Spring 2024 Colloquium - Liesl Yamaguchi - The Colors of the Universal Alphabet

Abstract: Born of a political will to standardize regional pronunciation and to contend with the many non-European languages of overseas Empires, the “universal alphabets” that emerged across Europe in the mid-nineteenth century sought to devise a single set of symbols capable of transcribing all possible sounds of human speech. How does one even envision such sounds? What models emerge to enable their anticipation? This chapter tells the story of the prominent and persistent model that presents vocalic sound in the image of a color triangle. Beginning with the controversy surrounding K.R. Lepsius’s vowel-color pyramid (Standard Alphabet, 1855), it traces Lepsius’s color and vowel triangles back through eighteenth-century phonetics and color theory before locating a possible synesthetic basis for the vowel-color analogy in Lepsius’s diary and assembling the archival evidence for a synesthetic intuition underpinning his vocalic model. Finding Lepsius’s vowel-color analogy to rely less on a phenomenal similarity between colors and vowels than on their opposability, the chapter concludes by observing the uncanny resemblance between Lepsius’s vowel-color pyramid and the vowel-color model that would emerge in the twentieth-century phonology of N.S. Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson.

Event Logistics: 3pm in Kerr 278 on May 6th.

Speaker Biography: Dr. Liesl Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work at the interstices of literary theory, poetics, and the history of linguistics has been recognized with the Vivien Law Prize in the History of Linguistics (Henry Sweet Society, 2022), the Ralph Cohen Prize for the Best Essay by an untenured scholar in literary studies (New Literary History, 2019), and the Society of Dix-neuviémistes of the UK and Ireland (2020). Her first monograph, On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia is forthcoming with Fordham University Press (Fall 2024).