“They were experienced not as wholly meaningless elements but as qualitatively meaningful and as such could reflect the quality
of the worldly referent they symbolized.14 The word would sound like its referent, not necessarily in the way of a strict onomatopoetic rendering, in which case language would be limited to designating only audible phenomena, but in the way of a physiognomic onomatopoeia. The word would not imitate but qualitatively intimate the thing it stood for, and this in virtue of its sheer sound: its timbre, force, duration, and so on-its felt and heard qualitative character. A physiognomic congruency would thus be the ground upon which so-called "arbitrary" sound elements would have come to have linguistic meaning.”