The correlation between the /s/ sound and the concept of subtlety in the Arabic lexicon.

Abstract

Early Arabic philologists, including Ibn Jinnî (932-1002/320-392), briefly addressed the motivation of the linguistic sign. However, their contributions mainly focused on onomatopoeia itself or on the effect that emphasizing a letter can have on the meaning of a word. It was not until the 20th century that anyone dared to speak about a correlation between a simple phoneme or letter and a precise lexical notion. In this article, we focus on this type of linguistic motivation through the correlation between the phoneme /s/ and the notion of "subtlety/to hide" in the Arabic lexicon.