Onomatopoeia
Originally posted September 13, 2004 by Peter CooperBesides being a difficult word to spell, an onomatopoeia is a word which attempts to describe a sound through imitation, such as boing, ding, or buzzer, or Spiderman's BAF! POW! and WHAP! Our pets and farmyard animals all go woof, miaow, and neigh.
Some words work as onomatopoeia in reverse. That is, a word becomes a sound linked to an action or occurance, such as crash, wallop and bang. These words may have been true onomatopoeia in times past, although their age helps this distinction to fade. The word "crash" descends from the Middle English "crasschen" which first appeared in the 14th century with no identifiable heritage and is assumed to be onomatopoeic.
Further information on onomatopoeia:
- The Times looks at the difference in onomatopoeia between languages and cultures (registration required)
- Wikipedia encyclopedia entry for onomatopoeia
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Because Chinese is somewhat lacking in available sounds (compared to a language like English), Chinese onomatopoeia are funny. For instance, the sound a dog makes is "wong," though all of my students readily admit that the sound a dog makes sounds nothing like the Chinese syllable "wong."
Posted by John B at September 14, 2004 11:20 PMSomewhat lacking in sounds? You know, I would have never thought that, I would have thought Chinese had far more sounds, in order to represent the gigantic amount of characters. I guess you do learn something each day, and I should stop thinking of Chinese characters as syllables. Thanks for posting, John!
Posted by Peter at September 14, 2004 11:38 PMAh, no, Chinese is a language of homophones. There are only around a thousand sounds in Mandarin Chinese (there is an exact number somewhere, but I can't seem to find it right now), whereas English has many times that number. There are four tones, too, but they just alter the sounds. Understanding Chinese is all about context.
A rather extreme (and somewhat contrived) example of this can be found at http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML in which all of the characters of a poem are pronounced exactly the same way :)
Posted by John B at September 17, 2004 02:17 AM