Masquerade

The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. This effect was first observed by German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929.[1] In psychological experiments, first conducted on the island of Tenerife … Köhler showed forms similar to those shown at the right and asked participants which shape was called takete and which was called baluba (maluma in the 1947 version). Data suggested a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with “takete” and the rounded shape with “baluba”.[2]

In 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler’s experiment using the words kiki and bouba and asked American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India “Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?” In both groups, 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as bouba and the jagged one as kiki, suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way.[3][not in citation given] Recent work by Daphne Maurer and colleagues shows that even children as young as 2.5 (too young to read) may show this effect as well.[4]

…the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language…. The presence of these “synesthesia-like mappings” suggest that this effect might be the neurological basis for sound symbolism, in which sounds are non-arbitrarily mapped to objects and events in the world.

via kremlint

Other examples that show how phonemes that are un-mapped onto the words of a language can still “mean” something, or at least “trigger” something

Prisencolinensinainciusol ‒ Adriano Celentano’s “gibberish” sounds like American English—sort of like a Bob Dylan song—but Celentano was Italian and almost none of the words technically are English.

If only I could pick up recordings of speakers of every language imitating what they “heard” from various foreign sentences. There’s of course the racist “Ching chong chang”, which reflects the negative curvature of us-them divisions. But you might be able to get around the implicit lack of detail by playing specific sentences or phrases and having the non-speakers imitate those phrases—either loosely, like a joke, or as accurately as they can. In doing this I think you would do real mathematics—for example you would need to define distance and similarity across some space (a moduli space?), and you would have many kinds of difference (across speakers, across trials, across sentences) which would need to be organised―the way mathematicians organise their spaces with connections (rules for parallel transport).

James Joyce and William Shakespeare are both famous for coining words. There must be a “wrong” way to do this.

Perrin’s Sound and Sense, chapter 13, lists meanings in English that are associated not just with full words, but with mere sounds.