Abstract
This paper proposes a hypothesis concerning a possible relationship among geometric form, bodily structure, articulatory gesture, sound, and lexical meaning in Albanian. The hypothesis emerged from a long-term personal investigation that began with a simple question: whether some of the earliest human naming processes may have been motivated not exclusively by arbitrary sound–meaning associations, but also by perceptual and embodied relationships.
The proposed model extends conventional discussions of linguistic iconicity and sound symbolism by considering the human body as a potential intermediary between visual form, articulatory action, and lexical representation. Particular attention is given to Albanian examples such as sy ‘eye’, hundë ‘nose’, and buzë ‘lip’, where visual or articulatory properties appear, at least heuristically, to invite associations with particular sounds or graphic forms.
The argument is explicitly presented as a research hypothesis rather than an established etymological conclusion. The central question is whether such relationships occur with sufficient regularity, structural coherence, and cross-lexical consistency to constitute evidence of a systematic principle of lexical formation. If testable patterns can be demonstrated, Albanian may provide a valuable case study for investigating the interaction of embodiment, iconicity, phonosemantics, and the emergence of linguistic form.
Keywords: Albanian, iconicity, sound symbolism, phonosemantics, embodiment, articulatory symbolism, geometric symbolism, etymology, language origins, lexical motivation
1. Introduction: A Question That Began with Geometry
My investigation into the possible origins of Albanian words did not begin with historical linguistics. It began with geometry.
As a child, geometry was the school subject that most strongly stimulated my imagination. Geometric concepts appeared to me not merely as abstract mathematical definitions, but as fundamental structures through which the physical world could be perceived: circles, lines, angles, curves, surfaces, and volumes.
This led to a question that gradually moved beyond mathematics:
Could some of the most elementary geometric forms perceived by human beings have played a role in the formation of the earliest linguistic concepts?
A second question followed:
Could the human body itself have provided one of the principal interfaces between perception, gesture, articulation, sound, and naming?
The question became particularly compelling when I began examining words for parts of the human body in Albanian. The body is simultaneously a visible object, a source of movement and gesture, and the physical apparatus through which speech is produced. It therefore occupies a unique position at the intersection of perception and articulation.
This observation suggests a possible chain:
perception → form → bodily representation → gesture/articulation → sound → lexical meaning
The purpose of this paper is not to claim that every Albanian word can be derived through such a chain. Rather, it is to formulate a framework within which potentially systematic relationships can be identified and tested.
2. From Arbitrary Signs to Motivated Signs
Modern linguistic theory has traditionally emphasized the conventional or arbitrary relationship between the linguistic signifier and its meaning. Yet linguistic research has also documented phenomena commonly discussed under terms such as iconicity, sound symbolism, ideophones, phonesthemes, and multimodal or embodied meaning.
The existence of such phenomena raises an important question concerning the earliest stages of lexical formation.
If humans initially encountered an object through multiple sensory channels, why should its linguistic representation necessarily have emerged independently of those perceptual and bodily experiences?
A human being does not encounter an object as an abstract dictionary entry. An object has:
a shape;
a position;
a movement;
a function;
a tactile character;
a visual appearance;
and, in the case of bodily experience, an articulatory or physiological relationship to the observer.
A theory of lexical motivation based on embodiment would therefore predict that some early lexical forms might reflect one or more of these properties.
This does not eliminate arbitrariness from language. Rather, it introduces the possibility that conventionalization may have operated upon initially motivated associations.
3. Geometry as a Possible Layer of Perceptual Abstraction
The geometric component of the hypothesis begins with a simple observation: human beings repeatedly encounter recurring shapes.
Circularity, linearity, curvature, enclosure, intersection, symmetry, and angularity occur throughout the natural environment and, particularly, in the human body.
The eye, mouth, nostrils, head, fingers, joints, and limbs provide particularly accessible examples.
The important question is therefore not whether a human organ literally "is" a geometric symbol. It is whether early humans could have abstracted recurring visual configurations into perceptual categories that subsequently participated in naming.
For example, a circular opening may be represented conceptually as:
O → opening → circularity → object/concept
A linear structure may similarly invite abstraction as:
I → line → extension → elongated object
A curved structure may evoke:
U → curvature → bending → enclosure
These representations should not be confused with modern alphabetic letters. The proposed relationship is conceptual rather than chronological. The symbols O, I, U, and others are modern analytical abstractions used to represent geometric configurations.
This distinction is essential.
The hypothesis does not require that prehistoric humans possessed the modern Latin alphabet. It requires only that they could perceive and mentally categorize recurring forms.
4. The Human Body as a Linguistic Interface
The human body occupies a special position in this proposed model.
It is both:
an object that humans observe and name; and
the physical instrument through which humans produce speech.
This dual status may have created a feedback relationship between what was observed and what was articulated.
Consider the mouth. It is an object with a recognizable shape, but it is simultaneously an articulatory mechanism involved in the production of numerous speech sounds.
The same is true of the lips, tongue, teeth, palate, throat, and nasal cavity.
Consequently, body-part terminology may represent an especially productive domain for testing a theory of embodied lexical motivation.
The hypothesis predicts that if a relationship among body form, bodily function, articulation, and lexical sound exists, body-part vocabulary should provide an unusually informative testing ground.
5. The Eye: Visual Form and Lexical Structure
The Albanian word sy ‘eye’ provides one of the observations that originally stimulated this investigation.
Viewed from the front, the eye presents a predominantly circular or oval visual configuration. In abstract geometric terms, it may therefore be represented by O.
Viewed laterally, however, the eye presents a substantially different contour. This change in visual perspective raises a broader question:
Could different perceptual aspects of the same object have contributed to different components of its linguistic representation?
The important methodological point is that such a proposal cannot be established merely by observing a resemblance between a word and a shape.
A valid investigation would require examination of:
the historical forms of the word;
their chronology;
their phonetic development;
related forms within Albanian;
possible cognates in other Indo-European languages;
semantic continuity;
and the frequency with which comparable form–sound relationships occur elsewhere in the lexicon.
Thus, sy should be treated not as proof, but as a test case for the hypothesis.
6. Hundë and the Question of Nasal Articulation
A more intriguing example is the Albanian word hundë ‘nose’.
The nose presents several immediately observable properties. It has a distinctive external form and two openings through which air passes. From a functional perspective, it is also directly connected with respiration and with the production of nasal speech sounds.
The presence of n in hundë therefore raises a potentially interesting phonosemantic question.
The consonant /n/ is a nasal consonant. Its production involves airflow through the nasal cavity while the oral passage is obstructed at an appropriate place of articulation.
The relevant question is not simply:
"Does hundë contain N because N is nasal?"
That conclusion would be premature.
The scientifically meaningful question is:
Do words referring to nasal organs, nasal functions, or related physiological concepts show statistically and historically significant associations with nasal consonants?
If such an association were repeatedly observed, while alternative explanations were controlled for, it would provide stronger evidence for a relationship between articulatory properties and lexical meaning.
Thus, the observation concerning hundë generates a testable prediction, rather than constituting proof by itself.
7. Buzë and the Bilabial Dimension
The Albanian word buzë ‘lip’ provides another particularly interesting case.
The visual form of the Latin capital B can be perceived as resembling two rounded or enclosed spaces attached to a vertical line. This resemblance invites comparison with the structure of the lips.
More importantly, however, the phonetic relationship is independent of the visual resemblance.
The sound /b/ is bilabial: both lips participate in its articulation.
This creates a potentially significant convergence:
lip → visible bodily structure → bilabial articulation → /b/ → lexical association
Again, this sequence should not be regarded as established etymology.
The key research question is whether comparable relationships can be identified systematically—for example, whether words referring to lips, mouth, biting, kissing, closure, or other bilabial actions show non-random concentrations of bilabial consonants.
Such a pattern could be investigated quantitatively.
8. From Pictographic Motivation to Phonosemantic Structure
These observations suggest that the concept of a purely pictographic origin may be too narrow.
A prehistoric naming process need not have been exclusively visual.
It may have involved several simultaneous dimensions:
visual perception
↓
geometric abstraction
↓
bodily experience
↓
gesture and movement
↓
articulatory configuration
↓
sound
↓
lexical convention
Under this model, linguistic motivation is multimodal rather than exclusively pictographic.
The term phonosemantics is useful here because it directs attention to relationships between sound and meaning. However, the proposed framework extends beyond sound symbolism alone by incorporating visual geometry and bodily embodiment.
I therefore propose the provisional concept of geometric-phonetic iconicity: a potential relationship in which a linguistic form may reflect both the perceptual geometry of its referent and the articulatory or acoustic properties associated with that referent.
9. A General Model of Embodied Lexical Formation
The hypothesis can be represented schematically as follows:
OBJECT
↓
PERCEPTION
↓
FORM / GEOMETRY
↓
FUNCTION / MOVEMENT
↓
GESTURE / ARTICULATION
↓
SOUND
↓
CONVENTIONALIZATION
↓
WORD
This model does not imply that every lexical item necessarily passed through every stage.
Different words may have originated through different pathways.
One word might be primarily visually motivated.
Another might be functionally motivated.
Another might be associated with an articulatory gesture.
A fourth might combine several dimensions.
The hypothesis therefore predicts multiple pathways of motivation, rather than a single universal mechanism.
10. Why Albanian?
The central question of this investigation is not whether Albanian is uniquely capable of exhibiting iconicity. Iconicity and sound symbolism are not inherently restricted to one language.
The more specific question is whether Albanian contains an unusually coherent or productive set of relationships among form, articulation, sound, and meaning that has not been adequately described by conventional etymological approaches.
This requires comparison.
A serious investigation would therefore need to examine Albanian lexical data alongside relevant Indo-European languages and, where appropriate, unrelated languages.
The critical issue would be whether proposed relationships are:
systematic rather than isolated;
productive rather than accidental;
historically plausible rather than based solely on modern forms;
phonetically motivated rather than orthographically imposed;
semantically coherent rather than retrospectively interpreted;
and statistically distinguishable from chance.
Only under such conditions could the hypothesis move from personal observation toward linguistic theory.
11. Falsifiability and Methodological Requirements
A theory of this kind must be capable of being disproved.
This is particularly important because humans are exceptionally good at detecting patterns, including patterns that may arise accidentally.
A rigorous investigation would therefore need to establish a corpus of proposed form–sound–meaning correspondences and compare them against appropriate controls.
For example, one could examine:
body-part vocabulary;
geometric vocabulary;
basic verbs of movement;
terms for openings and closures;
words associated with breathing;
words associated with articulation;
and basic sensory vocabulary.
Each proposed correspondence could then be evaluated according to several independent criteria.
11.1 Phonetic criterion
Is the proposed sound actually produced by, or strongly associated with, the relevant organ or action?
11.2 Semantic criterion
Does the proposed lexical meaning maintain a plausible relationship with the hypothesized physical property?
11.3 Formal criterion
Does the proposed geometric relationship correspond to a recognizable and independently definable feature?
11.4 Historical criterion
Can the relationship be supported by historical forms rather than being inferred solely from the modern Albanian form?
11.5 Comparative criterion
Does the proposed relationship survive comparison with cognates and related languages?
11.6 Statistical criterion
Does the observed concentration of particular sounds or structures exceed what would reasonably be expected by chance?
These criteria would transform an intuitive observation into a research program.
12. Beyond Conventional Etymology
Traditional historical etymology is indispensable for establishing relationships among words. Regular sound correspondences, historical documentation, morphological structure, and comparative reconstruction remain fundamental.
The present hypothesis does not seek to replace these methods.
Instead, it asks whether another layer of information may sometimes be present:
the relationship between the human perceptual and articulatory system and lexical structure.
If such relationships existed during early lexical formation, conventional etymological reconstruction might recover only part of the original motivation.
The historical sound changes that subsequently affected a word could obscure an earlier iconic relationship.
Therefore, the investigation of linguistic origins may require two complementary perspectives:
historical reconstruction
+
embodied and iconic motivation
The first asks how a word developed through time.
The second asks why a particular sound or structure might have been selected at an earlier stage.
13. The Deeper Question: Before Writing, There Was the Body
The most fundamental implication of this hypothesis concerns the chronology of human communication.
Written language is comparatively recent in human history. Speech is considerably older. Gesture and bodily communication are older still.
Before humans could write a word, they possessed a body.
Before they could represent a sound graphically, they had to produce that sound.
Before they could define a geometric concept formally, they encountered shapes in the physical world.
This suggests a potentially important sequence in the emergence of symbolic communication:
body → perception → gesture → sound → symbol
The modern written alphabet may therefore represent the final stage of a much older process.
From this perspective, the investigation of language origins should not begin exclusively with written symbols. It may need to begin with the human organism as the first instrument of communication.
14. Conclusion
The observations presented here began as childhood questions about geometry but developed into a broader hypothesis concerning the possible embodied origins of linguistic form.
The central proposal is that some lexical items may preserve relationships among:
geometric form, bodily structure, bodily function, articulatory gesture, sound, and meaning.
Examples such as hundë and buzë illustrate why these relationships deserve investigation, particularly where visual, physiological, and phonetic properties appear to converge.
However, resemblance alone is not evidence of etymology.
The essential next step is systematic testing.
If the proposed relationships occur only occasionally, they may represent coincidence, secondary association, or ordinary instances of sound symbolism.
If, however, they occur repeatedly across semantically related lexical fields, exhibit coherent phonetic patterns, survive historical analysis, and demonstrate statistically significant concentrations relative to controls, then they may point toward a deeper principle of lexical motivation.
The broader hypothesis can therefore be stated cautiously:
Some elements of early human vocabulary may have emerged through interactions among perception, geometric abstraction, bodily experience, gesture, articulation, and sound, before becoming conventionalized as linguistic signs.
Whether Albanian provides particularly strong evidence for such a process remains an empirical question.
That question is precisely what makes the investigation worthwhile.
Perhaps the origins of certain words should not be sought only in ancient texts, reconstructed proto-forms, or comparisons among languages.
Perhaps we must also look further back—to the human body, to form, to movement, to articulation, and to the first sounds produced by human beings.
Because before humans could write a word, they had a body.
And before they could write a sound, they had to produce it.
This paper proposes a hypothesis concerning a possible relationship among geometric form, bodily structure, articulatory gesture, sound, and lexical meaning in Albanian. The hypothesis emerged from a long-term personal investigation that began with a simple question: whether some of the earliest human naming processes may have been motivated not exclusively by arbitrary sound–meaning associations, but also by perceptual and embodied relationships.
The proposed model extends conventional discussions of linguistic iconicity and sound symbolism by considering the human body as a potential intermediary between visual form, articulatory action, and lexical representation. Particular attention is given to Albanian examples such as sy ‘eye’, hundë ‘nose’, and buzë ‘lip’, where visual or articulatory properties appear, at least heuristically, to invite associations with particular sounds or graphic forms.
The argument is explicitly presented as a research hypothesis rather than an established etymological conclusion. The central question is whether such relationships occur with sufficient regularity, structural coherence, and cross-lexical consistency to constitute evidence of a systematic principle of lexical formation. If testable patterns can be demonstrated, Albanian may provide a valuable case study for investigating the interaction of embodiment, iconicity, phonosemantics, and the emergence of linguistic form.
Keywords: Albanian, iconicity, sound symbolism, phonosemantics, embodiment, articulatory symbolism, geometric symbolism, etymology, language origins, lexical motivation
1. Introduction: A Question That Began with Geometry
My investigation into the possible origins of Albanian words did not begin with historical linguistics. It began with geometry.
As a child, geometry was the school subject that most strongly stimulated my imagination. Geometric concepts appeared to me not merely as abstract mathematical definitions, but as fundamental structures through which the physical world could be perceived: circles, lines, angles, curves, surfaces, and volumes.
This led to a question that gradually moved beyond mathematics:
Could some of the most elementary geometric forms perceived by human beings have played a role in the formation of the earliest linguistic concepts?
A second question followed:
Could the human body itself have provided one of the principal interfaces between perception, gesture, articulation, sound, and naming?
The question became particularly compelling when I began examining words for parts of the human body in Albanian. The body is simultaneously a visible object, a source of movement and gesture, and the physical apparatus through which speech is produced. It therefore occupies a unique position at the intersection of perception and articulation.
This observation suggests a possible chain:
perception → form → bodily representation → gesture/articulation → sound → lexical meaning
The purpose of this paper is not to claim that every Albanian word can be derived through such a chain. Rather, it is to formulate a framework within which potentially systematic relationships can be identified and tested.
2. From Arbitrary Signs to Motivated Signs
Modern linguistic theory has traditionally emphasized the conventional or arbitrary relationship between the linguistic signifier and its meaning. Yet linguistic research has also documented phenomena commonly discussed under terms such as iconicity, sound symbolism, ideophones, phonesthemes, and multimodal or embodied meaning.
The existence of such phenomena raises an important question concerning the earliest stages of lexical formation.
If humans initially encountered an object through multiple sensory channels, why should its linguistic representation necessarily have emerged independently of those perceptual and bodily experiences?
A human being does not encounter an object as an abstract dictionary entry. An object has:
a shape;
a position;
a movement;
a function;
a tactile character;
a visual appearance;
and, in the case of bodily experience, an articulatory or physiological relationship to the observer.
A theory of lexical motivation based on embodiment would therefore predict that some early lexical forms might reflect one or more of these properties.
This does not eliminate arbitrariness from language. Rather, it introduces the possibility that conventionalization may have operated upon initially motivated associations.
3. Geometry as a Possible Layer of Perceptual Abstraction
The geometric component of the hypothesis begins with a simple observation: human beings repeatedly encounter recurring shapes.
Circularity, linearity, curvature, enclosure, intersection, symmetry, and angularity occur throughout the natural environment and, particularly, in the human body.
The eye, mouth, nostrils, head, fingers, joints, and limbs provide particularly accessible examples.
The important question is therefore not whether a human organ literally "is" a geometric symbol. It is whether early humans could have abstracted recurring visual configurations into perceptual categories that subsequently participated in naming.
For example, a circular opening may be represented conceptually as:
O → opening → circularity → object/concept
A linear structure may similarly invite abstraction as:
I → line → extension → elongated object
A curved structure may evoke:
U → curvature → bending → enclosure
These representations should not be confused with modern alphabetic letters. The proposed relationship is conceptual rather than chronological. The symbols O, I, U, and others are modern analytical abstractions used to represent geometric configurations.
This distinction is essential.
The hypothesis does not require that prehistoric humans possessed the modern Latin alphabet. It requires only that they could perceive and mentally categorize recurring forms.
4. The Human Body as a Linguistic Interface
The human body occupies a special position in this proposed model.
It is both:
an object that humans observe and name; and
the physical instrument through which humans produce speech.
This dual status may have created a feedback relationship between what was observed and what was articulated.
Consider the mouth. It is an object with a recognizable shape, but it is simultaneously an articulatory mechanism involved in the production of numerous speech sounds.
The same is true of the lips, tongue, teeth, palate, throat, and nasal cavity.
Consequently, body-part terminology may represent an especially productive domain for testing a theory of embodied lexical motivation.
The hypothesis predicts that if a relationship among body form, bodily function, articulation, and lexical sound exists, body-part vocabulary should provide an unusually informative testing ground.
5. The Eye: Visual Form and Lexical Structure
The Albanian word sy ‘eye’ provides one of the observations that originally stimulated this investigation.
Viewed from the front, the eye presents a predominantly circular or oval visual configuration. In abstract geometric terms, it may therefore be represented by O.
Viewed laterally, however, the eye presents a substantially different contour. This change in visual perspective raises a broader question:
Could different perceptual aspects of the same object have contributed to different components of its linguistic representation?
The important methodological point is that such a proposal cannot be established merely by observing a resemblance between a word and a shape.
A valid investigation would require examination of:
the historical forms of the word;
their chronology;
their phonetic development;
related forms within Albanian;
possible cognates in other Indo-European languages;
semantic continuity;
and the frequency with which comparable form–sound relationships occur elsewhere in the lexicon.
Thus, sy should be treated not as proof, but as a test case for the hypothesis.
6. Hundë and the Question of Nasal Articulation
A more intriguing example is the Albanian word hundë ‘nose’.
The nose presents several immediately observable properties. It has a distinctive external form and two openings through which air passes. From a functional perspective, it is also directly connected with respiration and with the production of nasal speech sounds.
The presence of n in hundë therefore raises a potentially interesting phonosemantic question.
The consonant /n/ is a nasal consonant. Its production involves airflow through the nasal cavity while the oral passage is obstructed at an appropriate place of articulation.
The relevant question is not simply:
"Does hundë contain N because N is nasal?"
That conclusion would be premature.
The scientifically meaningful question is:
Do words referring to nasal organs, nasal functions, or related physiological concepts show statistically and historically significant associations with nasal consonants?
If such an association were repeatedly observed, while alternative explanations were controlled for, it would provide stronger evidence for a relationship between articulatory properties and lexical meaning.
Thus, the observation concerning hundë generates a testable prediction, rather than constituting proof by itself.
7. Buzë and the Bilabial Dimension
The Albanian word buzë ‘lip’ provides another particularly interesting case.
The visual form of the Latin capital B can be perceived as resembling two rounded or enclosed spaces attached to a vertical line. This resemblance invites comparison with the structure of the lips.
More importantly, however, the phonetic relationship is independent of the visual resemblance.
The sound /b/ is bilabial: both lips participate in its articulation.
This creates a potentially significant convergence:
lip → visible bodily structure → bilabial articulation → /b/ → lexical association
Again, this sequence should not be regarded as established etymology.
The key research question is whether comparable relationships can be identified systematically—for example, whether words referring to lips, mouth, biting, kissing, closure, or other bilabial actions show non-random concentrations of bilabial consonants.
Such a pattern could be investigated quantitatively.
8. From Pictographic Motivation to Phonosemantic Structure
These observations suggest that the concept of a purely pictographic origin may be too narrow.
A prehistoric naming process need not have been exclusively visual.
It may have involved several simultaneous dimensions:
visual perception
↓
geometric abstraction
↓
bodily experience
↓
gesture and movement
↓
articulatory configuration
↓
sound
↓
lexical convention
Under this model, linguistic motivation is multimodal rather than exclusively pictographic.
The term phonosemantics is useful here because it directs attention to relationships between sound and meaning. However, the proposed framework extends beyond sound symbolism alone by incorporating visual geometry and bodily embodiment.
I therefore propose the provisional concept of geometric-phonetic iconicity: a potential relationship in which a linguistic form may reflect both the perceptual geometry of its referent and the articulatory or acoustic properties associated with that referent.
9. A General Model of Embodied Lexical Formation
The hypothesis can be represented schematically as follows:
OBJECT
↓
PERCEPTION
↓
FORM / GEOMETRY
↓
FUNCTION / MOVEMENT
↓
GESTURE / ARTICULATION
↓
SOUND
↓
CONVENTIONALIZATION
↓
WORD
This model does not imply that every lexical item necessarily passed through every stage.
Different words may have originated through different pathways.
One word might be primarily visually motivated.
Another might be functionally motivated.
Another might be associated with an articulatory gesture.
A fourth might combine several dimensions.
The hypothesis therefore predicts multiple pathways of motivation, rather than a single universal mechanism.
10. Why Albanian?
The central question of this investigation is not whether Albanian is uniquely capable of exhibiting iconicity. Iconicity and sound symbolism are not inherently restricted to one language.
The more specific question is whether Albanian contains an unusually coherent or productive set of relationships among form, articulation, sound, and meaning that has not been adequately described by conventional etymological approaches.
This requires comparison.
A serious investigation would therefore need to examine Albanian lexical data alongside relevant Indo-European languages and, where appropriate, unrelated languages.
The critical issue would be whether proposed relationships are:
systematic rather than isolated;
productive rather than accidental;
historically plausible rather than based solely on modern forms;
phonetically motivated rather than orthographically imposed;
semantically coherent rather than retrospectively interpreted;
and statistically distinguishable from chance.
Only under such conditions could the hypothesis move from personal observation toward linguistic theory.
11. Falsifiability and Methodological Requirements
A theory of this kind must be capable of being disproved.
This is particularly important because humans are exceptionally good at detecting patterns, including patterns that may arise accidentally.
A rigorous investigation would therefore need to establish a corpus of proposed form–sound–meaning correspondences and compare them against appropriate controls.
For example, one could examine:
body-part vocabulary;
geometric vocabulary;
basic verbs of movement;
terms for openings and closures;
words associated with breathing;
words associated with articulation;
and basic sensory vocabulary.
Each proposed correspondence could then be evaluated according to several independent criteria.
11.1 Phonetic criterion
Is the proposed sound actually produced by, or strongly associated with, the relevant organ or action?
11.2 Semantic criterion
Does the proposed lexical meaning maintain a plausible relationship with the hypothesized physical property?
11.3 Formal criterion
Does the proposed geometric relationship correspond to a recognizable and independently definable feature?
11.4 Historical criterion
Can the relationship be supported by historical forms rather than being inferred solely from the modern Albanian form?
11.5 Comparative criterion
Does the proposed relationship survive comparison with cognates and related languages?
11.6 Statistical criterion
Does the observed concentration of particular sounds or structures exceed what would reasonably be expected by chance?
These criteria would transform an intuitive observation into a research program.
12. Beyond Conventional Etymology
Traditional historical etymology is indispensable for establishing relationships among words. Regular sound correspondences, historical documentation, morphological structure, and comparative reconstruction remain fundamental.
The present hypothesis does not seek to replace these methods.
Instead, it asks whether another layer of information may sometimes be present:
the relationship between the human perceptual and articulatory system and lexical structure.
If such relationships existed during early lexical formation, conventional etymological reconstruction might recover only part of the original motivation.
The historical sound changes that subsequently affected a word could obscure an earlier iconic relationship.
Therefore, the investigation of linguistic origins may require two complementary perspectives:
historical reconstruction
+
embodied and iconic motivation
The first asks how a word developed through time.
The second asks why a particular sound or structure might have been selected at an earlier stage.
13. The Deeper Question: Before Writing, There Was the Body
The most fundamental implication of this hypothesis concerns the chronology of human communication.
Written language is comparatively recent in human history. Speech is considerably older. Gesture and bodily communication are older still.
Before humans could write a word, they possessed a body.
Before they could represent a sound graphically, they had to produce that sound.
Before they could define a geometric concept formally, they encountered shapes in the physical world.
This suggests a potentially important sequence in the emergence of symbolic communication:
body → perception → gesture → sound → symbol
The modern written alphabet may therefore represent the final stage of a much older process.
From this perspective, the investigation of language origins should not begin exclusively with written symbols. It may need to begin with the human organism as the first instrument of communication.
14. Conclusion
The observations presented here began as childhood questions about geometry but developed into a broader hypothesis concerning the possible embodied origins of linguistic form.
The central proposal is that some lexical items may preserve relationships among:
geometric form, bodily structure, bodily function, articulatory gesture, sound, and meaning.
Examples such as hundë and buzë illustrate why these relationships deserve investigation, particularly where visual, physiological, and phonetic properties appear to converge.
However, resemblance alone is not evidence of etymology.
The essential next step is systematic testing.
If the proposed relationships occur only occasionally, they may represent coincidence, secondary association, or ordinary instances of sound symbolism.
If, however, they occur repeatedly across semantically related lexical fields, exhibit coherent phonetic patterns, survive historical analysis, and demonstrate statistically significant concentrations relative to controls, then they may point toward a deeper principle of lexical motivation.
The broader hypothesis can therefore be stated cautiously:
Some elements of early human vocabulary may have emerged through interactions among perception, geometric abstraction, bodily experience, gesture, articulation, and sound, before becoming conventionalized as linguistic signs.
Whether Albanian provides particularly strong evidence for such a process remains an empirical question.
That question is precisely what makes the investigation worthwhile.
Perhaps the origins of certain words should not be sought only in ancient texts, reconstructed proto-forms, or comparisons among languages.
Perhaps we must also look further back—to the human body, to form, to movement, to articulation, and to the first sounds produced by human beings.
Because before humans could write a word, they had a body.
And before they could write a sound, they had to produce it.
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