Why 'Tiny' Sounds Smaller Than 'Huge.' Nixing the Horrid 'Of.' Kokopelli.
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The Relationship Between Tone and Speech
In cross-linguistics research, it was found that 90% of languages use e sounds in words to indicate some type of smallness. It also seems that these sound-meaning relationships can even help decipher what words mean in an unknown language. When speakers of Polish or Italian were given words in linguistically unrelated languages like Japanese and Finnish, they could guess the correct meaning at rates better than chance. This might explain why certain sounds communicate particular things like how big or spiky objects are or how happy we are.
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