Has the notion of "semainophoric" structure been considered so far?

Question

Semitic languages like Arabic use consonantic roots conveying meaning, like ktb which is related to writing. The vowels to be added to form a word vary and give a nuance to this general meaning. Similarly, phonosemantics states that some sounds convey a meaning by themselves. It's striking to notice that languages as different from one another as Japanese, cauchois (patois spoken in pays de Caux, normandy) or German share similarities in the respective verbs meaning "to walk", namely aruku, arquer and walken. The global shared structure is a-r/l-k as sounds, which as such seem to convey the same overall meaning. One can draw a parallel with genetics, where genes are divided into coding parts, namely exons, and non coding parts, namely introns. The mechanism of alternative splicing of introns allows the same gene to code for different proteins, a bit like the ktb example above, where the consonantic root coresponds to exons, and vowels to introns.

So I would like to know if one can generalize these phenomena defining the abstract notion of semainophoric (from ancient Greek semaino=to mean, to bear a signal) structure appearing in morphology, as some kind of skeleton conveying meaning, nuances thereof being the flesh and organs over it. Has this been considered so far?

Answer 1

There are, to modern understandings, no universal sequences of sounds with one meaning. If there are correspondences, they are either because the languages are related (the words are cognate), because one language took the word from another language (one uses a loan word), or sheer coïncidence. There are thousands of languages each with tens of thousands of words, so there are bound to be a few similar looking ones in any pair of languages.

Even when multiple languages use specifically onomatopoëtic methods to tie meaning with the sound of the words, different languages "hear" them differently. Depending on the native language of the person you ask, you might find that the human representations of sounds that dogs and cows and roosters make are different, even when the sounds themselves are the same. Another great example I've seen is that even though the American Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, and Chinese Sign Language signs for tree all represent a tree directly, they all focus on different ways of representing it, with the ASL using an arm as the trunk and the hand as the canopy, DSL making a 2D outline, and CSL using the hands to represent the cylindrical nature of the trunk.

Your notion of 'semainophoric structure' would probably fall under the category of non-concatenative morphology bits of meaning that change words in ways that cannot be explained just by placing the morphemes next to each other. Aside from the templatic morphology of Semitic languages, another example that you might find for this phenomenon is that in some languages, particularly in Africa, a change in tone can act as a morpheme.