542. ENGLISH - Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia

 

The onomatopoeic Snap, Crackle, and Pop!

Definition:

The use of words (such as hiss or murmur) that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to. Adjective: onomatopoeic or onomatopoetic.

Etymology:

From the Latin, "make names"

Examples and Observations:

• "Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong. The little train rumbled over the tracks."
  
  
• "Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room."
  
  
• "I'm getting married in the morning!
  Ding dong! the bells are gonna chime."
  
  
• "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is."
  
  
• "Plink, plink, fizz, fizz"
  
  
• "'Woop! Woop! That's the sound of da police,' KRS-One famously chants on the hook of 'Sound of da Police' from 1993's Return of the Boombap. The unmistakable sound he makes in place of the police siren is an example of onomatopoeia, the trope that works by exchanging the thing itself for a linguistic representation of the sound it makes."
  
  
• "Hark, hark!
  Bow-wow.
  The watch-dogs bark!
  Bow-wow.
  Hark, hark! I hear
  The strain of strutting chanticleer
  Cry, 'cock-a-diddle-dow!'"
  
  
• "Onomatopoeia every time I see ya
  My senses tell me hubba
  And I just can't disagree.
  I get a feeling in my heart that I can't describe. . . .
  
  It's sort of whack, whir, wheeze, whine
  Sputter, splat, squirt, scrape
  Clink, clank, clunk, clatter
  Crash, bang, beep, buzz
  Ring, rip, roar, retch
  Twang, toot, tinkle, thud
  Pop, plop, plunk, pow
  Snort, snuck, sniff, smack
  Screech, splash, squish, squeak
  Jingle, rattle, squeal, boing
  Honk, hoot, hack, belch."
  
  
• "Klunk! Klick! Every trip"
  
  
• "[Aredelia] found Starling in the warm laundry room, dozing against the slow rump-rump of a washing machine."
  
  
• Jemimah: It's called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
  Truly Scrumptious: That's a curious name for a motorcar.
  Jemimah: But that's the sound it makes. Listen.
  It's saying chitty chitty, chitty chitty, chitty chitty, chitty chitty, chitty chitty, bang bang! chitty chitty . . ..
  
  
• "I have a new book, 'Batman: Cacophony.' Batman faces off against a character called Onomatopoeia. His shtick is that he doesn't speak; he just mimics the noises you can print in comic books."
  
  
• "Bang! went the pistol,
  Crash! went the window
  Ouch! went the son of a gun.
  Onomatopoeia--
  I don't want to see ya
  Speaking in a foreign tongue."
  
  
• "A sound theory underlies the onomaht--that we read not only with our eyes but also with our ears. The smallest child, learning to read by reading about bees, needs no translation for buzz. Subconsciously we hear the words on a printed page.
  
  "Like every other device of the writing art, onomatopoeia can be overdone, but it is effective in creating mood or pace. If we skip through the alphabet we find plenty of words to slow the pace: balk, crawl, dawdle, meander, trudge and so on.
  
  "The writer who wants to write 'fast' has many choices. Her hero can bolt, dash, hurry or hustle."
  
  
• "He saw nothing and heard nothing but he could feel his heart pounding and then he heard the clack on stone and the leaping, dropping clicks of a small rock falling."
  
  
• "It went zip when it moved and bop when it stopped,
  And whirr when it stood still.
  I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will."
  
  
• "I like the word geezer, a descriptive sound, almost onomatopoeia, and also coot, codger, biddy, battleaxe, and most of the other words for old farts."
  
  
• Russian Negotiator: Why must every American president bound out of an automobile like as at a yacht club while in comparison our leader looks like . . . I don't even know what word is.
  
  

• Sam Seaborn: Frumpy?
  Russian Negotiator: I don't know what "frumpy" is but onomatopoetically sounds right.
  Sam Seaborn: It's hard not to like a guy who doesn't know frumpy but knows onomatopoeia.
  
  
• "Linguists almost always begin discussions about onomatopoeia with observations like the following: the snip of a pair of scissors is su-su in Chinese, cri-cri in Italian, riqui-riqui in Spanish, terre-terre in Portuguese, krits-krits in modern Greek. . . . Some linguists gleefully expose the conventional nature of these words, as if revealing a fraud."
  
  

541. ENGLISH - On The Living Language

On The Living Language

 

A few months before accepting the job of revising The Elements of Style (the "little book" composed 40 years earlier by Cornell professor William Strunk, Jr.), E.B. White contributed this comment to The New Yorker:

Through the turmoil and the whirling waters we have reached a couple of opinions of our own about the language. One is that a schoolchild should be taught grammar--for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases. We knew a countryman once who spoke with wonderful vigor and charm, but ungrammatically. In him the absence of grammar made little difference, because his speech was full of juice. . . .

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs.

From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was and where it led to.

Children obviously do not depend for communication on a knowledge of grammar; they rely on their ear, mostly, which is sharp and quick. But we have yet to see the child who hasn't profited from coming face to face with a relative pronoun at an early age, and from reading books, which follow the paths of centuries.

You don't have to be a fan of The Elements of Style to appreciate White's principles and prose. But I have to challenge his remark about "the absence of grammar" in the countryman's speech. It might be nonstandard or unconventional--but never absent. When it comes to grammar (or to cows, for that matter), there's always some sort of path.

540. ENGLISH - Sound Symbolism

Sound Symbolism

 

Definition:

An association between particular sound sequences and particular meanings in speech.

The phenomenon of sound symbolism is highly controversial in language studies. See Examples and Observations, below.

See also:

• Ten Titillating Types of Sound Effects in Language
• Arbitrariness
• Echo Word
• Exercise in Identifying Sound Effects in Poetry and Prose: Alliteration, Assonance, and Rhyme
• Onomatope
• Onomatopoeia
• Onomatopoeia in "The Tunnel" by William H. Gass
• Phonestheme
• Reduplicative
• Symbolism

 

Examples and Observations:

• "Here's an experiment. You're in a spaceship approaching a planet. You've been told there are two races on it, one beautiful and friendly to humans, the other unfriendly, ugly and mean-spirited. You also know that one of these groups is called the Lamonians; the other is called the Grataks. Which is which?
  
  "Most people assume that the Lamonians are the nice guys. It's all a matter of sound symbolism. Words with soft sounds such as 'l,' 'm,' and 'n,' and long vowels or diphthongs, reinforced by a gentle polysyllabic rhythm, are interpreted as 'nicer' than words with hard sounds such as 'g' and 'k,' short vowels and an abrupt rhythm."
  
  
• Fl- Words
  "In English, words beginning with fl-, such as fly, flee, flow, flimsy, flicker, and fluid, are often suggestive of lightness and quickness.

Also, there are many words in English that begin with gl- and refer to brightness (such as gleam, glisten, glow, glint, glitter, and glimmer)."

• Gl- Words
  "Sound symbolism is often the result of a secondary association.

The words glow, gleam, glimmer, glare, glisten, glitter, glacier, and glide suggest that in English the combination gl- conveys the idea of sheen and smoothness.

Against this background, glory, glee and glib emanate brightness by their very form, glance and glimpse reinforce our conclusion (because eyesight is inseparable from light), and glib has no other choice than to denote specious luster, and, indeed, in the sixteenth century, when it became known in English, it meant 'smooth and slippery.'"

• Over the -ump
  "Consider the following group:

hump, lump, mumps, plump, rump, stump

These all have a rhyme -ump and they all refer to a rounded, or at least non-pointy, protuberance. Now consider what bump means. It can refer to contact involving something weighty whether it be hips, bottoms, or shoulders, or a slow-moving vehicle or vessel, but not the contact of a point with a surface, such as a pencil tapping a window pane.

The crump of an exploding shell fits in here, as does thump. You might also consider rumble, and possibly mumble and tumble, though admittedly this is -umble rather than -ump.

One has to allow that there can be words with -ump that do not fit the correlation. Trump is an example.

However, there are enough examples to suggest there is a connection between sound and meaning in one set of words.

You might also note that Humpty-Dumpty was no stick insect, and Forrest Gump wasn't too sharp."

• Dints and Dents
  "[W]hy is it that dints sound smaller than dents? There is presumably some sound symbolism going on here. Think of words like teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy, mini and wee. They all sound small!

A chip sounds smaller than a chop. So do slits compared with slots, chinks compared to chunks and dints compared to dents.

'Many a mickle makes a muckle' is an old saying that has virtually disappeared. Even if you haven't a clue what a mickle is, I am sure you agree it has to be smaller than a muckle. In fact, historically mickles and muckles are the same word. Like dints and dents, they arose as alternative pronunciations, although I suspect their vowels have always been symbolic of size."

• The Problem With Sound Symbolism
  "The fundamental thesis underlying the field of sound symbolism has always been controversial, because it appears to be so transparently wrong. The Sound Symbolic Hypothesis is that the meaning of a word is partially affected by its sound (or articulation).

If the sound of a word affects its meaning, then you should be able to tell what a word means just by hearing it.

There should be only one language. In spite of this, there has always been a fairly substantial group of linguists who do not dismiss the possibility that the form of a word somehow affects its meaning."

• Sound Symbolism and the Evolution of Language
  "Given that we share many of our sound-symbolic aspects of language with other species, it is quite possible that in sound symbolism we are seeing the precursors of fully formed human language.

In fact, it seems quite reasonable to say that in all advanced vocalizers (especially humans, many birds, and many cetaceans) we can see a basic sound-symbolic communication system overlaid by elaborations which could be termed arbitrary in their relationship to meaning."