In Kuuk Thaayorre the word for earlobe is literally ‘ear-foot.’ In Tzeltal the word for nipple may be glossed as ‘nose of the breast.’ In Yéli Dnye and other languages, the palm is the ‘hand-chest’ [1]. These are just a few examples of a curious cross-linguistic tendency: body part terms often incorporate other body part terms. Heads crop up—unexpectedly—on hands, arms, and legs; elsewhere we find displaced knees, roving noses, and itinerant eyes. How do we explain this pattern?
We might call these oddities ‘body-part-for-body-part’ (BP-for-BP) analogies. They are charming, certainly, but they also reveal a deep duality at the heart of anatomical terminology. As examined in a previous post, body part terms are widely and exuberantly extended to other domains of meaning. We use them to make sense of shapes, emotions, time, numbers, and much else. They are, in other words, a frequent source of figurative expressions. That’s the first side of the duality. Cognitive linguists, marveling at how pervasive this phenomenon is across languages, have appealed to the fact that the body is so basic. It furnishes the primordial grounding of our concepts, according to this account—it’s our foundation, our ultimate reference point, our terra cognita.
What these researchers don’t dwell on is the fact that the arrow also points the other way: we also use figurative expressions to help make sense of the body. For example, we sometimes draw on comparisons to the natural world or social order to illuminate our various nooks, knobs, and outcrops. The kneecap in Polish is literally a ‘little turnip’ [2]. In many languages the thumb is the ‘mother finger.’ In Jahai the philtrum—the unassuming groove connecting the nose and mouth—is known as the ‘upper lip streambed.’ Body part terms are, in other words, also a frequent target of figurative expressions. That’s the second side of the duality.
There is a clear tension here. Why, if the body is so basic, should we need to draw on other concepts—sometimes from other domains, sometimes from the body itself—to make sense of it? BP-for-BP expressions are a perfect embodiment of this tension. In one swoop, they cast the body as both source and target—the concept we want to illuminate and the concept we turn to for illumination. As we build up an explanation of this peculiar pattern, it will be helpful to review more examples.
The table offers just a smattering, but it gives a good flavor of the BP-for-BP expressions found around the globe. A first thing to note is that certain body parts tend to serve as the source in these expressions. Most common are heads, eyes, noses, and necks—though one also finds chests, mouths, fingers, and so on [3].
A second thing to note is that other body parts are especially likely to serve as targets: ankles, thumbs, nipples, elbows, knees. These body parts are—it is immediately clear—different from the body parts that most often serve as sources. In particular, they seem lower in importance or salience—they play bit parts, as it were. Putting these two observations together, the pattern in BP-for-BP analogies is straightforward: higher-salience body parts are used to illuminate lower-salience ones [4].
If salience seems like a gauzy construct, we can also appeal to more concrete notions. Terms for higher-salience body parts tend to be higher frequency in language and tend to be morphologically simple. Children usually learn them earlier. And they are also some of the anatomical terms most likely to get semantically extended to other domains. Terms for lower-salience body parts are just the opposite: lower frequency, often morphologically complex, learned later, and more likely to be labeled figuratively.
There are a couple corollaries of the general pattern by which higher-salience body parts illuminate lower-salience ones. A first is that many of these expressions would be startling if flipped. As several scholars have observed, toes are often the fingers of the foot, but fingers are never the toes of the hand [5]. Noses are not often labeled as the nipples of the face, and the neck, as far as I know, has never been cast as the wrist of the head. It’s hard to say never in an absolute sense, of course, but these flipped versions are not attested in any language I am aware of. And, on the above account, they would be truly unexpected.
Another corollary is that the same body parts rarely serve as both source for some expressions and target for others—and especially not within the same language. An exception is the knee. In some languages (e.g., Quechua) this is the target for expressions such as ‘head of the lower leg.’ But in other languages (e.g., Hausa) it serves as a source for descriptions of the elbow—i.e., ‘knee of the arm.’ If both co-occurred in the same language, the result would be a head-spinning expression—with the elbow described as the ‘head of the lower leg of the arm.’
Ultimately, these expressions urge us to refine the widely trumpeted gospel that the body is basic and primordial. The idea contains a key insight, but it is too broad a brushstroke: the truth of it depends crucially on which part of our anatomy we mean. Our body, like the any geography, is a patchwork of the familiar and the foreign, of terra cognita and terra incognita.
Notes
1. By contrast, in Tiriyó, ‘hand-chest’ refers to the back of the hand rather than the palm.
2. The kneecap seems to attract figurative expressions at an especially high rate—we might call it a metaphor magnet. In English the word “kneecap” of course involves the idea of a cap or hat. The formal anatomical label, patella, comes from the Latin for ‘small pan.’ And in Kuuk Thaayorre, the kneecap is literally the ‘knee-head.’ Similarly magnetic are the nether bits, likely due to a cross-linguistic drive to euphemize the indelicate. Across languages we thus find expressions that liken the penis to a tail, finger, or banana; the testicles to eggs or seeds; the clitoris to a uvula; and the labia to lips. The nether regions also provide one of the best examples of a BP-for-BP analogy in English: “butt-cheek.”
3. A note of caution is that not all of these BP-for-BP analogies may feel like lively metaphors to speakers of the language—indeed, they can go unnoticed. This is because the source terms involved have sometimes become generalized, bleached of their original vividness. To my mind, for instance, ”head” when used figuratively is not particularly evocative of actual heads; “eye”, meanwhile, is more so.
4. Other generalizations about BP-for-BP analogies may be possible. One is that parts of the upper body tend to serve as the source and parts of the lower body as the target, rather than the reverse. Another is that external body parts tend to be used to explicate internal body parts, rather than the reverse. But these patterns are not without exception—consider the Kuuk Thaayorre examples of ‘ear-foot’ for earlobe and ‘foot-liver’ for sole.
5. Discussed, for example, in Andersen (1978, p. 354).
Further reading
Andersen, E. S. (1978). Lexical universals of body-part terminology. In Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of Human Language. Volume 3: Word Structure (pp. 335–368). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Brown, C. H., & Witkowski, S. R. (1981). Figurative language In a universalist perspective. American Ethnologist, 8(3), 596–615.
Enfield, N. J., Majid, A., & van Staden, M. (2006). Cross-linguistic categorisation of the body: Introduction. Language Sciences, 28(2–3), 137–147.
Gaby, A. (2006). The Thaayorre ‘true man’: Lexicon of the human body in an Australian language. Language Sciences, 28(2–3), 201–220.
Wilkins, D. P. (1996). Natural tendencies of semantic change and the search for cognates. In M. Ross & M. Durie (Eds.), The comparative method reviewed: Regularity and irregularity in language change (pp. 264–304). Oxford: Oxford University Press.