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Originally Posted by Jens
Just as an aside, dwnielsen has repeatedly brought up the idea of sound symbolism, which is something that I am very interested in. I'm not sure how it relates to the naming of planets, however. The sound of a bell is similar in many languages because, well, bells sound a certain way. Many languages have a word for "cut" that has the /k/ sound, which is natural because cutting actually seems to sound that way to the human ear.
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Phonosemantics takes this a little farther, noting word clusters with common sounds and meanings, unrelated to simple onomatopoeia. One can exploit this with invented words, as in the famous "bouba/kiki" experiment. Subjects exposed to these words for the first time, and asked to associate them with objects, would reproducibly identify the rounded, lumpy object as the "bouba", and the spiky, sharp one as the "kiki". This happens with subjects who speak languages from many different language groups. Does it go back to the sounds of lumpy and sharp objects interacting with the environment? Maybe. But there are other examples that are purely visual, like the "gl-" group that associates with light sources (gleam, glitter, glister, glisten, glow, glint, in English).
However, to me the proposed application to astronomical bodies has more than a whiff of alchemical/magickal symbol-making to it: a stretching after relationships that aren't really there; mistaking puns for deep meanings.
My reference to Freud was supposed to work at that level: it's a negative comment on symbol-peddling, written by a symbol-peddler, and it also provides a symbolic reference to the shape of the dwarf planet Haumea. Move over, Robert Anton Wilson!
Grant Hutchison