Towards a History of Sound-Symbolic Theories  

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"Towards a History of Sound-Symbolic Theories" [1] is the title of a conference on sound symbolism held at the University of Burgundy in 2014.

Excerpt from call for papers:

"A significant part of the recent research in cognitive neuroscience nowadays seems to support the assumption of an originally motivated relationship between phonetics and semantics (Rizzolatti and Arbib 1998, Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001, Gentilucci et al. 2001, Maurer et al. 2006, Rizzolatti and Craighero 2007, Imai et al. 2008, Ozturk et al. 2012). Given the distrust of most modern linguists on this topic and the scarcity of books of linguistics on it (exceptions are Hinton et al. 1994, Hamano 1998, Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001, Bohas and Dat 2007), these scientists have sometimes been forced to mobilize authors of a bygone era to articulate a discourse around the experimental data they have. So Rizzolatti and Craighero cite repeatedly Condillac (1715-1780), while Ramachandran and Hubbard use, without quoting, a famous argument of Nigidius Figulus (98-45 BC.). If, on the one hand, this indicates a weakness of the current research in linguistics facing the challenge of natural sciences, it suggests, on the other hand, that the history of theories on language, through the epistemological hindsight it allows, could provide a valuable ground of mediation to initiate a fruitful exchange between these two disciplinary fields."

"Theories of this type [relationships of sound and meaning in language] are found for example (at very different levels of development) in the Chandogya Upanishad (II, 22), and in Plato (Cratylus 422e-427d), Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus 75-76), Nigidius Figulus (in Gellius, X, 4), Dionysius of Halicarnassus (De compositione verborum, XVI, 4), Origen (Contra Celsum, I, 24), Iamblichus (De mysteriis Aegyptiorum, VII, 5), Augustine (De Dialectica, VI and VII), in the Sefer Yetzirah, and in Kuukai (Shoji Jisso Gi), Abhinavagupta (Paratrisikavivarana and Tantraloka c. III), Ibn Jinni, Abraham Abulafia, Henry of Ghent (Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, c. LXXIII), Jacob Boehme (Mysterium magnum), John Wallis (1653: ch. XIV), Leibniz (1710 and 1765: ch. III, 2), Giambattista Vico (1744: ch. I, 3, 57 and II, 2, 4), Charles de Brosses (1765: ch. I and VI), Condillac (1775: ch. I, 2), Court de Gébelin (1774-1783 and 1776), Melchiorre Cesarotti (1785), Dieudonné Thiébault (1802), Carlo Denina (1804), Charles Nodier (1808 and 1834: ch. I-III), Abel-François Villemain (1835), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836: ch. 10), Ernest Renan (1848), Honoré Chavée (1849), Karl Wilhelm Heyse (1856), Adolphe Pictet (1859), Hensleigh Wedgwood (1866), Edward Tylor (1871), Jean Pierre Brisset (1883, 1900, 1913), Georg van der Gabelentz (1891), Wilhelm Wundt (1900: ch. I, 1), Maurice Grammont (1901 and 1933: ch. III), Otto von Jespersen (1922: ch. XX-XXI), Edward Sapir (1929), Wolfgang Köhler (1929), Richard Paget (1930), Stanley Newman (1933), Dwight Bolinger (1949), Maxime Chastaing (1958, 1962, 1964, 1966), Jean-Michel Peterfalvi (1964, 1966, 1970), Roman Jakobson (1965), Pierre Guiraud (1967: ch. III), Ivan Fónagy (1983 and 2001), Stanislav Voronin (1983), and probably many others that we do not yet know."

"The critical literature on the subject is now abundant. Just recalling some basic benchmarks, a starting point can perhaps be found in the Sixties with, on the one hand, André Padoux' key PhD dissertation, Recherches sur la symbolique et l'énergie de la parole dans certains textes tantriques (1963; en. tr. Vāc: the concept of the word in selected hindu tantras, 1990) and, on the other hand, Peterfalvi's review of the experimental researches on sound symbolism (1965). In the Semitic field, a turning point is represented by Gershom Scholem's Der Name Gottes und die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala (1970) tracing the first scientifically accurate profile of the Kabbalist theory of language in the Middle Ages. Despite his sarcastic approach, Gérard Genette's Mimologics (1976) represents another milestone as the first attempt to provide an overview of the Western tradition. For the modern era, one can supplement it with Roman Jakobson's and Linda Waugh's The Sound Shape of Language (1979: ch. 4) and with Philippe Monneret's Le sens du signifiant (2003: ch. 1-2). In the 1980s, researches on the subject are growing. One can cite at least Thomas Kasulis' work on Kuukai (1982), Jürgen Trabant's ones on Humboldt (1985, 1990, 1992), Moshe Idel's on Abulafia and the Kabbalah (1987, 1988, 1989), Donatella Di Cesare's on Humboldt and Hamann (1989, 1998, 2001), Stefano Gensini's on Leibniz (1991, 1995), Irene Rosier-Catach's on Henry of Ghent (1995), John Joseph's (2000) and David Sedley's (2003) on the Cratylus, Raffaele Torella on Abhinavagupta (2004), and Luca Nobile's on de Brosses and Condillac (2007, 2011, 2012). The time may have come to attempt a new synthesis. It is significant, from this point of view, that Keith Allan, editor of the Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics (2013) just asked Margaret Magnus for a chapter on the history of sound symbolism."