I suspect you'll enjoy reading this: https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the-word-was-embodied https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-was

I suspect you'll enjoy reading this: https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the-word-was-embodied https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the... "Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. Crucially, you do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning. Studies show that participants lacking any prior knowledge of Japanese, for example, often guess the meanings of the above words better than chance alone would allow. For many people, nurunuru really does feel ‘slimy’; wakuwaku evokes excitement, and kurukuru conjures visions of circular rather than vertical motion. That should simply not be possible, if the sound-meaning relationship was indeed arbitrary."