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terminology - Onomatopoeia Across Languages


Every language has its stock of onomatopoeic expressions, but they vary across nationalities and cultures.


For example, the American “bow wow” (a rapper’s name) has its Japanese equivalent in “wan-wan.” And the Korean equivalent is probably “mong mong.” The American “pitter-patter” has “para-para” in Japanese. American “chugalug,” Japanese “goku-goku.” And many others.


Of course the Japanese expressions above are written in Romaji or Western script, but there’s no denying that the whole reception of sounds is different.


My question is: Is there any technical term (or subfield) that can be used to refer to or that can best summarize this phenomenon? Of how almost exactly the same events would lead to completely different onomatopoeia across languages?



Answer



Mitch is right. But onomatopoiea per se is a very insignificant phenomenon, since it can only refer to words about sounds, and how often do we talk about sounds?


Onomatopoeia is, however, part of a larger, more general, and sporadically studied field of linguistic research called (variously) sound symbolism, phonosemantics, ideophones, assonance/rime analysis, and probably other names as well. Here's a list of my own research in the area, with a bibliography of assonance/rime phonosemantics.


In English, for instance, well over half of the shorter words have part of their meaning correlated with their sound, particularly initial consonant clusters (called "assonances", like /kl/ in cluster) and "rimes" (vowel nucleus plus coda, like /-əmp/ in stump).


Aural meaning types (e.g, clang, clatter, clap, clink, clunk) are very common, and each one of the meaningful clusters and rimes usually has some aural sense as well; in the case of kl-, which means something like 'contiguous; connect', the aural senses mostly have to do with noises made by things coming together.


And every language has stuff like this going on. Lots of it.


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