As a human I agree with dogs that 'Bouba' is round and 'Kiki' is spiky.
In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.
As the article says it does not matter what language you speak, a word that quickly changes the sound back and forth to the same thing sounds sharp because that is how sharp things look and feel. The serration on a knife has the same angle on either side leading to a point. This is what makes sense to me as to why we correspond Kiki to something sharp.
Interestingly, even the sound of the word ‘round’ feels gentle, while the word ‘spiky’ has high-frequency peaks (at p and k)! I wonder if dogs (or for that matter, humans) can accurately zero-shot classify words that represent round vs spiky for different languages.
It appears to me that onomatopoeia, at varying degrees, played a role in the spontaneous convergence of verbal communication, and thus the development of a language.
When I studied psychology 20 years ago we had a class which covered this, and at least then there were studies indeed showing these associations are exactly due to these phonetic identifiers.
> In all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.
This is just the same thing though?
It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.
It isn't trivially obvious, no, but the "k" sound is a fricative, i.e. the tongue rapidly moves close to the palate and then away, creating turbulence, and sounds with a sharp peak and amplitude. I.e. the waveform of a "k" or "kiki" sound looks more spiky. The opposite is the case for the "bouba" sound.
It is a bit mysterious why animals would all map e.g. sharp auditory waveforms to sharper / spiky lines (kiki figure), and then smoother sounds to smoother lineforms (bouba figure), but, reasonably, these senses evolved together and used far more shared underlying processing machinery than they do presently. After all, both light and sound reach us in waves and both carry energy.
Some primitive mush-blob perhaps just started processing all incoming energy waves together, differentiating e.g. smoother vs. more staccatto waves before making the distinction between e.g. sound vs. light. Or I dunno, but IMO it makes more sense when you consider evolution, and don't just look at processing now in isolation from the likely development of these senses.
k is a plosive, not fricative: there's a discontinuity in the flow of air, not a friction-sounding continuous airflow. that fits your point though, regardless.
Oops, you are right! Thank you for correcting. I checked before posting that some "k" sounds are indeed fricatives, but they definitely aren't in "kiki".
> The 'b' sound is a plosive too, by the way. It's voiced, vs the voiceless 'k'.
Yeah this I know, by "bouba" being opposite I meant the waveform.
Really the phonetic terms here are not actually relevant and have betrayed me. It's more that the 'k' sound is "more [ex]plosive" in that it seems to build up more pressure and turbulence (probably as you say, because the consonant is in the rear, so pressure builds and bounces around in the mouth more, whereas the "b" just mostly blasts out the front more quickly). And the "k" surely has a more peaky / spikey waveform in the audible range.
If you, or anyone else reading, is interested in playing around with this stuff, there's an open source program called Praat[0]. I assume it still is the go-to in linguistics for making spectrograms, it was back when I was studying it, at least.
There's probably nicer programs that can do the same thing, aimed at people like musicians, but they won't have the phonetics-specific guides and help online.
There's also a large archive of speech recordings from a wide range of languages hosted by UCLA[1], which you can download and play around with. There might be newer archives now, but I remember this one, because Peter Ladefoged wrote the proverbial book on introductory phonetics.
Linguistics generally aligns quite pro-copyleft, so there will be a lot of freely available stuff online.
When I want to avoid startling my cat I make sure that the sound of my presence is gradual and not sudden. The syllables of a bouba word all introduce themselves smoothly and not suddenly.
I’ll rush to posit something for others to poke holes in: the definition of a Kiki word is a word where the syllables have a sudden “attack” then decay. And that’s a function of sound, not language.
Sure it is. Fourier transform - Bouba and Kiki are far from the same there. And as someone else mentioned, time domain content - attack and decay. There are physical differences in the sounds which are pretty fundamental and can be definitionally linked to sharpness and softness across domains, especially as sharp objects are defined in nearly exactly the same way (except spatially).
It would be more interesting if we had two sounds which didn’t have such apparent objective differences giving rise to specific and universal subjective differences, or if something that was not so cross domain elicited a different response, e.g. linking volume with sharpness as opposed to something like size.
Depending how you pronounce bouba and kiki, they are actually very similar sounds. 2 syllables made with sudden stops of air - one by the lips, and the other by the throat. The attack and decay are very similar too. There's no obvious reason why we call one "sharp" and the other "soft".
So why is a spiky Fourier transform related to a spiky object? Are dogs visualising the frequency domain signal in their heads and seeing that it is spiky?
Not my claim, what I am saying is that as long as there is a physical connection between these domains we can’t be surprised about universal representations. In a spatial Fourier transform, spiky things have high frequency information. In a time Fourier transform, spiky sounds have high frequency information. In space, spiky things have sharp edges (attack). In time, sharp sounds have faster attack. The presence of a physical analogue here means that all these experiments are testing is whether brains identify this existing connection.
It would be more surprising if the connection was indicative of genuine universality of brains and their representations, rather than ability to identify a cross-domain mathematical/physics-cal connection.
That's fascinating, for me kiki is yellow, and bouba is blue. But it's possible that those colors were used in the visualizations I saw when first learning about it.
I was taught it was "BOW-ba" or "BOH-ba", but AI actually linked a number of studies that seems to confirm it is supposed to be and usually is "BOO-ba" (i.e. bulging eyes Pepe) in experiments. I don't personally think either pronunciation would change the results though.
The strange spelling is partly intentional to make sure that people read it as a very fake word with no known definition. In English bow, boba, boob are all real words.
The first time I heard of this effect like two decades ago, it was using the words "takete" and "maluma".
Aside from this bouba question, Kiki is a name. I've also wondered why these two words are used so often when talking about the effect, when they're both much more easily associated with something than takete/maluma.
In this case I think it is just a popularity contest. Takete/Maluma were the first version of the study in the 1920s. Kiki/Bouba replicated the study in the 2000s. So recency bias plus "simpler" fake words can explain some of the popularity.
You don't need to. They probably mean how rounded objects tend roll or slide, and spiky objects tend to scrape at most or dig into a crevice and so abruptly stop with a shorter sound.
There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
As I get older, I consistently find the world to be far less interesting than I used to believe. So many factoids that I once marveled at have turned out to be false or exaggerated, or now seem pretentious and forced to me even if they are true.
It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.
Dont know how old you are or what age has to do with it. But i find that as I get older simple factoids about the world are even more amazing. There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic and that gets more interesting the more you meditate on it.
It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.
Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.
> There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic
Is it? I used to think so myself, but nowadays I realize my reaction was just imitating what others had shown me was an “appropriate” response to this.
Whether there are 4 fundamental forces, a single one, or 100, none of these help me understand the world in any sense I actually care about.
I shouldn't use the word magic in a forum like this, last time I did something similar, it also got caught up with the semantics. I mean awe inducing. I've been doing the exercise of writing poetry and one thing that I love about the process is that you can absolutely find inspiration in the banal everyday things.
By the way, this mode of being makes me happier so I invite everyone to take a second and actually consider the question "how is this magical?" for everything. It can be a beautiful experience.
I've met amazing buddhist masters who have meditated for decades that describe the world in these terms. They are also the happiest and the people most oriented towards helping others that I've met.
What exactly about it is “awe-inducing”? There are four fundamental forces. Okay. Not three, not five. Just like there are five Platonic solids, rather than four or six.
Now what? What am I supposed to feel awe about? Are you sure you aren’t just echoing words you’ve read in a popular science book?
To be clear, I have myself parroted such soundbites for decades. But at some point I asked myself what I was actually trying to say when I said them, and came up empty.
You're not the first time that someone in this site tries to argue with me that I should not look for beauty and wonder. I'll do it anyway and am not interested in arguing with strangers about what deserves being open about to wonder and interest.
I do find it interesting the fact that there's some kind of order that happens to make the world the way it is and not some other way. That's enough.
I’m doing my very best not to fall into these deep mental and physical ruts or grooves.
It’s part of why time seems to accelerate when you age too our brains only record novelty and new experiences. Drive the thousandth time to the store, won’t remember even going. Do something new - suddenly the weekend seems long.
Sure, and not every single person agrees with the proposed phonetic shape-matching either, but the broad trend does hold and there is similarly in animal vocalizations even across unrelated languages.
No, actually it doesn’t. You are just wrong here. Amazing that your ‘older’ brain that ‘sees through it all’ won’t let you admit it and is actually just a necrotic defense or superiority mechanism. Genuinely very alarming to me and a huge warning not to let myself get like this.
Most animal sounds do not actually map that well into the range of sounds we use for human language. And even if they did, you would end up with different representations because different languages use different sets of sounds. Not to mention most animals make more than one kind of sound
But all of that doesn't mean that someone who has never heard English wouldn't be able two tell which of "woof" and "miaw" is supposed to be the cat
>across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog
Mexican / Spanish its Guau-guau or "wow-wow". Russia its tyaf-tyaf. Mandarin Chinese its wāng wāng. Few if any cultures that don't speak English know what 'woof' is.
obviously the idea is not that all cultures have the same word for the sound that a dog makes, but rather if you ask people from cultures which is the sound a dog makes "woof" or "miaow" assuming they have these concepts for the animals they would say "woof".
I am not arguing this is the case, but the original poster obviously feels it is, connecting it to the top level post's idea of common ideas for what words describe over languages.
I read something a while back about curse words more commonly using hard, visceral consonants because it's a lot more satisfying to say them in anger or frustration. Really hitting the end of the f-bomb or the beginning of "crap" feels better than saying something like "aw, jelly belly". Even something like "gosh" instead of "god" just doesn't feel as satisfying.
None of this is scientific (at least, not my attempts to describe it), and I don't have a good explanation for every swear or epithet, but I don't think it would be as satisfying to say "that's lubu!" instead of "that's caca!"
Yeah, this is far from a hard rule, and more just a general trend that seems like it might bear out statistically, but I don't recall the source where I heard it from, so it's possible that it was not rigorous.
Both of those words are one letter removed from English words for a thing that is sour and a thing that is sweet, which feels like it's going to significantly bias the results on its own.
I'm just a parrot owner and have no sources for this, but I'd be surprised if they didn't. Birds are very sound-oriented, have to make split second decisions while in the air to avoid collisions and to react to flock calls while they're moving, etc.
At least in parrots, they love playing with sounds. They'll bang things, tap on things, throw things around, and even scream into different objects just to hear the difference. They also have decent object permanence, speaking anecdotally.
Right? I was a little put off by the implication in the beginning that they're arbitrary. Of all the things in nature, even, if you throw them against a wall, the spiky thing will definitely sound more like kiki, etc.
Objects are not real, because reality is not objects. Reality is not each of the objects fit together, it's the complete undivided universe. We use objects to tell specific stories about that universe, not the other way around.
We can't tell a story about our sensory experience without first drawing arbitrary distinctions to divide it, and objectifying those distinctions. The very notion of a percussive sound is dependent on our arbitrary differentiation of that pattern as separate from other sound experiences. That boundary isn't discovered, it's optimized. The fact that we can categorize so many different instances of sound as "sharp" isn't because sharpness was already an inherent object to discover: it's because our notion of "sharp" has been optimized to match many instances of a consistent pattern. We eventually use the same word for sharp flavor, because that relative similarity in experience is the implication we are communicating in the first place.
A sharp object will always make a sharp sound. This is an objectively true implication: that same object won't suddenly make a dull sound, because sound is physically shaped by the objects it moves through. The mistake is to assume this objectivity extends to the very definition of those objects. We could just as easily tell a story about a blarp object, where "blarp" means sharp and blue. That boundary is perfectly valid as an object in a story: it's just sub-optimal, because the experience of blue is irrelevant to the experience of sharpness. Every time we compare blarp objects with others, we are wasting effort, carrying the baggage of redundant blueness. We do this all the time, and we don't like it. Language will never be perfectly efficient, because there are too many subjects involved to relate them all precisely; and too much commitment to familiarity to update the language quickly.
Language did not evolve gradually. Linguists like Chomsky have pretty strong evidence that language appeared suddenly — there are no “intermediate” or “less grammatically complex” languages anywhere in the world even among long uncontacted tribes. All evidence of language and culture suddenly appears about 100,000 years ago in the archaeological record. The evidence supports a more “Adam and Eve” creationist theory of human origins if we take human to mean “language”.
You’re talking about the transition to modern language. While there may (or may not) have been a large single step around 100,000 years ago, the subject here is the common foundation that preceded it.
You don’t have to have much experience with dogs to know they understand words and very basic sentences around things they care about and understand (food, going for walks, prey, “business”, approval/disapproval).
My understanding is that while dogs can understand words and put them together to understand basic (even novel) commands, they do not generally have a comprehension of syntax, which is an essential part of language. To them, a sentence is just a bag of concepts bundled together without structure.
In terms of the human evolutionary record, we have no idea what our ancestral species spoke like, compared to say a chimpanzee. None of them are around to tell us.
My intuition tells me that human evolution grokked language. Maybe like GPT it very quickly went from being complete gibberish to freakishly coherent. A handful of words and grammar rules leads to remarkable complexity. But that's a guess.
Look into the evolution of pigeon dialects into actual languages if your interested in this topic.
A bunch of workers from various countries are thrown together on a ship or some other international workplace and they develop a pigeon dialect of all their different predominate languages mashed together.
That pigeon develops and gets used for workplace needs but then these workers have families and their kids pick up that same pigeon language to talk with their friends except they need to talk about everything not just workplace stuff so they develop and advance the pigeon language and it goes from a basic rudimentary language into a full featured and complex language in a single generation even with just a few hundred speakers.
But you're focusing on humans and the human languages, and I'm honestly curious about the "step change" hypothesis!
I think I've heard about it before, but my stint at university in linguistics is > 15 yrs ago, so I don't know much about it.
I remember recognozing Chomsky when later studying CS and formal language basics came up, bringing the Chomsky hierarchy.
Do you have some favorite links to share about the "step change" hypothesis? I remember reading some odd info-news article comparing brains among different species of homo; and and maybe also this particular hypothesis, but I'm not really informed.
That aside, I don't understand why this "onomatopoeia" couldn't be shared among different animals and humans:
> I think objects with these shapes make similar sounds in the real world. Sharp shapes make percussive sounds. Round shapes make softer sounds.
Claiming that animals had no language at all would obviously be false. But we still have reason to think (?) that the human languages are intertwined with the intelligence gap we observe between humans and other mammals.
We have examples of people trying to invent languages in modern times, and it does not appear to be a fast process. The first people doing it would have the additional struggles of having no prior examples, no ability to take notes (writing having not yet been invented), and having to teach others to talk for the first time.
Which is spikier qktqb or rrqtyun? For me personally, rrqtyun is spikier although certain models seem to disagree. GPT (Astra) believes qktqb is spikier.
This one is also a curiosity
> isn't klop right at the edge between spiky and round
> Yes. “Klop” is borderline, but leans slightly spiky.
That such a phenomenon is easily visible in waveform make this pretty expected. Animals likely evolved to discretize audio long before mammals showed up
> The second experiment, which involved 19 other dogs, was identical in design except that the owners wore headphones playing rock music to stop them from hearing the 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' sounds. The idea here was to remove any owner cues the dogs might have been following.
Oof, the statistical power of 19 subjects is... not great
This is a fascinating article and I’m not casting shade but more of a curious question: If humans are the ones that generally associate this sound with that thing, knowing dogs are very observant of us, how do we know the dogs aren’t just copying what we are unknowingly exhibiting toward them throughout their entire lives? I have no idea how you’d pull that out of the stats though. Maybe you could find languages that have different sounds for round and spiky and compare dogs from those households to English speaking households (or rather languages with k’s for spiky and b’s for round)
For what it's worth, it's not an unreasonable conclusion a priori, though no comment on the methods here. The bouba/kiki effect has been demonstrated in newly-hatched chickens in controlled experiments.
But their gaze can also create bias. If you go to a window and look out of it, your dog will as well. If you mime looking at something your dog cannot see, it will come over and try to find what you're looking at.
Well we're quite close with them as they're also highly intellectually developed mammals.
There's a very good chance that intelligence develops in a same direction for all mammals (proof to this is how wekk we and dogs understand each other).
Not sure why it should be a surprising thing. Senses work together. Not isolated. I associate numbers with taste (2 and 5 are sweeter, 3 is salty, 7 is bitter and so on), and with spatial ladder-like locations (ladder goes up from 1 to 10 and then it becomes like rope bridge until 20 and then its like a hill climb until around 40 and then it is steep down- hill upto 100.
Words are definitely associated closely with geometric shapes, and with touch and sound.
Also, most importantly, all thoughts are attached to places that you have already seen. You can't think about anything without attaching it to a known place. When you forget something, it's because that physical place (room, road, or park) is crowded with other thoughts.
Not everything in science needs to be surprising to be useful. Same as the meta study that confirms no link between vaccinations and autism - not surprising, but still immensely useful.
As of today we have no proof that all animals understand sounds and words the same way we do. Some closer primates likely do, because we share common ancestors that communicated similarly to us. But not dogs. We know dogs bark and can memorize words we say, but we don't know how they process those words. This is a step in that direction.
Probably synesthesia. I have known a few with many questions to them to understand better.
From my discussions, the senses do work together or as I describe it is convergence of inputs creating a specific harmonic ratios or chords that map to the input.
Numbers with taste is new to me. I know for some numbers have colors or play notes/chords.
Well, I suppose it's pronounced [buba], right? It's not pronounced [bauba]? So why is it spelled 'bouba'? To distinguish from 'boob' (other comments here implied so)?
168 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadIn all seriousness, and I am surprised the article does not mention this, as dumb as it sounds Kiki has "sharp" sounds when pronouncing it and "Bouba" has a softer feel to it when pronouncing it.
As the article says it does not matter what language you speak, a word that quickly changes the sound back and forth to the same thing sounds sharp because that is how sharp things look and feel. The serration on a knife has the same angle on either side leading to a point. This is what makes sense to me as to why we correspond Kiki to something sharp.
It appears to me that onomatopoeia, at varying degrees, played a role in the spontaneous convergence of verbal communication, and thus the development of a language.
This is just the same thing though?
It's not actually trivially obvious that different minds would agree on how "sharp" and "soft" apply to sounds and to shapes.
It is a bit mysterious why animals would all map e.g. sharp auditory waveforms to sharper / spiky lines (kiki figure), and then smoother sounds to smoother lineforms (bouba figure), but, reasonably, these senses evolved together and used far more shared underlying processing machinery than they do presently. After all, both light and sound reach us in waves and both carry energy.
Some primitive mush-blob perhaps just started processing all incoming energy waves together, differentiating e.g. smoother vs. more staccatto waves before making the distinction between e.g. sound vs. light. Or I dunno, but IMO it makes more sense when you consider evolution, and don't just look at processing now in isolation from the likely development of these senses.
Lol, true.
But the place of articulation kinda flips, from rear consonant/front vowel (kiki), to front consonant/rear vowel (bouba).
If you flipped the voicing, it'd be 'gigi' vs 'poupa', which to my ears at least, is a lot less clear cut.
Yeah this I know, by "bouba" being opposite I meant the waveform.
Really the phonetic terms here are not actually relevant and have betrayed me. It's more that the 'k' sound is "more [ex]plosive" in that it seems to build up more pressure and turbulence (probably as you say, because the consonant is in the rear, so pressure builds and bounces around in the mouth more, whereas the "b" just mostly blasts out the front more quickly). And the "k" surely has a more peaky / spikey waveform in the audible range.
There's probably nicer programs that can do the same thing, aimed at people like musicians, but they won't have the phonetics-specific guides and help online.
There's also a large archive of speech recordings from a wide range of languages hosted by UCLA[1], which you can download and play around with. There might be newer archives now, but I remember this one, because Peter Ladefoged wrote the proverbial book on introductory phonetics.
Linguistics generally aligns quite pro-copyleft, so there will be a lot of freely available stuff online.
[0]: https://praat.org/ [1]: https://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/
I’ll rush to posit something for others to poke holes in: the definition of a Kiki word is a word where the syllables have a sudden “attack” then decay. And that’s a function of sound, not language.
It would be more interesting if we had two sounds which didn’t have such apparent objective differences giving rise to specific and universal subjective differences, or if something that was not so cross domain elicited a different response, e.g. linking volume with sharpness as opposed to something like size.
It would be more surprising if the connection was indicative of genuine universality of brains and their representations, rather than ability to identify a cross-domain mathematical/physics-cal connection.
Same genetics produce the same outcome (mostly).
Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105198 - Feb 2026 (107 comments)
Which is "Bouba", and which is "Kiki"? [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572742 - Jan 2026 (23 comments)
Bouba / Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45320327 - Sept 2025 (2 comments)
Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40699583 - June 2024 (170 comments)
Bouba/Kiki Effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27885703 - July 2021 (94 comments)
Bouba/kiki effect - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8372550 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
I must respectfully disagree; kiki is brown, not red, but it’s an easy mistake to make
I do not think this is realible experiment. Dogs are very sensitive to non verbal cues from their owner.
For example if owner is scared, it will defend the owner. I get assaulted all the time, by dog owners who unleash their dogs on me, in self defense.
Aside from this bouba question, Kiki is a name. I've also wondered why these two words are used so often when talking about the effect, when they're both much more easily associated with something than takete/maluma.
Dog's have very good hearing, and their hearing must help them to model the world around them, to understand what different objects in the world are.
So I think it's less about linguistics and more about our audiovisual mapping of the physical world.
Then again, that must be where the origin of language evolved from in the first place.
You don't need to. They probably mean how rounded objects tend roll or slide, and spiky objects tend to scrape at most or dig into a crevice and so abruptly stop with a shorter sound.
There's probably an overlap that makes the distinction fuzzy.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.
It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.
Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.
Is it? I used to think so myself, but nowadays I realize my reaction was just imitating what others had shown me was an “appropriate” response to this.
Whether there are 4 fundamental forces, a single one, or 100, none of these help me understand the world in any sense I actually care about.
By the way, this mode of being makes me happier so I invite everyone to take a second and actually consider the question "how is this magical?" for everything. It can be a beautiful experience.
I've met amazing buddhist masters who have meditated for decades that describe the world in these terms. They are also the happiest and the people most oriented towards helping others that I've met.
Now what? What am I supposed to feel awe about? Are you sure you aren’t just echoing words you’ve read in a popular science book?
To be clear, I have myself parroted such soundbites for decades. But at some point I asked myself what I was actually trying to say when I said them, and came up empty.
I do find it interesting the fact that there's some kind of order that happens to make the world the way it is and not some other way. That's enough.
It’s part of why time seems to accelerate when you age too our brains only record novelty and new experiences. Drive the thousandth time to the store, won’t remember even going. Do something new - suddenly the weekend seems long.
But all of that doesn't mean that someone who has never heard English wouldn't be able two tell which of "woof" and "miaw" is supposed to be the cat
Mexican / Spanish its Guau-guau or "wow-wow". Russia its tyaf-tyaf. Mandarin Chinese its wāng wāng. Few if any cultures that don't speak English know what 'woof' is.
I am not arguing this is the case, but the original poster obviously feels it is, connecting it to the top level post's idea of common ideas for what words describe over languages.
Pi, Pie, Pide, Pita, Pizza, Piadina, Pirog (Russian for "pie"), Piscina (circular basin).
Also, some Russian words for organs that have to do with piss (which are naturally circular) also start with "Pi".
None of this is scientific (at least, not my attempts to describe it), and I don't have a good explanation for every swear or epithet, but I don't think it would be as satisfying to say "that's lubu!" instead of "that's caca!"
At least in parrots, they love playing with sounds. They'll bang things, tap on things, throw things around, and even scream into different objects just to hear the difference. They also have decent object permanence, speaking anecdotally.
We can't tell a story about our sensory experience without first drawing arbitrary distinctions to divide it, and objectifying those distinctions. The very notion of a percussive sound is dependent on our arbitrary differentiation of that pattern as separate from other sound experiences. That boundary isn't discovered, it's optimized. The fact that we can categorize so many different instances of sound as "sharp" isn't because sharpness was already an inherent object to discover: it's because our notion of "sharp" has been optimized to match many instances of a consistent pattern. We eventually use the same word for sharp flavor, because that relative similarity in experience is the implication we are communicating in the first place.
A sharp object will always make a sharp sound. This is an objectively true implication: that same object won't suddenly make a dull sound, because sound is physically shaped by the objects it moves through. The mistake is to assume this objectivity extends to the very definition of those objects. We could just as easily tell a story about a blarp object, where "blarp" means sharp and blue. That boundary is perfectly valid as an object in a story: it's just sub-optimal, because the experience of blue is irrelevant to the experience of sharpness. Every time we compare blarp objects with others, we are wasting effort, carrying the baggage of redundant blueness. We do this all the time, and we don't like it. Language will never be perfectly efficient, because there are too many subjects involved to relate them all precisely; and too much commitment to familiarity to update the language quickly.
You don’t have to have much experience with dogs to know they understand words and very basic sentences around things they care about and understand (food, going for walks, prey, “business”, approval/disapproval).
My intuition tells me that human evolution grokked language. Maybe like GPT it very quickly went from being complete gibberish to freakishly coherent. A handful of words and grammar rules leads to remarkable complexity. But that's a guess.
A bunch of workers from various countries are thrown together on a ship or some other international workplace and they develop a pigeon dialect of all their different predominate languages mashed together.
That pigeon develops and gets used for workplace needs but then these workers have families and their kids pick up that same pigeon language to talk with their friends except they need to talk about everything not just workplace stuff so they develop and advance the pigeon language and it goes from a basic rudimentary language into a full featured and complex language in a single generation even with just a few hundred speakers.
I think I've heard about it before, but my stint at university in linguistics is > 15 yrs ago, so I don't know much about it.
I remember recognozing Chomsky when later studying CS and formal language basics came up, bringing the Chomsky hierarchy.
Do you have some favorite links to share about the "step change" hypothesis? I remember reading some odd info-news article comparing brains among different species of homo; and and maybe also this particular hypothesis, but I'm not really informed.
That aside, I don't understand why this "onomatopoeia" couldn't be shared among different animals and humans:
> I think objects with these shapes make similar sounds in the real world. Sharp shapes make percussive sounds. Round shapes make softer sounds.
Claiming that animals had no language at all would obviously be false. But we still have reason to think (?) that the human languages are intertwined with the intelligence gap we observe between humans and other mammals.
We have examples of people trying to invent languages in modern times, and it does not appear to be a fast process. The first people doing it would have the additional struggles of having no prior examples, no ability to take notes (writing having not yet been invented), and having to teach others to talk for the first time.
This one is also a curiosity
> isn't klop right at the edge between spiky and round
> Yes. “Klop” is borderline, but leans slightly spiky.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7188
Oof, the statistical power of 19 subjects is... not great
This is why dogs understand us so well. We are in many ways the same.
Not because we are similar, just they are evolved for companionship. That and 15-17k years of forced domestication.
Skeksis vs Gelflings, you guess who are the bad guys.
Words are definitely associated closely with geometric shapes, and with touch and sound.
Also, most importantly, all thoughts are attached to places that you have already seen. You can't think about anything without attaching it to a known place. When you forget something, it's because that physical place (room, road, or park) is crowded with other thoughts.
As of today we have no proof that all animals understand sounds and words the same way we do. Some closer primates likely do, because we share common ancestors that communicated similarly to us. But not dogs. We know dogs bark and can memorize words we say, but we don't know how they process those words. This is a step in that direction.
From my discussions, the senses do work together or as I describe it is convergence of inputs creating a specific harmonic ratios or chords that map to the input.
Numbers with taste is new to me. I know for some numbers have colors or play notes/chords.
If you just looked at the sound wave of these being spoken you’d see one is more skirt than the other.
Even the letter b is more sounded than the letter k