Bouba/Kiki Effect
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It turns out that "Baba" and "Keke", two named objects that the player can control, were named after this effect! Hempuli talked about this during one of their twitch streams many months back.
(I can't say enough wonderful things about this game)
Bouba/kiki is most likely a specific instance of the more general notion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism. Another well-known cross-linguistic association is the one between front vowels and small objects on one hand, and back vowels and large objects on the other.
I wonder if it's just the Baader–Meinhof effect or if the post was caused by the same youtube algorithm.
I’m always worried that if we engage in this type of cancelling we will end up with vilification and people will forget that Stalin and Hitler were also just people (and not evil looking demons).
The Taliban got a dedication on an Apollo mission and in one of the Rambo movies … now these things tend to be forgotten. It’s always better to remember and remind people about the potential of evil we (you and me) can do to other people. Leave the name, yet make sure that the article and every mention refers also to the R A F.
There’s some bias to associate sounds with particular images or concepts, but we have different languages because we don’t choose the same words.
If anything, the consistency of symbolism is much greater than inter-linguistic consistency of how words sound.
If symbols were arbitrary then maybe a rabbit could symbolise ferocity, but they are instead more like metaphors that need to tie into something concrete.
For those unfamiliar with the Bible: hyperpape is referring to Isaiah 11:6–7, 65:25, prophecies of the time when God assumes more direct kingship over the earth, featuring herbivorous, peaceful lions.
Notwithstanding this, Isaiah does feature lions as fierce beasts in more places: 15:9, 21:8, 30:6, 31:4, 35:9, 38:13.
In Lecture 4 (Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese) he talks about the Kiki / Bouba effect. His enunciation is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xttp5GpiVLs&list=PLez3PPtnpn...
For instance, the clause nominalizing particle KOTO expresses a more objective view compared to NO.
Piano-wo hiku-no ga taihen. (Playing the piano is difficult (for me, because of arthritis or whatever)).
Piano-wo hiku-koto ga taihen. (Playing the piano is difficult (as such, for humans)).
The Japanese onomatopoeia is full of this also. For instance something lightly rolling is korokoro, whereas gorogoro refers to heavy rolling.
Sparkling, glittering: kirakira (-suru).
Slithering, wriggling, sliding: nyoro-nyoro.
Another example of sound symbolism in the grammar: questions.
The ka particle is the most direct question marker. If, say, you're scolding a child and want to say "are you listening to me?" angrily: kiiteiru-ka?
A soft way, with a completely different nuance, would be: kiiteiru-no?
See? "ka" is a hard sound with an unvoiced consonant at the front, full of high frequency content, like an object breaking, whereas "no" is low frequency.
“we see this sound symbolism in onomatopoeia” and gives a very large list of examples, followed by “this can be used to explain other phenomenons such as [insert parents statement]”
You are right that it is interesting how and if ko-so-a-do fits this pattern, but I don’t think it’s a “gotcha” against sound symbolism in Japanese.
What is clear is that the hypothesis cannot be some strawman like "every corner of the Japanese language exhibits hard/soft sound symbolism: every grammar construct, every vocabulary item, ...".
How much there has to be to separate a trend from coincidence is beyond me, but ways of quantifying it suggest themselves. For instance, frequency of occurrence of sound-symbolic constructs in speech.
Some pretty common devices fit this pattern. Another one is kara (strong assertion of causality) versus no de (weak assertion of causality). Words like koto, kara, keredomo and the question particle ka come up all the time, as do no, node, noni and so on.
Fun coincidence: snake in Zulu is inyoka or nyova
Also, memorizing a couple of credit card's information has saved me so much time -- highly recommended.
like is 1234 a slope /
?
I don't have this, though I do have a consistent "visualization" of numbers under one hundred (and, yes, months, and days of months, and weeks) since very young. Probably helps a bit to memorize some stuff, though I can't compare with the same me deprived of this view. I'm not great at remembering birthdays but not terrible either.
People with such visualizations don't even always realize not all people see them the same way, or at all for that matter.
I was deep into synesthesia stuff when I worked at UCSD and had a friend participate in an experiment at VS Ramachandran's lab and one of the neat things is that a lot of the commonalities are culturally or temporally specific.
Many of the people with numeric synesthesia use a ring because they resemble CLOCKS! 1-12 is a common pattern and most people with synesthesia that grew up with this kind of clock have the same pattern for the first 12 numbers, but after that they tend to have their own patterns they develop.
This is true for other forms of synesthesia as well, there's not a single "way" but more a categorical set of shared characteristics, usually derived from their surroundings, as this isn't something people get taught to manage or take advantage of, but some folks naturally do. It's truly fascinating.
It sounds like you grew up with more calendars than round clocks, or an agenda/diary of some sort, or maybe it comes from something else - think about it, I'd love to know if you can place it!
It definitely sounds like you have some form of synesthesia.
For time scale - I grew up in the late 80. So planning and scheduling was always done on a wall mounted calendar in my parent's kitchen or mom's day planner. So I think the concept of a year/month/hours in a day where always superimposed in my head as either a grid pattern for the month like any other calendar , or up/down rectangular scale for hours in a day or clock. Same goes on how I visualize a year. Priors years are just vertical block on the left of the current year block. Future years were on the right of the current year. Same for decades. Direction & distance were always like a measuring ruler going either left or right.
Do you have any interesting color overlaps between letters and numbers? I'm noticing that the fifth letter E (I'm assuming english, apologies if not!) is of a similar shade (purple / blue) as the number five!
One of the canonical tests to "prove" synesthesia is real involved putting a bunch of 5s and Ss randomly on a page and those with synesthesia could quickly distinguish between the two. It's always fascinating that the shape of the letter/number wasn't part (necessarily) of the color sense, and that they still stayed distinct, so just curious if you've noticed any overlaps/influences between letters and numbers or if they tend to tickle a totally different color sense.
Finally 8 and H are both brown and oddly exact same color. Not sure if its because H is also the 8th letter in the alphabet.
A seq like 1244 has a bit more entropy with the "bump" where the 3 should be, so it's easier to see it as a slope of length 2 starting at 12, or some "busy-beaver" like sequence that starts gradual and curves rapidly up to 44. The bump at 3 seems most natural.
A long sequence of numbers looks like monotonically increasing groups or strings, and the curve is easy to remember. Is it a log-like plot, a hyperbolic curve, parabola, saw tooth, line, etc? I usually end up finding a curve that has fewer deviations and matches the numbers nicely. I just have to remember how long each sequence was.
Like this:
1234567788100
is
1/7, length 7. 77/99, length 3, except +1 where the 99 should be. It's kind of clumsy with text, easier with pictures and dots, like seeing wood grain or stars. All you need is the "origin" coordinate frame. There's still numbers, but the lines help keep the memory of the relationship more natural.
Words are the same. Sounds angle up and down and squiggle back sometimes. It's why my handwriting is so terrible I think. Probably this is how shorthand was developed, so I don't think it's all that unique to me.
From there, numbers->sounds is easy enough but never helped me remember things. What helps is the ridge-lines and parabolas.
I can totally understand what you're saying but there's no way I could apply it to a series of numbers, maybe not even if I practiced.
Did you always have this feeling with numbers, or was it practiced at all? It feels like what you're describing is a natural visualization you've developed and it also sounds a lot more powerful than something one might practice.
https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually...
I have also heard that this same technique might be the basis for at least some myths and other sacred stories, wherein a myth arises as a mnemonic for something important like an agricultural cycle or migration path.
If anyone knows names of researchers in this area or books on the topic I would be very interested to follow up on it.
-Jack Handy
For example the world "girl" would visualize a head of hair with these brown slender shapes that would surround the head and move upwards.
It's really crazy it actually has a name. I noticed as I get older it no longer happens, but I remember it used to happen incredibly intensely when I was young.
Many synesthetes experience a consistent match between words or sounds and visualizations, but not necessarily the same pairing that other people do.
While I had practically forgotten it until you mentioned it, I had similar experiences, for example the french song "au clair de la lune" always evoked the same, very vivid (but rather abstract) picture in my mind. To my child mind, it was so intense that the song was that picture to me.
Nowadays this doesn't happen...
The star-shaped object would make a "spiky" sound, the bubble-like object more of a bump-like sound. That explains the attribution of the words kiki and bouba to the objects in different cultures. My explanation.
For example, Python has a rounded or smoother shape, whereas C-style languages are more kiki-like (with JavaScript being the spikiest); Haskell, IIRC, had a squarish lump kind of appearance. I originally wrote myself off, thinking that maybe the shapes very loosely correspond to how the code looks in each language "from a distance", but I was never really satisfied with that.
It doesn't help whatsoever but it does wind up my cofounder ;)
Type 1 is a one way door, no return!
Type 2 is a 2 way door.
I’d probably label type 1 a kiki (a pointy decision … beware!)
"kiki" has lots of high frequencies: the i and the click sound of the k. Sharp corners also have lots of high "frequencies", but in the 2d domain.
There's an equivalent symmetry, except with low frequencies, with "bouba" and the rounded shape.
I feel like this can't be a coincidence
Well, no shit - that's why we refer to onomatopoeia, a word which probably has far wider currency than others of similar provenance like poiesis.
I'll add a conjecture that similar disparities exist in vowels, with e and i being considered slender while a, o, and u are considered broad.
It is fascinating how many science grants we could save on if we just asked HN commenters to describe the world. To think that we might have reached such knowledge about human beings by just asking HN to tell us about the world.
Eat your heart out, Karl Popper. It appears that Keats wins the day.
I came across some valuable advice in a book once, though sadly I forget the author ant title: be ahead of your time, but only by about 20 minutes or so.
Some here in the US were searching for organic solutions to eliminating plastic waste, but there was a whole demographic that said, “Well, duh” when it was discovered that a particular worm ate plastic. For them it was just a part of observational life.
It is always possible to create completely arbitrary words, but long term the ones that survive are the ones that fit in the language current state and evolution.
eg. Was the response to [ Bouba-like image + Bouba-like audio ] faster/more accurate than [ Bouba-like image + Kiki-like audio ]
Seemed like it may provide some insight into speech perception and synesthesia.
(mamy:sweet, sira:salty, sakai:spicy)
Bouba sounds like something that doesn't require a lot of chewing.
On the other side, you rarely see rocks with extended round parts meeting at sharp, concave angles. A lot if not most things that look like that are soft.
It's not a perfect correlation, but it does seem like a real one to me.
Very few leaves look like Kiki. Most are rounded. Leaves also aren’t the kind of physical objects you would typically interact with physically as a baby learning about kinematics.
https://randomwalk.substack.com/
Going to use this one in my next email :)
The interesting part is that everyone gives the same answer, regardless of culture and language.
> 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki", suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way
So apart from visually impaired (from birth) people, we may have a pattern in mapping shapes to phonemes.