Thanks to the people that replied to the frivolous query about
containers beginning with the letter B in english. Below, eventually,
are some serious suggestions. Meanwhile I've cut and pasted bits from
messages received. It seems there may be something in it.

'B' is also the first letter of the word 'bollocks'. (Thankyou Steve)

A boll is a seed containing vessel apparently which just goes to prove
the point.

Boundary, and Bund as in river-bank to contain floods?

Some people sent exceptions just to prove there are:

Sorry to be nagative but I can think of a lot that don't begin with
'b'! All the below are from Roget's Thesaurus entry 'receptacle'.
Sack, capsule, kit, pouch, chest, caddy, trunk, case, vessel, vase,
can, pannier, punnet, jar, crock, flask, flagon, jar, decanter, cruet,
urn, tub, pail, pot, tankard, jug, pitcher, mug, goblet, cup....etc
etc......! (Simone Apel Information Officer
Publishers Research Services (PResS))

what about: cup, tin, can, pot, jug, dish, sack,
drawer, wardrobe, tub, tetrapack, caddy, coal skuttle, carafe, carton,
carton, case, cask, chicken brick, crib, cruet, cylinder, jar,
decanter, vessel, recepticle, pan, drum, envelope, potty, gourd,
hopper, inkhorn, keg, mould, net, packet, pencil case, pepper pot,
planter, plant pot, pommander, punnet, salt cellar, sandbox, smudge
pot, ashtray, dustbin, tombola, toolbox, vase, trug and tucker-bag?

No I don't believe that there is a connection, its just a load of words
(James Savage City Information Librarian)

carton, crate, container, can, canister, carrier bag (oops there's a
B), census (a bit abstract, but still holds a lot...), car boot
(hmmm..), coolbag, coffin, cartridge . . .

my vote is for the C's, but I can't work out any significance!
(Mark Kerr)

Related thoughts:
Not really the same , but vaguely related - a very great many of the
words (particularly adjectivies and adverbs) which begin with s in
English are for something which has unpleasant connotations. I've
always wondered whether there is any significance in that. My guess
is that these things originate way back in the mists of time?
(Clare Powne
Information Services Librarian)

To change the subject a little (but not too much I hope) I have always
been puzzled by a similar phenomenon. Why do the names of all the
continents
start and end with the same letter?

Europe
Asia
America
Australia
Antartica
(Stephen Clarke)


Suggestions:

These are the serious explanations. Jolly interesting they are too.
I've incorporated most of Dominic Watt's reply because he actually
seems to know what he's talking about. (Not a librarian I think).

Maybe there's some wider
significance of a preference for words beginning with B (or perhaps
letters towards the start of the alphabet?).

 I don't know the exact answer to your query but this sort of
phenomenon has often been commented on within the field of English
linguistics, e.g. all the words containing a short i which mean
hurried motion of some type: skip, nip, pinch, filch, flinch etc.
etc. I'm quoting from memory from Otto Jepsersen, Growth and
structure of the English language, 9th ed. 1948, so a venerable
but still significant work of English linguistics. (Tom French
Head of Modern British Collections The British Library 96
Euston Road London NW1 2DB)


My fiancee sent me your 'frivolous query' about words in English for
containers, and I thought you might like to know that there are
several people researching in just this area, which among those who
are excited by such things is called 'sound symbolism'. I agree that
studying this kind of phenomenon might seem frivolous at first
glance. But actually the fact that English, and other Germanic
languages, have lots of words for containers that begin with the
sounds [b] (bag, bottle, etc.) and [p] (pot, purse, pouch, pocket) is
very interesting from the point of view of the correspondences
between types of sound - in this case, sounds produced by
closing the lips, allowing air to build up behind them, and then
releasing the air with a plosive burst - and the ways in which the
brain perceives and stores language.

I'm talking about sounds rather than 'letters' here, as after all the
origins of these words lie far back into pre-history at a time when
it hadn't even occurred to your average Indo-European that you could
represent speech sounds by making marks on wood, bone, or stone.
We might speculate, then, that the reason such 'bilabial-initial'
words came to stand for a certain type of object in proto-Germanic
(and the ancestors of other European languages) has something to do
with the sound of the bilabial plosives themselves; [p] and [b]
somehow 'resemble' the objects they help to represent. This isn't
onomatopoeia here though - I'm not suggesting that closing and
opening your lips very rapidly 'sounds' like a bottle or a pot, or
anything as spurious as that. Rather, I'd suggest something more
abstract. As another example, think of all those words in English
beginning with the sequence [skr]: scratch, scrawl, scrape, scrap,
scribble, scrub, (in)scribe, and so on. Many of these involve the
concept of cutting or incising a mark or groove of some sort, or
making a mark on something by moving a pointed object around. You
might think this was to do with the scratching noise a pencil or a
scraper makes, say, but that's a circular argument; why wouldn't some
other sequence, such as [fgl], do? Both [skr] and [fgl] are sequences
of a voiceless fricative, a velar plosive and an alveolar
approximant, and the two clusters look almost identical on a
spectrogram (a representation on paper or on a computer screen of the
frequency and amplitude of a sound as a function of time).

It seems that the brain stores phonologically similar words in such a
way that when one word is accessed - let's say a word like 'dog' -
other words related to it are 'activated' or 'primed'. This could be
a semantic relation - 'hound' or 'puppy' get primed when 'dog' is
heard or read, as do 'cat' and 'rabbit' to a lesser extent - or a
phonological one. Thus 'bog', 'dig' and 'dot' are also primed when
'dog' is heard. And so on. Therefore, it's not too difficult to
imagine that during the development of a language - where new words
are needed for new objects - those objects which 'remind' the speaker
of another object through this priming process are allotted a
phonological pattern similar to that of the existing word. Ditto
where new words are borrowed from neighbouring languages. As a
result, similar sounding words representing similar objects 'cluster'
around a phonological pattern which may have originated in a
completely arbitrary way. So you end up with lots of words for
containers beginning with [p] or [b] in English, although the origin
of this association may have arisen purely at random. Remember,
though, that for every container-word with [p] or [b] there's
probably one beginning with something else, so the English
'container ~ bilabial plosive' relationship, if there is one, can
never be called anything more than a tendency.

There's some interesting research on sound symbolism in vowels - it
seems that if you look at a sample of languages from across the
world, again and again you'll find that words containing the vowel
[i] (as in English 'bee') represent small things, and those
containing [a] (as in English 'cat') represent larger ones. Again,
it's hard to see how a small thing can 'sound' more like [i], and so
on, but if you look at the sound itself, it's got inherently higher
fundamental frequency (which we perceive as pitch) and is much less
sonorous - has less 'carrying power' - than [a], per unit effort on
the speaker's part. Small things resonate at higher pitch and with
less sonority than do large ones (think e.g. church bells, organ
pipes), which may have something to do with it.

The jury's still out on all this as you might imagine, as it's
difficult to know how to go about testing these things in a rigorous
way. But as I say, there's a good number of people working on
large-scale surveys of phonological similarities in unrelated
languages, and the small example you gave from English is bread and
butter to them. Have a look at Hinton, Nichols & Ohala's (1995) Sound
Symbolism (CUP) - it's a right riveting read, if you'll excuse the
alliteration.

By the by, the whole sound symbolism thing is extremely important in
marketing - this is why you end up with bafflingly-named products
like 'Persil' and 'Cheerios'. See for example

http://www.naming.com/whitepaper.html

Fascinating stuff.

*************************************
Dominic Watt
Department of Linguistics & Phonetics
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
UK


and a merry Christmas to you all.

----------------------
Maurice Wakeham
[log in to unmask]



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