onomatopoeia follow-up
Re this post: An anonymous user took me to task (via the ask function) for jokingly offering “The Straight Dope” and then immediately jumping into structuralist linguistics. This is fair criticism, since I also criticized the incoherence of armchair experts and my post relied on some inaccessible jargon. Touche!
Anyway, the whole point about armchair experts is that unlike them, I will not make shit up. (See this post by Simen for a takedown of the experts I have in mind). Thus, rather than making shit up or having you take my word for it, I decided to be rigorous and try to explain why the original question—can languages be more onomatopoetic than others?—was not the right question. I suppose I abused the notion of Straight Dopeness when I had “no handwaving” in mind.
To clarify, the argument to my earlier post is as follows:
- The intellectual tradition of linguistics stipulates that all language is arbitrary, so right off the bat it’s hard to compare languages as being more or less onomatopoetic because onomatopoeia is not arbitrary. Onomatopoeia is imitation: Just as a stick figure stands for a person in a kind of iconic approximation so do onomatopoeia stand for non-language sounds by offering a reasonable approximation. So the tradition is not equipped to handle the question, but we can still try to think about these things.
- Suppose we asked which character set for a language could make the most detailed or the widest range of emoticons. The analogy fits because we are using part of the language to imitate something outside of it using the combination of language units. Intuitively we might think that the writing system with the widest range of shapes would be best equipped.
- However, we realize that the sounds that imitated by onomatopoeia are really simple and basic—moo, woof, oink, quack—and do not require that much acoustic detail. What’s important, it seems, is that the language system has just enough breadth/variety in the sound inventory for a passable imitation that people can agree on.
Admittedly, I rambled and handled things very much off the cuff, and the post in fact was one of those compositional processes where I discovered the answer I was looking for by writing and sorting through my thoughts. I would love to be a better writer when it comes technical linguistic matters, and I consider my blogging here practice towards that end. But this is a tumblelog—a scrapbook for ephemeral conversation and stuff I find online—so let’s not take things so seriously!
Of course, I do wish there were simple answers and explanations for linguistic phenomena but this is almost never the case. The notion that language can be easily explained and the allure of simplistic explanations however strike me as a recipe for bullshitting and the propagation of bullshit.
