.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his poems and fictions about mirrors, made clear that reflections of the self are not only constructions of the mind, but that they have a disarmingly palpable presence in the world. Importantly, he put forward the notion that all materials that reflect light at any level can become active mirrors in relation to our experience of the world. He observed that the activating force of reflections (and therefore of possible mirroring) appears not only in chromed sculpture or glass mirrors, specifically crafted for their highly reflective capacities. He saw that this force also arises out of the “merely” reflective thing—whether or not that thing has been specifically created for this effect—and of course in natural materials and or phenomena.
I have a notion that abstraction is based on reflectivity. If you sit down and reflect on a philosophical idea, you enter a certain kind of state in your mind. If you look at a reflective object and become involved with looking at it, your mind enters a very similar kind of state. So, looking at a reflective object and reflecting on an idea might be a very similar experience. My idea is that a metaphor for how language works, because basically at the fundamental level it’s origin looking at an object, a symbol associated to a phoneme that is reflecting an idea.notion that abstraction was based on reflectivity. If you sit down and reflect on a philosophical idea, you enter a certain kind of state in your mind. If you look at a reflective object and become involved with looking at it, your mind enters a very similar kind of state. So, looking at a reflective object and reflecting on an idea might be very similar experiences. My idea was that this could become a metaphor for how art worked, because basically it’s looking at an object and reflecting an idea.
Reflectivity is made up of the interaction of light and surface, an objective image formed of a collaboration between material and energy that articulates the intrinsic properties of the object and its situation in space. But, strangely, our experience of it is the opposite, a subjective experience in which the reflection seems to exist somewhere between the object, the light source, and our eyes. Often it confuses us with its variability, its tendency to disorient our normal spatial capabilities. In other words, it fascinates, because it cannot be completely explained as a collection of optical effects.
Reflectivity physically exudes mystery, even within our world that tries to eliminate the unknown from all aspects of life. Benjamin Buchloh describes the historical development of our interest in the metaphoric possibilities of perceptual experience within the fields of art and architecture: “What followed the cult of transparency was a cult of reflections, of mirror effects that would reflect audience behavior and movement in the manner of a recording camera.”8 Ultimately, these experiences are registered in our minds not as a single, photographic image, but as multiple moments of the perception of light interacting with materiality.
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