Tomato
The tomato plant is native to the New World, either to the west coast of South America, or possibly Mexico. It is not known whether it was domesticated and eaten by native peoples: there is no evidence that it was, but a huge amount of horticultural information was lost in the upheaval of the Spanish invasion. In any case, the Spanish certainly enjoyed it, and it became a staple of Italian cooking by the late 1500’s; but in England and its colonies, it was thought to be unfit to eat, because it contained glycoalkaloids (which are indeed poisonous, but the fruit is safe to eat). Tomatoes gradually became acceptable fare there during the 1700’s.
The word tomato comes ultimately from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word tomatl, literally “the swollen fruit”. It entered Spanish as tomate, and English as tomate in about 1600. By 1750, it had become tomato, perhaps by analogy with the closely related potato.
The central syllable of tomato is a manifestation of expansive, elastic energy, fitting its plump shape. The manifestation arises from a movement of earthy energy, and the result of the manifestation is more movement of earthy energy.
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:17 am
How do different pronunciations of a word affect phonosemantics?
The British notoriously say /tuh-MAH-toh/ where Americans say /tuh-MAY-toh/ … and the Nahuatl language says the “same” word more differently still. (Written “tl” in Nahuatl words represents an unvoiced-/l/ sound.)
A related question: what happens to the phonosemantics of any word as that word vastly changes its pronunciation within just *one* language over time?
For example … 800 years ago, literally every word in such a simple sentence as “I hate wine though I love meat” had a far different pronunciation — therefore presumably far different phonosemantics — than the very same words today.
The way that people said “wine” 800 years ago, we would not recognize today as the same word: where we say /WAH-een/, people 800 years ago said /WEE-nuh/ … a big difference in sounds, hence inevitably a big difference in phonosemantics if phonosemantics has any validity at all.)
So what does it mean, phonosemantically, that the sound has changed from /WEE-nuh/ to /WAH-een/ over the centuries? (not to mention all the whole raft of other more-or-less-related pronunciation-changes that literally thousands of other words also underwent along with this one?)
For that matter: what does it mean, phonosemantically, that a whole raft of words such as “enough/through/cough” all once ended in a sound that the English language no longer even has?
August 4th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Kate, these are all excellent questions, and I certainly don’t have definite answers. I have guesses, though…
Different pronunciations of a word indicate different “spiritual” meanings. The society that pronounces the word differently will attach different spiritual significance to the word. The “long a” of American pronunciation in tomato indicates elasticity and expansiveness (one imagines a big, plump tomato!); the “short o” sound (”ah”) of non-American tomato hearkens back to Source energy, meaning that the tomato may be considered more spiritually significant outside of America. I have no idea if this is true, or even how one would test it; but that’s what I might expect.
Similarly, if a word changes in pronunciation over time, its spiritual significance should also change. This is certainly the case with wine. I’m not going to do a phonosemantic analysis of wine right now, but I’ll put it on my list.
Something like English’s Great Vowel shift would indeed represent a wholesale change in the spiritual universe of a society. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that something like that occurred in England between 1200 and 1600.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Well, I look forward to seeing what you’ll tackle in future Words of the Day!
I have to say that phonosemantics does not convince me anywhere nearly as fully as it convinces you. This does not stop me from enjoying your phonosemantic speculations. (Hmmm … I wonder what a phonosemantician would make of “celestial” and “bestial” … two words of very different meaning, which phonologically have so much in common … )
And I definitely look forward to seeing a phonosemantics perspective on the Great Vowel Shift. (I wonder, though … if wholesale changes in pronunciation correlate closely with wholesale changes in a society’s outlook, what about the phonosemantics of earlier wholesale pronunciation-changes, such as the changes that turned Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Germanic?
What, specifically, would it mean (from a phonosemantician’s point of view) that, a couple of thousand years ago, the speakers of an ancient language changed their /p/-/t/-/k/ sounds into as whole new set of sounds (/f/-/th/-/h/), and then changed still another set of sounds (/b/-/d/-/g/) into a whole brand-new /p/-/t/-/k/ set?
One reason I feel more than a little skeptical that phonosemantics works out in as neat point-to-point detail as your “Word of the Day” examples assume it does:
if a strong point-by-point correlation really exists between every sound in a word and some aspects of whatever-that-word-stands-for … if phonosemantics means as much, about the significance of sounds and their sequences in words, as”Word of the Day” seems to say it means … then a phonosemantician who knew what cultural/spiritual changes the speakers of a given language had undergone *should* (logically) manage to discern from those changes what had meanwhile changed in the sound-system of the language.
For example:
suppose a phonosemantician knew how the culture and spirituality of Italy have changed from the times of the Caesars through to our own times,
and suppose the phonosemantician also knew Latin but knew no Italian. If phonosemantics “works” — if it holds true as powerfully as “Word of the Day” assumes it does –
then a phonosemantician who knew Italian history and who knew Latin, but who did not know Italian, should have the ability to correctly “deduce” modern Italian –
at least, to deduce its sound-system and its current pronunciation of Italian words that came from Latin –
by applying his knowledge of Italian history to his knowledge of phonosemantics.
NOT that I ask you to add such detailed explorations to your already busy life! … but the success (or failure) of such a project would say much about the trustworthiness (or otherwise) of phonosemantic reasoning. So, no matter what such a project might confirm (or disconfirm) about phonosemantic premises, I hope you can instead take a few minutes to answer a question that keeps bugging me:
Jeff — what evidence/occurrence
(if it existed and if you knew about it)
would you regard as good evidence
that one or more premises/assumptions of phonosemantics
“didn’t* hold true
(or at least, that they didn’t hold true anywhere nearly as fully/precisely as “Word of the Day” depends on?)
August 15th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Sorry to take so long in replying, Kate — I had to think about this a while.
What would I regard as good evidence that one of the premises or assumptions of phonosemantics was false? Well, there are a LOT of premeses here. The meaning of each individual sound, for example, is a premise. For me to think that one of these meanings was wrong — well, I’m sure that some of them probably are. Even if all the meanings I listed in the main article are correct in some sense, I am probably interpreting some of them incorrectly. I feel particularly uncertain about some of the vowels.
What about the basic assumption of phonosemantics: that the sounds of words have a combinatorial spiritual meaning? I’m not sure if there is any such evidence; to be bluntly honest, I’m not tackling this subject as a scientist, but as a spiritual exercise. I don’t think the predictions of phonosemantics are solid and unambiguous enough (yet) to be tested. If I anywhere on this site give the impression that phonosemantics is a mature science, please let me know, and I’ll change it.
In other words, phonosemantics isn’t at the theoretical stage; and it isn’t even at the hypothesis-testing stage. We’re still in the hypothesis-creation stage.
That said: it would give me pause if, in a single language, it could be shown unambiguously that an individual sound had very, very different spiritual meanings.
Finally, a quick note about “celestial” and “bestial”: these words don’t actually sound that much alike: seh-LEHS-chul vs. BEES-tyul. The “al” ending, which spiritually indicates a balanced, volume-filling energy, syntactically only indicates an adjective derived from a noun. The spiritual status of these kinds of suffixes is very interesting, and may say something about how English speakers conceive of the relationship between entities and attributes, but that would be a whole series of blog posts.