keywords
linguistics, sound symbolism, sound-shape iconicity, cross-modal congruency, phonology, second language learning, evolutional linguistics
Introduction
Back in the Mid Bronze Age, an unexpected aha moment prompted Phoenician turquoise miners to use Egyptian hieroglyphs to write words in their own language. Their "experiment" gave origin to the first alphabet, which evolved into many modern alphabets, including the Roman letters used to write the present article. The newly acquired possibility of representing the somewhat abstract but numerically limited sounds of a language, instead of an infinite number of concepts or words, was a game changer in the history of writing. However, as the systems morphed from icons into symbols, they lost their mnemonic strength.
Language representation is not an easy endeavor. The flow of speech is perceived acoustically and constitutes a multitude of distinct audible vibration waves that propagate in the air. Different civilizations have devised distinct systems to represent language by means of visual signs. In order to address the semiotic nature of those systems, we need to shortly refer to the Peircean Semiotics and its three types of signs: symbols, icons, and indices.
Symbols are signs that are culturally constructed, need to be agreed upon, and then memorized by its users. The Roman letter f is a symbol; its relation to the sound it represents is arbitrary. Icons, conversely, are signs that resemble the object they represent. The ancient Chinese character for rain was iconic, easy to learn because it looked like rain. Its logic was not based on representing the flow of speech per se, but the concepts referred to by it.
Indices, or indexes, however, follow a different logic. They are not arbitrary but do not resemble the referent either. They are signified by posing a direct link between them and the object they represent. Uniskript signs are indexical because they refer to speech sounds, which are physical waves, by pointing to the articulatory features that produce them.
The three different types of signs are illustrated in the chart below, with an arrow indicating a continuum of abstraction from left to right.