(Near) Universal (para) Kiki-bouba associations

[Zju]

Red always* means danger or arousal, but does green always mean ready-to-go or done? Do bad experiences leave a sour taste in all cultures? Is anxiety ever associated with some spatial concept other than narrowness?

Is it even possible to list all such associations? Let's get to the bottom of it! (...or maybe to the top of it in that one language)

^{*for the purposes of this thread, let always equal more than say 90%}

[zompist]

I don't think you're going to get a useful answer here— we don't have many hunter-gatherer or other indigenous people, and not even enough non-Westerners.

I'm dubious even that the "kiki/bouba" effect is universal. (Wikipedia suggests that it fails for Turkish and Mandarin.). More anecdotally, is "ko" a soft feminine suffix? It is in Japanese. Is "Mohtab" a nice feminine name? It is in Farsi.

Red is a propitious color in China; "red" is literally "beautiful" in Russian.

I expect agoraphobes would have very different opinions about wideness and anxiety...

[Zju]

Yeah, admittedly it'd be a massive undertaking to make a comprehensive study of these sorts of semantics. But I was hoping somebody would know at least one association that is shared between more than a few cultures / language families - for linguistic and conlang inspiration.

[Creyeditor]

Do bad experiences leave a sour taste in all cultures?

They leave a "bitterer Nachgeschmack" in German, i.e. "a bitter after-taste".

[Raphael]

There used to be people in Germany who saw red as "the color of love", but I don't know if anyone still thinks that way. Little hearts symbolizing love seem to be usually red in US pop culture, too, though.

[Travis B.]

Do bad experiences leave a sour taste in all cultures?

They leave a "bitterer Nachgeschmack" in German, i.e. "a bitter after-taste".

That sounds cromulent to me, and I'm a native English-speaker.

[Richard W]

There used to be people in Germany who saw red as "the color of love", but I don't know if anyone still thinks that way. Little hearts symbolizing love seem to be usually red in US pop culture, too, though.

Possibly more the colour of sexual desire, and I suspect that's a universal. Or are literal red-light districts just a Eurasian thing?

[hwhatting]

There may be some answers in the CLICS database. But a cursory check for "red" and "anxiety" didn't bring anything up that would help with the OP questions.

[Glass Half Baked]

Predictably, there is little positive evidence beyond the basics. When it comes to color symbolism, we can say with confidence that humans think there is something special or conspicuous about red. This paper shows that cave painters at a Levantine site were going to great lengths to get the reddest ochre instead of yellow or brown ochre for their art.

Someone took on the thankless task of exposing people to smels and asking them to pick an associated color. The results were predictably disappointing. They only asked Eurasians, but still we can only make few conclusions. People pretty reliably associate fruity and floral smells with the color red and vegetable smells with green, but that's probably because they're used to fruit and flowers being canonically red and vegetables green. They're basically naming the objects they smell, rather than connecting color to smell conceptually.

Sound symbolism is a little tougher, because obviously it would have to be a spectrum; all languages rely on an arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning. It's hardly surprising that exceptions to Bouba-Kiki are numerous. But a vague pattern is better than nothing. And thanks to onomatopoeia, we know that those patterns do exist. Languages where bombs go "fee fee" are the exception, not the rule. The thing is, the extent to which these patterns infect allegedly arbitrarily pronounced words seems minimal in most languages. Put another way, the word for bomb might well be "feefee."