This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

One of the characteristics of language is that there is no relationship between the way that words sound and their meaning. For example, there is nothing window-like about the word window, and it is named with completely different sounds in other languages, from fenêtre in French to shubak in Arabic. In this talk, Dr Shiri Lev-Ari will discuss cases where the sounds of words are not arbitrary. She will start by showing what characterises the sounds of swear words across the world’s languages. She will then discuss which languages have more words whose sounds express their meaning, and why that is the case. She will end with an example that illustrates that our intuition regarding whether the sounds of certain words express their meaning can be very wrong.

Dr. Shiri Lev-Ari is a cognitive scientist studying language from a social perspective. She is particularly interested in how language evolution is shaped by the social needs of the society. She holds a PhD from The University of Chicago and is currently a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London.