Language, Sounds and Intelligent Design

Thank you Chu for posting this fascinating topic and sharing your videos. I've only watched the first and I must say, manna after my own heart! You conveyed so much in such a small space - but so eloquently and perceptively.

In my one-time line of work this concept of language as encoding 'the essence of things' was a given. I think all true poets and poetic dramatists, especially of course Shake-spear, took this not just as a given but as a purposeful calling to work through or from and to use sound and rhythm as meaningful beyond the surface of the language so as to reveal totality of being rather than mere utility. In a simple way when first working with performers of this kind of 'heightened' text I would get them to experience and play with a whole body sense of the sound qualities encased with words/signifiers. At a simplistic level - and just taking English as an example (because I think in a strange way as a language it encapsulates this inherent creative tension very well) - one can simply it down to consonants being the 'thought' or shaping or form of the thing to be signified and the vowel as its 'emotion' or feeling or expressiveness. And in English this negotiation, or dance, or marriage, or war between these two places informs and even shapes the final signifying word. The vowels in some way are trying to escape or expand or flow and the consonants are controlling and forming and dictating the limits and shapes to the vowels. Obviously this has many ebbs and flows, but it seems to be a creative compromise between the fixed and the free, between tightening and loosening of fully integrated sensational and mind meaning.

So much of this apprehensional power of words (as opposed to comprehensional) has been lost today where we are so overloaded by and over dependent on the visual with the ensuing dilution of our other sensory powers. Back in the 16th century people in London said they went to 'hear' a play (not watch). Tells you a lot about what has been lost along the way. But I used to find when working with those willing to re-tune their bodies/voices, that they became way more excited about language when they began to experience and explore words as sprung capsules full of explosive meaning buried in just the sound they make - so I would say its a natural human attribute that lies way deeper than prevailing social programming or culture.

Anyway thank you. I'm really looking forward to watching your other videos. I'll learn much from you and perhaps rekindle somewhat a love that was waning.
 
Great video series, Chu! You explain it in such an easy to understand way...super interesting stuff!

I remember the Babel: Language of the 21st Century book was shared as a PDF here, or maybe on the old Cass yahoo group, years ago...maybe someone still has a copy? Whichever computer I had it on is long gone. It was quite mind-blowing to me, though I can't recall much of it now..
 
Palinurus said:
This article contains a video clip from The Chase with the most important declaration with regard to this subject.
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Interesting. It is possible that it is a fairly common and developed idea within science fiction.

Very similar to Protoculture.

Children of Protoculture​

The Protoculture was the first sentient race in the galaxy. Realizing they were alone, they sent out seeding missions to help influence the evolution of life on other planets. Long after the Protoculture went extinct, their legacy remained as several planets across the galaxy developed humanoid lifeforms. These subcultures are commonly known as the Children of Protoculture.
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And:

Note: Whoever reads the complete story in the link will find some very interesting things... like giants created for war or beings from another dimension that feed on the spiritual energy...
 
Laura said:
I've been thinking lately that language - sounds - have something to do with geometry of information. After all, "In the beginning was the Word..."
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Exploring this idea, it seems like there are a few foundational concepts that are highly interrelated. Mathematics, language, sound, information, geometry. It seems quite difficult to describe any of these without at least some sort of reference to the other. Mathematics elaborates geometry, but mathematics requires geometric symbols to do the elaboration. And the meaning of a geometric symbol can only be conveyed via some sort of sound.

The C's have described mathematics as being the 'only universal language', but there's clearly more than meets the eye to this statement. After all, how can a concept like "mother" be described mathematically? Could you imagine communicating with a mind that would require that kind of description? :-O

The "essences" of sound groupings that Chu describes from Abehserah's book, if reflective of the geometry of information, points to a sort of 'meta-information' that causes the 'geometricizing' of the information. This 'meta-information' could be the property of an archetype, say at the sixth density level of pure knowledge/truth.

So perhaps the Truth 'shapes' information in a way that provides a sound as one inherently essential aspect, and we, through our hyperdimensional connections to this information, 'play' these sounds both unconsciously and consciously via activities such as music, poetry and language at 3D? This also leads me to wonder about the Pythagorean "Music of the Spheres" and the various religious motifs about the higher realms being filled with music.

Going further, if we bring UFT into this (gravito-electro-magnetic forces?), could we also speculate that the 'proper' sounds would be one part of a reflection of information that includes specific combinations of these forces that may have particular effects... "sound manipulating gravity" anyone?

In a more cooperative sense, if a group of people were to align the sounds and construction of their words with the archetypes they wish to reflect at this level as closely as possible, I wonder if that would assist in channeling the energies of those archetypes into everyday reality? So the appropriate words, songs, dances etc could help 'create order from chaos'. Gives a whole new meaning to Jordan Peterson's Rule 10: "Be Precise With Your Speech"! 😄

Anyway, this is getting really abstract, so I'll leave it there before I start sounding like a madman. 😄
 
Fascinating! Thank you for posting this Chu 🙂. Regarding “The Square Unit”, and the author focusing on Consonants for meaning, I have had similar thoughts while pondering on Philology. It seems to me that Consonants give structure, like the poles of a tent, or the skeletal structure of vertebrate animals. And vowels give nuance to the otherwise rigid structure. Order of the sounds matter as well.

VL vs LV - evil, vile, veil, vilify, etc...Love, live, alive, levity — opposite meanings

Fascinating stuff!

Thank you again!
 
For those who read faster than they watch, simply prefer reading, or want to put it through Deepl for a translation, here is a rough transcript. You won't have the slides' animation, but it should be easy to follow. each full slide is above the corresponding explanation:

PART 1: Sounds and Meaning: Introduction
Hello and welcome to Language with Chu. It's been a while and I've been doing quite a bit of research, and I recently gave a talk at a polyglot gathering about the topic that I'm about to tell you about. I had to shorten it so much because I only had half an hour to talk about it, so if you were at the Polyglot Gathering 2021, you might have already seen the gist of it. But this series of videos will expand on that. If you weren't there, then it may all be new, or you may already have some ideas.

But it's something that, I should tell you straight away, you won't find in Linguistics books. You won't even find it when you're talking with friends about language really, or in any kind of mainstream book about language. It's kind of specific and it took me a while to find it, actually. You have to pick at different clues.

But basically, it's about the question, “Could sounds have meaning?”. Normally (and I'll start with my slideshow in a minute) you don't think that the letter “t” or the vowel “e” have any intrinsic meaning, right? What does “e” mean? Well, nothing, right? Well, maybe nowadays we don't see it like that, but perhaps they used to have a meaning…

In fact, Socrates (so we're talking about Plato's writings, this one was from like 390 BC)… There's a really nifty text called “Cratylus” where he talks to… Socrates talks to two philosophers, and they're arguing about whether language is purely arbitrary, a convention, or whether the act of naming things has something to do with reality. So, do sounds convey something? And he puts it beautifully. He says, “well, I think that our ancestors created names, started naming things, created language, because they were perceiving the essence of things”, just as a painter is looking at a landscape, say, and he or she will choose the colors and materials and textures to portray what he or she is seeing. And it's a way to “signify”, to represent what he sees about reality. Obviously, the portrait or the drawing is not the object itself, but it tries to catch the essence of what the object is. And Socrates says that, basically, language could be a bit like that. That originally, people chose certain vowels or certain consonants because they showed the essence. Something softer may have one consonant, something rough may have another one, etc.

Well, it sounds kind of crazy but I'm finding more and more that there may maybe some clues there. So let's begin by looking at this diagram:

Slide1.JPG

It's very simple. That's how usually Linguistics sees the word. Ferdinand de Saussure is a linguist from Geneva. He was writing this in 1916, I believe. And he's one of the fathers of Linguistics. I myself studied his theory when I was at university. And one of the things he says, is that for every word, every “sign”, you have the “signifier”, which is the word, the characters, letters and sounds that you pick to depict that object. And then you have the “signified”, which is the actual concept or object. So, I think of a tree, and I say “tree” in English, but not in Spanish. In Spanish it is “árbol”. So each language would have chosen specific sounds to depict an object, right? So far, so good, and nobody really splits it up. Nobody, as I said, tries to figure out the meaning of the /t/, the /r/, etc. So, usually we leave it at that. [And it’s all supposedly arbitrary, a convention.]

But in fact, when you think about nature, there's something very interesting:

Slide2.JPG


Why would we see that 26 to 100 atoms (depending on who you ask) form all matter in the universe, and 20 amino acids only form life of all kinds, from a plant to a human being…? And then in languages, we also have that for each language, there are about 20 consonants and 5 vowels (in average, of course). So each one of them goes on to form bigger organisms. From the atom, you get molecules; from the amino acids, you get proteins, which then compose cells and the bodies and every organism in existence; and then from languages, you start off with those little pieces (letters and sounds) and you end up with entire languages, spoken and written.

So there's some kind of parallel there, even though I'm obviously oversimplifying things, and it's not necessarily exactly the same. But we could find more comparisons just by remembering that sounds are the smallest “molecule of language”, say, and they usually kind of get ignored.

When you study Linguistics, usually you break down the subjects into these six disciplines:


Slide3.JPG


You have Phonetics, which is all the sounds in the world, the human sounds. And you study a bit about how humans are made to pronounce sounds, etc. Then you have Phonology, which is actually the study of “phonemes”, the tiny sounds that each language chooses. I explained that in a previous video when I was talking about sounds and the importance of learning them for when you learn a foreign language. And according to Phonology, usually phonemes are defined as the smallest unit of meaning in language, except that it's not really meaning. It's only because when you change a phoneme (so, one sound)… If I tell you “pet” and “pat”, I just changed the vowel, and yet, the meaning of the word changed. In that sense, they're “the smallest unit of meaning”. They just change the meaning of a word as a whole. But I think you're going to see in a minute that we can go deeper than that.

Then, there's Morphology, which is how words are put together, how they are composed. A “morpheme” is also a chunk of meaning. So, usually you divide it into roots and other morphemes. Like, “possible” with the root “poss”, and then, “im-poss-ible”. “Im” would be a morpheme for negation, “ble” for “able”, etc.

Then you have Syntax. Everybody knows what syntax is, I think. It's just the word order in a sentence. And then you have Semantics, so the meaning of phrases and sentences just as you read them or hear them. And then, Pragmatics is the language in context: just because you see a question, is it really a question, or is it an order? If somebody says “How happy to see you!”, does it really mean that, or are they being ironic? Etc. All that is Pragmatics.

I'm really simplifying the field of Linguistics, yes, but it's just to get to this: Usually, you see the first four as the “form”, so anything that is the structure of the language. Then you have Semantics, the only part that deals with content, with meaning. And Pragmatics is, as I said, language in use, in context.

Well, I would argue that, actually, there's a lot more content that gets ignored, a lot more meaning that is inside sounds. Sounds, and morphemes, because morphemes, the chunks of words, are composed of sounds too. And syntax too, because the way you structure a sentence can also change meaning.

Slide4.JPG

So then, can sounds, the phonemes of each language, have meaning? I think they do. One of the famous experiments with this was done by an excellent linguist, Edward Sapir, in 1930. This is after centuries of ignoring the topic. Most linguists (I'll talk about it in another series of videos to show you the progression of these thoughts) ignored the idea that any sound could have meaning. But Edward Sapir did a very, very easy experiment with hundreds of people:

He told them: “In a strange land, the words mil and mal mean ‘table’. Could you tell me which one is the big table, and which one means a small table?” Can you guess? Most people guessed, as you probably did, that mal was the big table.

Okay, no big deal. Maybe that's a coincidence, right? Then, there's another experiment (there are many like that): I'm showing you two words: takete and maluma. They're both shapes, and one of them is spiky, and the other one is a rounded shape. Which one would you say is which? You probably guessed right again, or rather not right, but you guessed like the majority of the people. And you figured out that takete was the spiky one and maluma was the rounded one.

Well, if sounds didn't have any meaning, then it's a bit strange that you find these things universally agreed upon when in theory these words are random. I could have said the opposite, yet 90% of the people are choosing the same one. So, why? Well, maybe you could say “Oh, it's because the /a/ is a big sound in your mouth, “aaa”. Therefore you associate it with a big table”. Yes, but the /a/ was here too, see? In takete. So it's not quite as clear-cut. And /m/ and /l/ are more rounded, they have a rounded feel to them. Yeah, okay, maybe.

Maybe that's why, but that's it for now. I'm going to show you studies which I find fascinating, and which actually give you more concrete clues about why Socrates may not have been wrong, and sounds convey the essence of the object. So stay tuned! There's going to be three different theories or three different works that I'd like to share with you, because they're very little known, and I think that you're going to find them fascinating to start exploring this topic. So, see you later for more.
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Part 2 -Sounds and Meaning: Phonosemantics

Hello, and welcome to Language with Chu. I hope you watched the first part of this presentation. Please click above and watch that first, because it will give you the content of what I'm talking about. But let's move on. I'm going to start by telling you about one of the theories that talks about sounds and meaning:

Slide6.JPG

It is the work of Margaret Magnus. And it's not just this book. There's actually her thesis, there are more writings by her. I personally find her excellent. She's made me think a lot about words and what they really mean, and sounds. But let me give you a brief explanation of what she talks about:

Slide7.JPG

She called it Phonosemantics, so “meaning of sounds”. And in her hypothesis, she says that “in every language of the world, every word containing a given phoneme (sound) has some specific element of meaning, which is lacking in words not containing that phoneme. Each phoneme is meaning bearing”. So what that means is that (I'll show you in a in a second with an example) each sound, say /a/... whatever, has a meaning, an intrinsic meaning. And that is what she calls the “phonesteme”. So that would be the smallest chunk of meaning in language, not the phonemes. Meaning you, have to break it down on two things: meaning is the reference, like I showed in my earlier video about the tree. It's just the meaning of the word. But there could also be inherent meaning, which are traits that are like the essence of a thing it's not the thing itself. If I ask you to describe something like, I don't know, a bomb, say, you would say, well, it's explosive, it's hard, it's, you know, it has something… it's enclosed, you know, all those things… all those characteristics of a definition, those would be inherent meaning that are carried sometimes or very, very often by the phonemes themselves, by the sounds themselves.

I'll give you a quick example: you have words with /str/ in English, right? “srt”. And they all mean something linear, like a line, a string, a strip, a stripe, a street. That's curious, because when you look at each of these words, they all have different roots according to the standard etymological explanation. And then you have words with /ap/, and they happen to have some quality that tells you they are flat things: cap, flap, lap, map. Okay, what happens if you combine the two? What word do you get? Strap. And what is a strap? It's a flat line, basically, it's a band.

Okay so, these things, when looking at the roots of the words, will not be grouped together at all. And Margaret Magnus did 14 different kinds of experiments, I believe, in which, from different angles and in different kinds of groupings, she found out for the entire English dictionary (and she did a bit on Norwegian and Russian too) that you end up with something that looks like this:


Slide8.JPG

For the sound /b/ she grouped words. Every word that didn't have prefixes and suffixes, just the main core of the word without affixes, if you want.

She grouped them and she said, okay, some of them have to do with explosions, some of them have to do with badness… What's the quality that these words share in common? And she ended up with this kind of grouping, where all the words that start with /b/ will have one of these characteristics.

And if you change it for a /d/, the characteristics will change.

sounds Magnus.png

Sometimes some of them will be shared, so you'll have these four for /d/ as well, but they'll have a subtle difference. Now I don't have to time to explain all the experiments she did, but it's really fascinating when you see the words grouped together. Then she explains that each language will choose to group these essences a little bit differently, and that would explain why we don't use the same words in every language. So Russian, for example, (this is not the actual analysis, it's just for a visual representation)… Russian would use words starting with /b/ to also represent big and bulging things, or fire or light, but for badness they chose, I don't know, the /g/ sound. Norwegian would have done the same with another group of words, etc.

Each sound will have been divided like that, and then it gets fascinating, because she starts combining those sounds saying, well, what happens if you put the /b/ and then follow that with an /r/? Or what happens if you have /g/ alone and /g/ and /l/, etc?

sounds Magnus2.png

And she ends up with all kinds of fascinating combinations that tell you, wait a minute, there's something about sounds! Of course, the /b/ doesn't have a meaning in itself but it could convey in one word all these little traits of an object. So keep that in mind for the next one, which is yet another theory of how to find meaning in sounds. Stay tuned, see you next time!
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Part 3 - Sounds and Meaning: Each syllable has meaning!

Hello and welcome to Language with Chu. This is part three of the series on sound and complexity, or sounds and meaning. If you haven't watched the previous two parts, I recommend that you do that because I'm following up on that. Click right here and you'll see them, and I'll leave the links at the bottom as well.

Slide10.JPG

Screenshot 2021-06-24 114952.png

So let's go back to how to find meaning in sounds. This one is another book. It's in Spanish, but you can find it in English. I believe the title is “Romance didn't start with Latin” or something like [see references] that. Just look for the author and you'll find it. That's another topic for another video on how or why she thinks, and is very convincing about, the fact that Latin is not the mother of romance languages.

But what I want to pick from this book in relationship to sounds is that she quotes philologists and linguists who have taken names of places. Names of places are usually the ones we assume are the most arbitrary, or maybe they have a historical trace somewhere, but we don't think that Paris means anything or London, right? Usually you just take it as a proper name, and that's it.


Slide11.JPG

Well, what these people did was divide the different names of places, which you see in this column, and again, they don't mean anything in theory. And then, they took a syllable that they had in common. And they looked at the landscape, and by looking at the landscape, they saw that, say, for example, these places [with “ba”] all have to do with water. Then, the “ka” places had to do with rock, /k/. Okay, so could that be… could that relate to some actual words? Yeah, in Spanish, roca, coral, calcio, etc. Those have to do with stone, something rigid. And the towns that are full of stone, or coral, or whatever, have the /k/, /ka/ sound, etc. And these are thousands of words that then gave each of these particles a meaning.

Slide12.JPG

So then, what happens when you go, for example, and take a simple name? This is a town next to Barcelona, and if you go by the general assumption you say, okay, it either has to do with “Valerius”, some kind of Roman person, a general, whatever, that went to that town, or with valerian root. Except [there is no famous Valerius recorded in that town, and] valerian root wouldn't show up throughout the whole year, so there would be times when the landscape was bare. That wouldn't serve as a landmark or anything. So then, if you use the particles that I just told you about, and combine their meaning, it becomes a lot more interesting. A name that seemed complete completely arbitrary or random, or maybe historical or whatever, ends up being all these meanings that you can see here. And the town just happens to be in a big valley, and it's the union, the confluence of several rivers, it's surrounded by water, is big, etc. So, it's a bit of a coincidence when you see so many patterns like this all over and over.

And even simple words. For example, she talks about the word “calabaza”. In Spanish, it means “pumpkin”, and when you break it into these particles, you end up with something that says “hard water container”. And that's the use of pumpkin in many Spanish-speaking countries. Actually, traditionally in many countries it was used as a water container. You dry the pumpkin, and use it as a water container, still today. So a word that sounds completely random (nobody knows where it comes from) becomes something that, chunk by chunk, has meaning.

Another example is the word slave, which supposedly, comes from Latin slavus, except that in Latin, “slave” was servus, not slavus. So that's already kind of iffy. And then, somehow this /k/ sound appears because all the Latin languages share it, and even German. They all have that /k/ sound added to the words esclavo, esclave, etc. If you use the particles, the same kind of particles, you end up with these four, and each one means: “es” is usually associated with words that have to do with “used to be”, “ex” like as an ex-minister. Then “c”, living being or human being. “La”, related to, and like we saw here the “ll”, union, meeting, it's something that relates things, links things. And then, here in “vo” you have free and unbound. So, if you combine them together, you get something along these lines: “Used to be free human”. Well, what's a better name for a slave than “used to be a free human”? You see? So, even these particles could actually have a lot of meaning.

The author speculates that it could be that all their romance languages, and others, shared a common ancestor which that was an agglutinative language. That means, it's a language that collects all these little chunks that you see in the screen, for example, and all these chunks have meaning, and it glues them together, just to simplify what that type of language is. I don't know if it's that, it could be. It could be that languages in the past used to all be agglutinative, but I tend to think that it's not so much the structure, the type of language they were, as it was this knowing what sounds conveyed, or choosing sounds for what they conveyed. So, so far we've seen two theories: phonosemantics by Margaret Magnus, and this one from Carme Huertas. And I'm moving on to the third one, so stay tuned for part four. See you in a bit.
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