Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog's barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl-(Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning 'light' via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like 'How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?' So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.

Iconicity is a resemblance between form and meaning grounded in perceptuo-motor analogy. In speech, iconicity is understood as words “sounding like what they mean.” Studies on English and Spanish use ratings to identify words speakers consider iconic. Perry et al. (2015) show that English onomatopoeia are rated highest, followed by adjectives/verbs > nouns > function words. Our study replicates this for Japanese but, owing to additional variables, yields more nuanced findings. Word-class aside, Japanese speakers are more likely to rate words as iconic if they are an (1) ideophone > (2) Yamato/native prosaic word > or (3) non-Yamato prosaic word. For comparison, we reanalyzed English ratings from Perry et al. (2015), and found neither strata (Germanic, Latinate, French) nor historically iconic etymology had a significant effect. With these factors in mind, we propose that ratings reflect a word’s relationship to sensory information rather than iconicity.

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The enzymes uricase, allantoinase, and allantoicase have been measured in liver preparations of the African lungfish Protopterus aethiopicus. The levels for these enzymes in lungfish liver suggest that the amount of urea formed in vivo in Protopterus via a uricolytic pathway may be greater than that derived via the Ornithine-urea cycle. The operation of a "purine cycle" in lungfish liver is proposed.

This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which collects 4948 unique onomatopoeia and ideophones (mimetics, expressives) of Mandarin, as well as Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. These are analyzed according to a wide range of variables, e.g., description, frequency. Apart from an overview of these variables, we provide a tutorial that shows how the database can be accessed in different formats (.rds, .xlsx, .csv, R package and online app interface), and how the database can be used to explore skewed tonal distribution across Mandarin ideophones. Since CHIDEOD is a data repository, potential future research applications are discussed.