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Bonus 38: When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia
🕑 Added 2020-04-03 00:52:09 +0000 UTCWhat colour is the letter A? Are the days of the week or months of the year located in particular positions for you? Do certain musical notes have colours or textures? Synesthesia is a cognitive phenomenon where certain senses or concepts cross over into other ones, and it's probably more common than people realize.
In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about synesthesia! We talk about research on various kinds of synesthesia, including the much-studied grapheme-colour, sound-colour, and time-space synesthesias, as well as rarer varieties such as Gretchen's attitude-texture synesthesia which she's never heard of anyone else having. Also, our producer Claire realized she was actually a synesthete while editing this episode! This is...not the first time something like this has happened to us, so if you discover the same, we'd love to hear your stories!
Content note for synesthetes: This episode talks about the general phenomenon of letters and numbers having colours but it doesn't talk about specific mappings of symbol to colour, e.g. "the colour of A" or "letters that are green" but not "$Letter/$Word is $Colour" as we know this creates painful cognitive dissonance for some synesthetes (including one of us!). We'd ask that people also refrain from naming specific colour mappings in the comments here; to do it in the Discord please use spoiler tags |like this| so people can opt-in to seeing them or not.
Announcements:
Remember to apply for the LingComm Grant if you have a public linguistics project you could use some support with!
Also, we know that this is a rough time for everyone these days. We want to reassure you that Lingthusiasm is already a distributed, internet-based project so we'll be continuing to put out our regular episodes and bonus episodes which don't talk about news or current events and are hopefully a nice distraction for you. If you're looking for other breaks from the social media news cycle, we're also really enjoying the community that's growing in the Lingthusiasm Discord, which you already have access to. By request, we've recently started experimenting in Discord with doing livestream listen-alongs of new episodes and play-alongs of linguistics-related video games, if you'd like some linguistics community events to keep you company. We've also started an email newsletter called Mutual Intelligibility where we summarize resources available on various linguistics topics for teaching or self-teaching.
Finally, if you've been financially hit by covid-related closures, we completely understand and have no hard feelings if you need to suspend your patronage for now (and if the Lingthusiasm Discord is an important community to you in this time and you want to keep access to it in the meanwhile, just send us a private message here or on Discord and we can give you temporary guest access for the duration).
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Don't forget to apply for a LingComm grant!
- Cross sensory mapping - Lingthusiasm Episode 21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles
- Discovering you have synesthesia during a linguistics study
- Lingthusiasm Episode 5: Colour words around the world and inside your brain
- Synesthesia/Linguistics research
- An interesting study about synesthesia in sign languages
- Graphemes Sharing Phonetic Features Tend to Induce Similar Synesthetic Colors
- Gretchen's twitter review of This Is How You Lose The Time War
- Wassily Kandinsky, an artist with synesthesia
You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at AllThingsLinguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles
Comments
I have synaesthesia too! Interestingly, when I learned Arabic I transposed colours from the Latin alphabet to their nearest phonetic counterparts in the Arabic alphabet. But my brain also had to assign new colours to letters like خ whose sound might be familiar yet lacks a single grapheme in English, and in the case of ع the sound itself is completely novel!
We both have, and we're big fans of Ada Palmer! Gretchen has a post about her experience reading Too Like the Lightning: https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/149193832028/a-linguist-tweets-too-like-the-lightning-by-ada
Idk if you have read Terra Ignota by Ada Palmer, but your descriptions of synesthesia reminds me a lot of how setsets percieve the world!
