re onomatopoeia
I know nothing—and I mean nothing—about linguistics. Which means I constantly have stupid questions about the subject, such as:
Is there any objective standard according to which we can say that one language is more onomatopoetic than another? Because it sure as hell seems to me that Spanish trumps English on that front (except for ‘oink’).
Also: What might it say about the cultures in or through or across or by which languages develop that one might be more onomatopoetic than another?
There is no such thing as a stupid question when it comes to linguistics—language matters tend to be plagued by the incoherent blather of reactionary armchair experts—thus I have no problems fielding any questions on language and giving you The Straight Dope.
One of the foundations of modern structuralist linguistics is the Saussurean sign which says that there is an arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. What this means is that there is nothing iconic or “stop”-like about the shape and make-up of a stop sign. That is, a red octagon with giant white lines and curves has nothing to do with the act of slowing down and ceasing forward motion. This assumption that there is an arbitrary relation between form and meaning, as I understand the history of linguistics, pushed us towards the abstract, symbolic and computational study of language forms (since there was nothing iconic or inherently meaningful about words and sounds) and this was a good thing.
But as a result of arbitraryness, your question about comparative onomatopoetic capacity is somewhat incoherent. That is, by assumption all language is arbitrary, so it’s not possible to be “more or less onomatopoetic”. But we recognize that onomatopoeia, like reduplication or phonesthemes, flirts with iconicity (by which I mean, standing for something in a clear, non-arbitrary way) and sound symbolism, and it would be unprincipled to throw out the question entirely.
There is also, however, the dangerous ethnocentric subtext to your second question: If we assume that all language is imitative in origin—I’m thinking of cavepeople on cartoons—then a language that is more fit for onomatopoetic imitation is more iconic and more “primitive” than the more “developed” languages that do not readily facilitate such imitation. So let’s just be mindful and try to think about sound imitation scientifically.
We think of onomatopoeia as the process of imitating nonhuman sounds using the sounds of human language. This rules out things like raspberries and tongue-clucks since these are universally not used in language sound systems. The tools at a speaker’s disposal therefore are things like stops, vowels, fricatives, nasals, or whatever else in the sound inventory. The question therefore is to what extent—or perhaps at what resolution—a particular language sound system can capture a nonlinguistic sound.
Intuitively, it therefore seems that a language with more consonants and vowels would be better off, so here’s an insightful list of cross-linguistic onomatopoeia. Looking through these examples, I get the sense that all language needs to accommodate most of those examples are some vowels and at least two classes of consonants—stops, glides (y,w), liquids (l,r), nasals (m,n,ng) and fricatives (s,z,f,v,sh). Each class of sounds has its own properties that are useful for imitation: stops interrupt the speech stream and make natural boundaries, fricatives provide turbulent noise, nasals provide humming, and so on. Phonological breadth therefore boosts imitative capacity, as there are more tools at one’s disposal.
But then again, we are dealing with simple sounds whose onomatopoetic imitation becomes conventional and standardized: I’m thinking of oink which sounds nothing like a squeal but that’s how we communicate that noise in English. This kind of standardization reinforces the notion of arbitraryness: All you need, it seems, for onomatopoeia is a set of sounds to perform a passable imitation and a language to codify and reinforce the onomatopoetic mapping. This latter point seems most important to me: Even with a shortage of speech sounds, an imitation can stick and be useful in communication only when everyone agrees on it.
Reduplication is prettay prettay prettay good.
Reduplication
Malagasy makes use of reduplication to encode semantic distinctions. The semantic effect of verbal reduplication is that of indicating manner (mainly iterativity or unmotivated/unsystematic event processing):
mihèrka ‘to look back’ > mih-erik-èrika ‘to look behind one repeatedly’
mandròvita ‘to tear’ > mand-rovi-ròvitra ‘to tear up into pieces’
Calling tristanjay.
Answering!
You’ve got reduplication encoding the iterative aspect (which I’ve parsed to my best ability in your post to make the reduplication clearer). The canonical reduplication language is Tagalog, but I’ll let eush give examples from that. Here are a bunch of examples.
Inflectional Reduplication:
- Ilokano plural reduplication [via]
- kaldíŋ (‘goat’) → kal-kaldíŋ (‘goats’)
- púsa (‘cat’) → pus-púsa (‘cats’)
- jyánitor (‘janitor’) → jyan-jyánitor (‘janitors’)
- Ilokano progressive marking [via]
- basa (‘read’) → ag-bas-basa (‘is reading’)
- adal (‘study’) → ag-ad-adal (‘is studying’)
- trabaho (‘work’) → ag-trab-trabaho (‘is working’)
- Sanskrit perfect [via]
- root → perfect
- pat- (‘fly, fall’) → pa-pát-a (‘have fallen/flown’)
- mna:- (‘note’) → ma-mná:-u (‘have noted’)
- bhava- (‘be’ [pres.]) → ba-bhũva (‘have been’)
- Pingelapese reduplication and triplication [via]
- kɔul (‘to sing’) → kɔu-kɔul (‘singing’) → kɔu-kɔu-kɔul (‘still singing’)
- mejr (‘to sleep’) → mej-mejr (‘sleeping’) → mej-mej-mejr (‘still sleeping’)
Noninflectional (Cool Shit) Examples:
eush:
Now that’s something you don’t see every day. Who the hell else speaks Tagalog in Northeast Ohio?
Holy-holy reduplication, eush!
Word Journal made the frontpage! And it did so with my linguistics-heavy post on reduplicatives! This has to be the only frontpage item that mentions vowel ablaut.
A number of Nepalese nouns are formed by reduplication. As in other languages, the meaning is not that of a true plural, but collectives that refer to a set of the same or related objects, often in a particular situation. For example, “rangi changi”* describes an object that is extremely or vividly colorful, like a crazy mix of colors and/or patterns, perhaps dizzying to the eye. The phrase “hina mina” means “scattered,” like a large collection of objects spilled (or scampering, as in small animals) in all different directions. The basic Nepalese word for food, “khana” becomes “khana sana” to refer to the broad generality of anything served at a meal. Likewise, “chiya” or tea (conventionally made with milk and sugar) becomes “chiya siya”: tea and snacks (such as biscuits or cookies).
— Now, this is cool. It reminds me of the funky Mandarin compounds where conjoined antonyms refer to the continuum they are opposed on: viz. the compound “big”+”small” means “size”, “long”+”short” means “length”, father”+”mother” means “parents”, “left”+”right” means “thereabouts” and “buy”+”sell” means “business”.
Phonological properties of shm-reduplication * Words beginning with a single consonant typically replace that consonant with shm- (table shmable). * Words beginning with a consonant cluster are more variable: some speakers replace only the first consonant if possible (breakfast shmreakfast), others replace the entire cluster (breakfast shmeakfast). * Vowel-initial words append the shm- directly to the beginning of the reduplicant (apple shmapple). * Shm-reduplication is generally avoided or altered with words that already begin with shm-; for instance, schmuck does not yield the expected *schmuck schmuck, but rather total avoidance or mutation of the shm- (giving forms like schmuck shluck, schmuck fluck, and so on). * Many speakers use sm- instead of shm- with words that contain a sh (Ashmont Smashmont, not *shmashmont).
* Some speakers target the stressed syllable rather than the first syllable (incredible inshmedible); a subset of these do not copy base material preceding the stressed syllable (incredible shmedible; cf. Spitzer 1952).
— There’s a senior thesis for a linguistics student in here somewhere: test control words, CC-initial words and words with CC-initial stressed syllables, V-initial words with varying stress, sh-initial words and words with sh-onset and sh-coda syllables, schmuck, and other words of varying stress.
List of English Reduplicatives →
Reduplication is a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated. Examples of reduplication: hoity-toity, Joe Schmoe, hip-hop, chit-chat, and no-no. This list sorts them into the following types: Type I are rhyming pairs, Type II are ablaut pairs (the vowel changes and consonants remain unchanged), and Type III are total reduplications.
I tried to keep this post as pithy as I could for Word Journal, but I would like to mention my favorite kind of (English) reduplicatives: Contrastive focus reduplication. Basically, a total reduplication is used to indicate a special word meaning, as in “Do you like like him?” or “Is she your girl friend or your girlfriend girlfriend?”.
Edit: My research led me to this paragraph. Make it stop:
Three men come into a restaurant: one is from Walla-Walla, one from Pago-Pago, and one from Ryukyu. They order cous-cous, mahi-mahi, and a kiwi salad. They ask the mu-mu clad waitress (who suffers from beri-beri) about the quality of the food. In some versions of this edifying story, she replies, “So-so.“ What else might she have said? (via)
