Re: CHAT: Synesthesia

Nik Taylor:
> Melissa Phong wrote:
> > I'm a bit confused about what synesthesia is exactly.  All
> words conjour up
> > colors in my head and I see things like Nicole describes. For
> instance, the
> > alphabet looks rather like piano keys and August is sort of a
> muted yellow.
> > But to me, that's quite different from having synesthesia and
> tasting colors,
> > etc. I guess I just assumed that everybody sees words as colors
> and different
> > designs. Is that not true?
>
> Not true at all.  I get no visual connotations from different words,
> even a word like "red" doesn't give me any image unless I actually
> conciously *think* about the color red.
Ah, but "e" is an orange vowel. It is "a" that is red. ["i" *ought*
therefore to be yellow, but it isn't nearly as yellow as "e" is orange
and "a" red.]

In reply to Melissa, I think, from personal experience and a small
smattering of exposure to studies of synesthesia, that the association
of colours with linguistic material (sounds or letters) is common
but not universal. (It's unidirectional: thinkig of sounds or letters
evokes colours, but not vice versa.) And associating colours with
other stuff is also one of the less rare forms of synesthesia. Other
forms are very rare, and in fact the formal studies I've seen reports
of all involve associating colours with stuff, mostly words.

I have a chromatic synesthetic responses to letters and sounds. Sometimes
it's a precise hue (e.g. f is mustard yellow, unless the hue is
tweaked slightly by adjacent sounds), while other times it's a vaguer
sense of darkness/luminosity & paleness/vividness/saturation. Especially
with these vaguer senses I'm sure we're getting into the realm of cognitive
universals; even a relatively cursory glance at English phonesthemes
reveals a connection between back rounded vowels and darkness, and so
unremarkable is this association that it has made its way into standard
terminology -- witness "clear L" vs. "dark L", where "dark" = velarized.

My sound-colour associations, btw, have a strong semiconscious influence
on me when I'm creating words for Livagian. Whether I start with the
sound or with the meaning, I cast around for a corresponding meaning or
sound that feels like it's a good match. That there is some constancy to
these intuitions is shown by my discovering striking similarities in sound
between words with relevantly similar meaning, where the words were
invented a long time apart and had been forgotten. I've also had cases
where I'd forgotten I'd already invented a word for a given meaning, and
reinvented it, and then found the old and the new versions to be very
very similar.
   I would very much expect possibly even a majority of conlangers to
have had similar experiences; surely this heightened experiencing of
language on both an intellectual and a sensual level is one of the
things that makes people invent languages, rather than on the one
hand invent stories or make pictures, or on the other hand just learn
and study languages.

--And.