You know, rough things, things that are jagged, rugged, coarse, things that feel uneven and raspy to the touch, or that look like it… Sandpaper, tree bark, coral… Languages call them by many names: aspre, áspero, rugueux, rau… And here’s something funny: almost all of these have an “r”! Now, wait a minute, is this a trick, handpicking languages and words, or…?
Indeed: in 2022, a seminal paper by Winter et al., proposed that a particular kind of “r” – the “trilled r” (as in Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian, and many other languages) – tends to be disproportionately used in words expressing “roughness” across the world’s languages, pointing to a cross-modal (or sound symbolic) link between sound and touch: the “rough” tactile sensation of a surface is mapped onto the “rough” acoustic and articulatory feeling of the sound. This is based on four sub-studies (on English, Hungarian, 332 languages, and the history of Indo-European family), and is supported by, among others, recent experimental work showing that, across 28 diverse languages, people reliably associate the “trilled r” with a jagged line, and “l” with a straight one.
However, in an extension published this year with Rémi Anselme and François Pellegrino, we show that these results are actually much more general: any sort of “r-like” sounds (and there are many, ranging for the “trilled”, to the “approximant” and “tap/flap” in English, to the “uvular trill” of Édith Piaf’s French, and the “uvular fricative” of German, among others) seem to be preferentially used in words having to do with “roughness”! If this is so, then this association must be due to something else than just the acoustic and articulatory “roughness” of the sound itself.
But no matter what the mechanisms might be, what is clear is that, while languages are “free” to use whatever words they “want”, and that there’s no more “ratness” in rat than in, say, şobolan or francach, as per Ferdinand de Saussure’s arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, this “freedom” is somewhat constrained or guided by human nature and by the myriad associations – conscious and otherwise – that we constantly make. Language is, after all, a thing of this world.
