Our comments:
'Little' and 'large' both have sound symbolic properties because the
vowels in their stressed syllables are felt to be phonetically appropriate
to the properties the words represent. /ɪ/
is a short vowel and the tongue is arched up and forward so that it
is produced in a small space, high in the mouth and towards the front.
As the /ɪ/ sound is 'little' in pronunciation
terms it is felt to be sound symbolic when the word involved refers
to 'little' things.
The phoneme /ɒ:/, on the other
hand is long and is produced in a very large mouth cavity (the whole
tongue is dropped to the bottom of the mouth and the mouth is opened
wide). So it is a 'large' sound in terms of the size of mouth cavity
used to produce it, and so takes on sound symbolic properties when used
to refer to 'large' things.
So Little and Large seem to have made a point of going for names which
are sound symbolic in terms of the relationship between their contrasting
vowels and their meaning, as compared with 'big' and 'small', which
have vowels which seem to go against the meanings they represent.
Note here that the sound symbolic relationship is between sound and
physical size, not between sound and sound, as it is with onomatopoeic
words like 'buzz' and 'quack'.
