"My NAME is Alice, but—"

"It's a stupid enough name!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"

"MUST a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.

"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "MY name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."

Alice’s adventures Through the Looking Glass continue these explorations – including some playful forays into the nature of speech.

It begins in the first chapter, when Alice reads a poem called the Jabberwocky. “Twas brilig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…” the poem begins. “It seems very pretty,” Alice says when she had finished it, “but it's RATHER hard to understand!”

Alice hits the nail on the head: the poem somehow tickles our sense of grammatical correctness even though the words themselves are nonsense. Neuroscientists exploring the machinery of language now regularly use “Jabberwocky sentences” during brain scans, to show that meaning and grammar are processed quite separately in the brain. (Interestingly, other writers have also used such “grammatical nonsense” to great effect – including Kurt Cobain in Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.)

More fundamentally, Alice then meets Humpty Dumpty, and their conversation explores the nature of words themselves. Can a two-word phrase like Humpty Dumpty evoke his “handsome shape” better than some other random sounds? This is an ancient philosophical question that dates to Plato. Previously, scientists had assumed that would be impossible – words are arbitrary and there should be no innate meaning in sounds. But it’s now looking like Humpty may have been right.

Consider the words “kiki” and “bouba”. If given different shapes to label, most people choose kiki for a sharp object and bouba for a round one. Such “sound symbolism” is now a popular area of research, though the reason is not entirely clear; one theory is that the association comes from the shapes the lips make as they articulate the sounds.

Whatever the cause, it means that you can sometimes guess the meaning of foreign words with accuracy better than chance; it can also influence the nicknames given to people, so that, like Humpty Dumpty, they actually reflect your appearance. More intriguingly, some even suspect that these could be “linguistic fossils” that reflect humankind’s first utterances.

The White Queen and mental time travel

