Metaphor/quotes/postnote/notes/2/8/2024

The Canada Goose Chin Strap

Aloha

Metaphor

Some recent linguistic theories view all language in essence as metaphorical.[4]

wiki, metaphor

So I'd like to do the same thing with synesthesia. First of all I'd like to show it's real, it's not bogus. Second, suggest candidate mechanisms, what's going on in the brain. And third, so what - why should I care? So I'm going to argue in fact synesthesia has very broad implications. It might tell you about things like metaphor and how language evolved in the brain, maybe even the emergence of abstract thought that us humans, human beings are very good at.
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And just for fun, I'm going to tell you this is Martian alphabet. Just as in English alphabet, A is a, B is b, you've got each shape with the particular sound, this is Martian alphabet and one of these shapes is kiki and the other is booba, and I want you to tell me which is which. How many of you think the bulbous shape is the kiki, raise your hands? Well there's one mutation there. In fact what you find is if you do this experiment, 98% of people say the jagged shape, the shattered glass is kiki, and the bulbous amoeboid shape is a booba. Now why is that?

from
Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese
Reith Lectures 4
The Emerging Mind
web

Notes: it's almost like smile/grin letters are for happy, small things, and the others for sad, big things...a reach...but something like that is being considered by the linguists...rather than words being arbitrary, meaning having no relation to how they are spoken, articulated, ideophones are are all over, and it's tangled up with intonation...the ABCs are like arranged...ab, cd, ef, gh, ij...kl, mn...op, qr...s...tu...vw...xyz...and that's a reach in progress...the linguists must have names for all the tones and clicks and such and their corresponding lips tongue teeth mouth movements...(oh, the ABC song, iambic and such-2/8/2024edit)

from my post, Ideophones
web

But that's only part of the story, part one. Part two, I'm going to argue, there's also a pre-existing built-in cross-activation. Just as there is between visual and auditory, the booba/kiki effect, there's also between visual in the fusiform and the motor brocas area in the front of the brain that controls the sequence of activations of muscles of vocalisation, phonation and articulation - lips, tongue and mouth. How do I know that? Well let's take an example. Let's take the example of something tiny, say teeny weeny, un peu, diminutive - look at what my lips are doing. The amazing thing is they're actually physically mimicking the visual appearance of the objejct - versus enormous, large. We're actually physically mimicking the visual appearance of the object so what I'm arguing is that also again a pre-existing bias to map certain visual shapes onto certain sounds in the motor maps in the brocas area.

from
Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese
Reith Lectures 4
The Emerging Mind
web

The bouba/kiki effect, or kiki/bouba effect, is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. Most narrowly, it is the tendency for people, when presented with the nonsense words bouba /ˈbuːbə/ and kiki /ˈkiːkiː/, to associate bouba with a rounded shape and kiki with a spiky shape. Its discovery dates back to the 1920s, when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways. There is a strong general tendency towards the effect worldwide; it has been robustly confirmed across a majority of cultures and languages in which it has been researched,[1] for example including among English-speaking American university students, Tamil speakers in India, speakers of certain languages with no writing system, young children, infants, and (though to a much lesser degree) the congenitally blind.[1] It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.[2] The bouba/kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.[3]

wiki, tiki bouba

Notes: a side by side!...my happysmall, sadbig with kiki and bulbous!...go figure...I was going to go on and on about the etymology of the word metaphor...transport across or some such...that for anothertime... but I got diverted by wiki's footnote 4 to radio talk about book, The Emerging Mind...a curio: kiki wiki tiki...what is kiki?...sheesh...footnote 3 for anothertime!

Aloha,

:)

DavidDavid