The history of theories attributing an important role to relationships of similarity or analogy between sound and meaning in language is rich and ancient. In most major written traditions (Western, Jewish, Arab, Indian, Japanese...), these speculations, often related to issues of the origin or creation of mankind and the world, emerge in the early stages of metalinguistic reflection (the Upanishads in India, Plato in Greece, Kuukai in Japan, etc.) and often resurface during major turning points in the history of civilizations (Nigidius Figulus at the end of Roman Republic, John Wallis and Charles de Brosses shortly before the English and French Revolutions, etc.). It is a heritage that requires the work of linguists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and epistemologists to be released from its now cryptic encoding and to be relocated in its own cultural coordinates allowing to understand and exploit it.

The history of theories attributing an important role to relationships of similarity or analogy between sound and meaning in language is rich and ancient. In most major written traditions (Western, Jewish, Arab, Indian, Japanese...), these speculations, often related to issues of the origin or creation of mankind and the world, emerge in the early stages of metalinguistic reflection (the Upanishads in India, Plato in Greece, Kuukai in Japan, etc.) and often resurface during major turning points in the history of civilizations (Nigidius Figulus at the end of Roman Republic, John Wallis and Charles de Brosses shortly before the English and French Revolutions, etc.).

The formulations of these theories are extremely varied, not only from the point of view of textual genres (scientific, philosophical, literary or religious texts) and from that of their cultural and political functions (mystical or materialistic, revolutionary or reactionary, marginal or institutional theories, etc.), but also in terms of technical, methodological and epistemological solutions (constative theories of the imitation of reality and performative theories of its establishment; iconic theories of the similarity between sound and meaning and indexical theories of the contiguity between voice and world; sound-image, sound-diagram and sound-metaphor theories; onomatopoeic, sound-symbolic or phono-semantic theories, based on the hearing or the articulatory gesture, etc.).

Most often forgotten or ignored, these hypotheses are, in addition, a huge heritage of ideas, problems and sometimes solutions about the relationship between language and mind, at times strangely naive, at times surprisingly refined, but always deeply stimulating through their radical difference from the contemporary epistemological framework.

It is a heritage that requires the work of linguists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and epistemologists to be released from its now cryptic encoding and to be relocated in its own cultural coordinates allowing to understand and exploit it.

Program

Thursday 20 February

9h00 Accueil

AMPHITHEATRE - R09 - ANTIQUITY

• · 9h30 Philippe Monneret (15') Welcome
• · 9h45 Luca Nobile (15') Introduction
• · 10h00 Thomas Kasulis (45' + 15') Kūkai’s soundscape of reality and language

11h00 Coffee Break

• · 11h30 Johannes Bronkhorst (30' + 10') Sound-symbolic theories and synchronic etymologies
• · 12h10 Frédérique Biville (30' + 10') Nigidius Figulus et le symbolisme articulatoire des pronoms
• · 12h50 Luca Nobile (30' + 10') From Plato to Charles de Brosses : sound symbolism and the history of language sciences.

13h30 Lunch

14h30-15h30

AMPHITHEATRE - R09 - ANTIQUITY

• · 14h30 William Herlofsky (20' + 10') Good vibrations. Kūkai and his 1200 year-old philosophy of language and (purified) sound symbolism
• · 15h00 Claudine Besset-Lamoine (20' + 10') Voix coptes perdues et retrouvées. La voix prophétique à Nag-Hammadi, les voix des Noms Barbares, "Le Dire à haute voix".
• · 15h30 Valentina Di Lascio & Angelo Giavatto (30' + 10') How many steps back to sound symbolism? Epicurus and the Stoics on the origin and correctness of words

SALLE DES SEMINAIRES - R03 - XX

• · 14h30 Juan-Carlos Moreno Cabrera (20' + 10') The contribution of Garcia de Diego's Diccionario de voces naturales to sound-symbolic research.
• · 15h00 Maria Kraxenberger (20' + 10') Revising Jakobson’s sound-meaning-nexus: from theoretical assumption to contemporary implementation
• · 15h30 Kevin Mendousse (20' + 10') Des régularités phonosémantiques dans le lexique de l’anglais

16h00 Coffee Break

AMPHITHEATRE - R09 - XVIII-XIX

• · 16h30 Claudia Stancati (20' + 10') Un débat "expérimental" sur l’origine du langage au XVIIIe : l’étymologie contre la métaphysique du langage
• · 17h00 Françoise Berlan (20' + 10') Synonymie distinctive et iconicité du signe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, une conciliation impossible ? Le cas de Pierre-Joseph Roubaud
• · 17h30 Zaal Kikvidze (20' + 10') Phonological Iconism in a 19th Century Trilingual Dictionary (Based on Dictionnaire géorgien-russe-français by D. Chubinashvili)

SALLE DES SEMINAIRES - R03 - OFF TOPIC

• · 16h30 Alessandra Pozzo (20' + 10') La parole mystique : analyse phono-symbolique
• · 17h00 Serge Mouraviev (20' + 10') La forme phonique des fragments d'Héraclite suppose-t-elle une théorie du rapport entre le son et le sens ?
• · 17h30 Anne-Caroline Rendu-Loisel (20' + 10') Lorsque le son fait sens : pour une théorie phono-symbolique dans les textes akkadiens cunéiformes de l’ancienne Mésopotamie

FRIDAY 21 FEBRUARY

AMPHITHEATRE - R09

• · 9h40 John Joseph (30' + 10') ‘The vivid portrayal of what they value’: imitation and nervous excitement in the history of sign theory
• · 10h20 Georges Bohas (30' + 10') La motivation du signe linguistique dans la tradition grammaticale arabe

11h00 Coffee Break

AMPHITHEATRE - R09 - XVII-XVIII

• · 11h30 David Cram (30' + 10') John Wallis on sound symbolism
• · 12h10 Stefano Gensini (30' + 10') Leibniz’s theory of natural origins of language and its influence on Melchiorre Cesarotti
• · 12h50 Virginie Pektas (30' + 10') La signature des choses. La théorie böhmienne de la langue naturelle

13h30 Lunch

AMPHITHEATRE - R09 - XIX-XX

• · 14h30 Åsa Abelin (20' + 10') Sound-symbolic theories in the Nordic countries
• · 15h00 Michela Piattelli (20' + 10') Hensleigh Wedgwood (1803-1891) on the origin of language
• · 15h30 Rusudan Gersamia & Maia Lomia (20' + 10') Sound Symbolism in Kartvelian Languages

SALLE DES SEMINAIRES - R03 - XX

• · 14h30 Francis Tollis (20' + 10') Un linguiste français à faire figurer dans l’histoire du phonosymbolisme : Maurice Toussaint
• · 15h00 Gabrielle Le-Tallec (20' + 10') Le problème du passage du phonatoire au sémantique en linguistique hispanique : dépassement de Guillaume et linguistique du signifiant
• · 15h30 Ekaterina Voronova (20' + 10') La formation de la théorie phono-symbolique de Stanislav Voronin dans les années quatre-vingt en Russie

16h00 Coffee Break

AMPHITHEATRE - R09 - XIX-XX

• · 16h30 Didier Bottineau (20' + 10') « Excursion au royaume des voyelles » : le phonosymbolisme d’Ernst Jünger
• · 17h00 Thomas Schwaiger (20' + 10') On theories of reduplicative iconicity in 19th century linguistics
• · 17h30 Serguei Tchougounnikov (20' + 10') Les « gestes verbaux » (Sprachgebärde) et le « sentiment de la langue » (Sprachgefühl) dans la « linguistique psychologique » .

SALLE DES SEMINAIRES - R03 - XX

• · 16h30 Nahyun Kwon (20' + 10') A theoretical extension of the frequency code hypothesis in magnitude symbolism
• · 17h00 Monika Konert-Panek (20' + 10') Words and music – on the symbolic value of speech sounds. Michał Bristiger’s musicological contribution to the linguistic sound-meaning debate
• · 17h30 Maruszka Meinard (20' + 10') Sound symbolism and diagrammatic iconicity

SALLE DES CONSEILS - R02 - OFF TOPIC

• · 16h30 Ken-Ichi Kadoka (20' + 10') The Symbolism of the Onomatopoeia Markers in Japanese
• · 17h00 Andrey Mikhalev (20' + 10') La Théorie du champ phonosémantique: à la recherche d’un système proto-conceptuel de la langue
• · 17h30 Ekaterina Sundueva (20' + 10') Verbalization of sense perception by means of stem consonant [r] in Mongolian languages

18h00 Conclusion