give us a V
give us a V
Despite what you might hear, there has been very little cross-linguistic research in sound symbolism; that is research in multiple languages. When you see claims, for example as I have done, that the letter, or sound, v is ‘fast’ or that s is ‘sinewy’ then you need to consider what language this is specific to and what are the terms upon which these claims are made. One of the most thorough studies of individual consonantal sound symbolism by Margaret Magnus identifies V as having ‘energy’ in English. However, in her study of monosyllablic words1, she records that ‘vessels’ and ‘presence and absence’ are more significant semantic correlates. This is a semantic categorisation of any word containing the letter v anywhere in the word. A quick glance at a dictionary shows that there are actually very few monosyllablic words, mot being 2 syllables long, and so the validity of the ‘fast’ or ‘energy’ claim is tenuous for English words as a whole.
V is distinctive, so has greater stand-out and it is present in a few words denoting ‘lively’ and ‘life-sustaining’ such as vitality, vitamin, vitalize and vivace. For this reason, it is used quite extensively in pharmaceutical brand names e.g. viagara, ventolin, viracept, vivanza. As to whether this qualifies it to have the meaning ‘fast’ is another matter. You might notice that the adjacent i is present in all these words, making it an alphabetic group vi- value, rather than that of the individual v. On the other hand you might want to consider victim, virus, vile, villain, vice, violate, and violent before you give even this grouping an unqualified thumbs up.
1 Magnus, Margaret (2001) Dr: philos. – thesis Faculty of Arts Department of Linguistics, NTNU Trondheim Norwegian University of Science and Technology