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Phonosemantic Subsets in the Lexicon: Hungarian Avian Nomenclature and L’Arbitraire Du Signe

BEGINNING with the premise that complete arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is unlikely if not impossible, I examine in this essay non-derived Hungarian avian nomenclature in an attempt to assess degrees of arbitrariness (and its opposites) in the fi t of form to function. Two fundamentally different, indeed opposed, kinds of non-arbitrariness are distinguished: self-similarity among items in semantic subsets and, at the same time and in the same subsets, strongly disparate deployments of phonemes and shapes of roots. Self-similarity arises from two sources, again fundamentally opposed: divergence and convergence. Disparate phoneme deployment and root shape also have two opposite sources: old versus relatively new lexis. Various kinds of ‘iconicity’ are distinguished, and iconicity as a whole, narrowly defi ned, is distinguished from indexicality, which of these two kinds of non-arbitrariness is by far the more prevalent. At least in the subset of bird names, indexicality seems to reside in clusters of self-similar forms. Within and across these clusters, iconic features of various kinds enrich the picture by encoding relative size of the referent. Near the end of the essay I put forward an etymology for madar, ‘bird’.