Does the word scratch sound hard or soft? Sharp or dull? Does it sound piercing and specific, or blunt and indiscriminate? Does the way scratch sounds, when you say it out loud, reflect the real-life properties of a scratch? I think so. Scratch, scr-at-ch, sounds sharp, and hard, and piercing, and specific. It sounds like a thin, grazing strip or a tear. Something fast and direct. The word scratch sounds like a scratch looks.
The etymology of scratch is rather misty, but generally it is thought to derive from a fusion of Middle English scratten and crachen, themselves both of uncertain origin. However, the “scr-” sound-cluster appears in many words which tend to have ‘sister’ terms, closely related in meaning but lacking the initial ‘s’. Consider scrunch/crunch, or cringe/scringe (a vintage, alternative form of cringe). The Oxford English Dictionary notes that;
It does not appear that these coincidences are due to any one general cause ..., but it is probable that the existence of many pairs of synonyms with scr- and cr- produced a tendency to change cr-, in words expressive of sounds or physical movements, into scr- so as to render the word echoic or phonetically symbolic.
Essentially, cr- words which denoted a particular physicality became scr- words, and this sound-cluster began to be associated with a particular class of action.
The accepted ‘sharpness’ of scratch is a good example of (half of) the kiki-bouba effect, which notes that we generally do not assign sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Researchers found that, across genders, races, cultures, ages, and geographical locations, when presented with nonsense words like ‘kiki’ and ‘bouba’, participants tend to assign ‘kiki’ to a spikier, thinner shape, in comparison to the flat, rounded edges of ‘bouba’. The study has been confirmed among American university students, speakers of languages with no writing system, infants, and even the congenitally blind. This discovery of sound symbolism pushes us to recognise that the way we hear and register plosives versus fricatives, affricates versus liquids, is not meaningless, but relates to something physical we observe about the world. We naturally ‘hear’ shapes, in the sense that the malleability of certain sounds inspires us to think of certain forms that we notice about the world.
We might even observe the kiki-bouba effect at play in our own anatomy. It has been suggested that the association is related to the shape of the mouth when producing sounds—the more rounded shape of the lips when pronouncing bouba and the more taut form we take when saying kiki. Whether it’s a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant, or a laminal apico-alveolar retroflex consonant, we can note some consistency between the reported sharpness of the word and the tightness of our vocal gymnastics.
This is one angle from which to offer the argument that language is not assigned entirely arbitrarily, that there is some quality or property about the word scratch that means it must have been, that it was always intended in some way to sound like, if not exactly, scratch. Something about the sharpness of that real-life incision translates to our use of the fricative in the naming and meaning-making process. The question is whether this phenomenon occurs frequently enough in our language to make a real case for this direction of fit, or whether, in a language of over one million words, some are bound to sound similar to their physical manifestations.
There is much debate over the arbitrariness of language. Many see arguments for linguistic naturalism, or the view that language is essentially wound-up with human nature when it comes to meaning, as a romantic (or arrogant) quest for some human exceptionalism in the way we communicate, different from the roar of the beast. From Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (McKusick, 1986):
A variant of the doctrine of linguistic naturalism, attributable to Epicurus and Lucretius (De Natura, 5:1031ff), asserts that language arises spontaneously from human nature, just as beasts naturally emit cries … they are outward manifestations of man’s inner nature … To the obvious objection that there are many different human languages, [Lucretius] replies that there are a great variety of peoples, each with its own distinct characteristics. Linguistic variation is, in this view, an index of the variability of human nature.’
This seems, to me, a little too romantic and yearning to be an acceptable account of meaning-making. Furthermore, this kind of iconisation (Irvine and Gal) dangerously supplies racist ideologies. Irvine and Gal define iconisation as the notion that ‘a linguistic feature somehow depicts or displays a social group’s inherent nature or essence’. They offer the coastal city of Cartagena as an example, noting that:
Tour guides like to describe the light pronunciation of final /s/ in the local dialect as being taken away by the strong sea wind, an iconisation in which the people, like their city, are windswept. Meanwhile, a heavy medial /t/ (think of ‘water’) signals Britishness in the United States, but the iconisation.. would be to think this sound is a manifestation of an inherently British characteristic of fastidiousness.
There are many of these pithy examples, but they do not make up the majority of the English language by any means. It is necessary at this point to refine the claim of the argument, and to note that these examples hope not to show that language is mostly non-arbitrary, but that it is not entirely arbitrary. We need only a few examples of this weighty link between our shape-processing and our phonetic output to demonstrate that our language, that all language, is not entirely arbitrary.
Though hardly comprehensive, there are enough examples of onomatopoeia and phonosemantics to challenge the traditional Saussurian view of the complete arbitrariness between Sign, Signifier, and Signified, and for us to recognise that, in many cases, the way we experience the world does inform our meaning-making process. When it comes to scratch, or glitter, or the nonsensical bouba, the way we process the world around us carries weight in the naming process. Against the coldness of linguistics, of grammar rules and etymological consistency, we can find something irreplaceably human, something romantic and mortal in the hardness of scratch.