Sound symbolism

Such correspondence between linguistic sound and meaning may significantly affect the form of spoken languages.

When Hermogenes asks if he can provide another hypothesis on how signs come into being (his own is simply 'convention'), Socrates initially suggests that they fit their referents in virtue of the sounds they are made of: 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 motionHowever, faced by an overwhelming number of counterexamples given by Hermogenes, Socrates has to admit that "my first notions of original names are truly wild and ridiculous".

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.

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.

Ideophones are heavily present in many African and East/Southeast Asian languages, such as Japanese, Thai, Cantonese and Xhosa.

A well-known example is English gl-, which is present in many words related to light or vision, such as gleam, glow, or glare.

[10] Examples include: English this and that, French ceci and cela, and Indonesian ini and itu.

[11] Joo (2020)[12] suggests that this may be related to the infant's tendency of using the nasal sound to seek the attention of the caretaker.

Sound symbolism can relate to the color, shade, shape, and size of the brand mark.