The Phantasic Profile of a Language

The phantasic profile of a language community, the statistical distribution of voluntary mental-imagery and multimodal-simulation capacity across its speakers, is a load-bearing variable in what the community's vocabulary means. A word produced and prestiged within a community skewed toward hyperphantasic capacity addresses a thicker multimodal semantic region than the same word would address in a community skewed toward aphantasic capacity. Cross-linguistic semantic analysis that ignores this variable systematically misreads imagistic, somatic, aesthetic, and contemplative vocabulary, by assuming reader-side activation capacity is uniform across language communities when it demonstrably is not. The paper lifts an established finding in cognitive science (individual phantasic variation, Zeman et al. 2015) to the community level, argues that phantasic profile is recoverable through inference from literary corpus, contemplative-tradition evidence, and contemporary cross-linguistic data, and proposes that phantasic-profile inference become a standard component of contested-term translation. Worked examples from Buddhist contemplative vocabulary, Old Norse kennings, Japanese aesthetic terms, Hebrew theological vocabulary, and the converse case of scientific-technical English as deliberately aphantasic-compatible lingua franca develop the apparatus across distinct phantasic regimes.