Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia (also spelled onomatopœia, from Greek: ονοματοποιΐα) is a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing, such as animal noises like "oink" or "meow", or suggesting its source object, such as "boom", "zoom", "click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz", or "bang". The word is a synthesis of the Greek words όνομα (onoma, = "name") and ποιέω (poieō, = "I make" or "I create") thus it essentially means "name creation", although it makes more sense combining "name" and "I do", meaning it is named (and spelled) as it sounds (e.g. quack, bang, etc.).

Sinhala-shri.png Sinhala is written in a non-Latin script. Sinhala text used in this article is transliterated into the Latin script according to the ISO 15919 standard.

Onomatopoeic words differ across languages because they always have to conform to some extent to the broader linguistic system they are part of. Thus the Norwegian tikk takk for the sound of a clock could never be a Dutch word because Dutch words never have long consonants at the end of the word; accordingly, the Dutch equivalent is tik tak.

In the case of a frog croaking, the spelling may moreover vary because different frog species around the world make different sounds: Ancient Greek brekekekex koax koax (only in Aristophanes' comic play The Frogs) for probably Rana ridibunda; English ribbit for species of frog found in North America; English verb "croak" for Rana temporaria.

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Cross-linguistic examples

Main article: Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias

Uses of Onomatopoeia

Some other very common English-language examples include hiccup, bang, beep, and splash. Machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia, as in honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. In science fiction the sounds made by laser weapons are often described as "zaps". For animal sounds, words like quack (duck), bark (dog), roar (lion) and meow (cat) are typically used in English. Some of these words are used both as nouns and as verbs.

Agglutinative languages or synthetic languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that it is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia. One example is English "bleat" for the sheep noise: in medieval times it was pronounced approximately as "blairt" (but without an R-component), or "blet" with the vowel drawled, which is much more accurate as onomatopoeia than the modern pronunciation.

An example of the opposite case is "cuckoo", which, due to continuous familiarity with the bird noise down the centuries, has kept approximately the same pronunciation as in Anglo-Saxon times and has not changed to having its vowels as in "furrow".

Verba dicendi are a method of integrating onomatopoeia and ideophones into grammar.

Occasionally, words for things are created from representations of the sounds these objects make. In English, for example, there is the universal fastener which is named for the onomatopoeic of the sound it makes: the zip (in the UK) or zipper (in the U.S.). Many birds are named from the onomatopoetic link with the calls they make, such as the Bobwhite quail, the killdeer, chickadee, the cuckoo, the chiffchaff, the whooping crane and the whip-poor-will. In Tamil and Malayalam, the word for crow is kaakaa. This practice is especially common in certain languages such as Māori and, therefore, in names of animals borrowed from these languages.

Advertising uses onomatopoeia as a mnemonic, so consumers will remember their products, as in Rice Krispies (US and UK) and Rice Bubbles (AU) which make a "snap, crackle, pop" when one pours on milk; or in road safety advertisements: "clunk click, every trip" (click the seatbelt on after clunking the car door closed; UK campaign) or "click, clack, front and back" (click, clack of connecting the seatbelts; AU campaign) or "click it or ticket" (click of the connecting seatbelt; US DOT campaign).

Manner imitation

Main article: Ideophone

In many of the world's languages, onomatopoeia-like words are used to describe phenomena apart from the purely auditive. Japanese often utilizes such words to describe feelings or figurative expressions about objects or concepts. For instance, Japanese barabara is used to reflect an object's state of disarray or separation, and shiiin is the onomatopoetic form of absolute silence (used at the time an English speaker might expect to hear the sound of crickets chirping or a pin dropping in a silent room). It is used in English as well with terms like bling, which describes the shine on things like gold, chrome or precious stones. In Japanese, kirakira is used for glittery things.

Examples in media

See also

References

External links