Free The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky Page A

about the nature of food advertising. But although we’ve talked about food words in terms of their history and the adjectives we use to describe them, I’ve said nothing so far about the sound of the food words themselves.
    Why would the sound of a food word tell us anything? It’s not obvious why the sounds in the name of a word might be suggestive of, say, the taste or smell of the food. Shakespeare expressed this skepticism most beautifully in Romeo and Juliet :
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
     
    Juliet is expressing the theory we call conventionalism : that a name for something is just an agreed upon convention. English uses the word egg , but Cantonese calls it daan , and Italian uovo , but if accidentally it had evolved the other way around, it would be fine as long as everyone agreed. The alternative view, that there is something about a name that fits the object naturally, that some names might naturally “sound more sweet” than others, is called naturalism .
    Conventionalism is the norm in modern linguistics, because we have found that the sounds that make up a word don’t generally tell you what the word means. Linguists phrase this by saying that the relation between sound and meaning is “arbitrary,” a word first used by political philosopher John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Locke pointed out that if there were a necessary relationship between sound and meaning, all languages would have the same words for everything, and the word for egg in English and Italian would be the same as the Chinese word.
    A moment’s thought suggests another reason that conventionalism makes more sense than naturalism, at least for spoken (as opposed to signed) languages: spoken languages only have around 50 or so distinct “phones” (the distinct sounds that make up the sound structure of a language) and obviously have a lot more ideas to express than 50.
    But 2500 years ago in the Cratylus , Plato points out that there are reasonable arguments for naturalism as well as conventionalism. Socrates first agrees with Cratylus’s position that there is an “inherently correct” name for everything for “both Greeks and barbarians.” One way to be natural or “inherently correct” is to use letters consistent with the meaning of the word. For example the letter o (omicron) is round, and “therefore there is plenty of omicron mixed up in the word goggulon (round).” Similarly, words with the sound(Greek rho, ρ, which was pronounced as a rolling trilledlike modern Spanish) often mean something related to motion ( rhein [flow], rhoe [current], tromos [trembling]).
    But then Socrates turns right around and argues for the conventionalist position of Hermogenes by noting, for example, that even in different dialects of Greek words are pronounced differently, suggesting that convention is needed after all.
    Linguistics as a discipline followed this latter line of reasoning, andFerdinand de Saussure, the Geneva professor who is one of the fathers of modern linguistics, made the principle of the “arbitrariness of the sign” a foundation of our field. But research in the last few decades, following the earlier lead of giants of linguistics from the past century like Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson , has shown us that there was something to naturalism after all: sometimes the sounds of a name are in fact associated with the tastes of food.
    We call the phenomenon of sounds carrying meaning sound symbolism . Sound symbolism has ramifications beyond its deep philosophical and linguistic interest. Like other linguistic cues to marketing strategies sounds are crucial to food marketing and branding.
    Sound symbolism has been most deeply studied with vowels, and in particular the difference between two classes of vowels, front vowels and back vowels , which are named depending on the position of the tongue when articulating the vowels.
    The vowels i