Kotodama

In The Matter With Things McGilchrist described a surprising connection between language and brain lateralisation:

“Language is a highly complex system, a constantly emerging, and evolving, organism, an embodied aspect of experience, caught up in the fluidity of the reality it reflects. And from the commerce between symbols and what they symbolise two things inevitably follow. In the left hemisphere’s world words are seen as arbitrary signs: in the right hemisphere’s world they are seen as to some extent fused with the aspect of reality they represent.

In other words, tokens or symbols cannot escape being part of the real world in the right hemisphere, and the real world cannot escape becoming tokens or symbols in the left hemisphere. Thus subjects with their left hemisphere experimentally suppressed reported that the sun was so named ‘because it shines’, bread because it is ‘so tasty and fresh’, spaghetti because it’s ‘what you eat with cheese’. They couldn’t accept that objects might be renamed; the name was part of what they were. By contrast, with the right hemisphere suppressed, subjects took the view that names are entirely arbitrary. (Although de Saussure taught that the sign is arbitrary, it is not.)” [1]

We could also note that the embodied nature of language can be seen in the strong cross-cultural associations between word sounds and objects, aka "sound symbolism," where certain sounds naturally evoke qualities like size, shape, or texture. This can be seen in phenomena like the "bouba-kiki effect," which appears across unrelated languages, suggesting a universal human tendency to link sounds to meanings beyond arbitrary convention. [2]

Elsewhere in The Matter With Things McGilchrist also noted evidence for the cross-cultural recognition of value, whether that be moral or aesthetic (as in the example he provided of Bellini's 'Casta diva'). Given such observations, I suspect that, if one were to combine embodied language with valueception or the ability to presence to the sacred, we would get something like Tolkien's notion of "phonaesthetics" or perhaps, more tantalizing still, the ancient Japanese belief called "kotodama," that words have a sacred or magical power. Koto (言) means language/word, and tama (魂) means soul/spirit. This, no doubt, has analogues in many other cultures as well. [3]

One might surmise that when we learn a language, we learn that it not only embodies the sensory aspects of reality that it represents, but also the more numinous or sacred aspects of reality as well, those aspects which cannot be easily grasped and manipulated. And as with the "bouba-kiki effect," I suspect this would, again, hold across languages and cultures. If such an insight were incorporated into language learning programs, it might set us upon a more firm philosophical and phenomenological foundation, and thus a more productive path. [4] But none of the aforementioned makes coherent sense unless one is able to first presence to the sacred. Then such implications as these become a live possibility. In short, to reiterate a point McGilchrist has made many times, presentation and representation must operate in tandem. [5] 

What say you? Are there other concepts you may be aware of that are similar to kotodama?

Notes: 

[1] This point was later reiterated: "If you suppress the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere sees that words have ‘something of the quality’ of what they denote. And so you couldn't possibly arbitrarily change the name of things. So when subjects [whose LH had been suppressed] were asked “Could bread be called something else?” They replied “No, of course not. Bread's called ‘bread’ because it's crusty and delicious and you can eat it with pasta."
[2] And so, though "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," one may rightly be skeptical! Relatedly, the "face-name matching effect" describes how people can match unfamiliar faces to their correct names better than chance.
[3] Regarding pronunciation, "kotodama" is the common modern form, while "kototama" is sometimes preferred by traditionalists. Relatedly, Japanese sound symbolism includes extensive onomatopoeias. In China, Xunxi claimed the ancient sage kings chose names (Chinese: 名; pinyin: míng) that directly corresponded with actualities (Chinese: 實; pinyin: shí), but later generations confused terminology, coined new nomenclature, and thus could no longer distinguish right from wrong. Thus, when Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor, he said he would "rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality.
[4] This approach to language learning has been used by missionaries in the past, and still today. And notably the "language boot camp" used by the Mormon church is widely recognized to be highly effective. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.
[5] Presencing to the sacred is a large topic. But to make a long story very short, I believe the concept of philoxenia provides a window into the sacred. Someday I hope to write a book that I have naively titled 主客の言霊 (Shukyaku no kotodama) “The sacred language of host and guest.”

See also: ideasthesia, ideophone, crossmodal, sound symbolism, true name, magic word