Word Length and Entity Size: Decoding Linguistic Intuition

Published on April 17, 2023

Think of language as a playful puzzle! Imagine if the length of a word reflected the size of the thing it represents. Well, that’s exactly what happens with ‘whale’ and ‘microorganism.’ It’s like calling a massive mammal by saying two letters, or describing a tiny organism with a tongue-twisting phrase! At first, this seems to defy logic in language, but researchers have delved into this linguistic enigma. The beauty lies in the fact that linguists studying arbitrary language and those exploring sound symbolism both found that word length correlates to entity size in this case. However, a new twist is added to the tale. A comprehensive analysis of over 600 languages from more than 100 families uncovers an intriguing pattern. It turns out that many languages tend to use longer words to convey the concept of smallness and shorter words for bigness. These implicit cognitive associations challenge our explicit judgments, demonstrating the complexity of sound symbolism research. Dive deeper into this captivating mystery by exploring the underlying research!

Abstract
A classic example of the arbitrary relation between the way a word sounds and its meaning is that microorganism is a very long word that refers to a very small entity, whereas whale is a very short word that refers to something very big. This example, originally presented in Hockett’s list of language’s design features, has been often cited over the years, not only by those discussing the arbitrary nature of language, but also by researchers of sound symbolism. While the two groups disagreed regarding the role of arbitrariness and sound symbolism in language, they both agreed there is a nonsound symbolic relation between word length and entity size in this case. This paper shows that the length of the words whale and microorganism in fact reflects a sound symbolic pattern. An analysis of >600 languages from >100 language families shows that languages use longer words to denote the concept small than they do to denote the concept big. The paper thus shows how explicit judgments might differ from implicit cognitive association and the problem of relying on these in sound symbolism research.

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