Xinyi Jiang: Cross Linguistic Onomatopoeia

An onomatopoeia refers to a word that imitates the sound or the source of the sound it represents. For example, the sound of laughing, [haha] in English, is one commonly seen onomatopoeia. Just as people from different cultures and backgrounds with normal eye-sight can express colors from the nature by drawing, a universally understood method, people with normal hearing could also interpret sounds by ‘transcribing’ them in a recognizable way using languages. Due to its nature, onomatopoeia is one of the few non-arbitrary components in languages. Hence, it can provide us with clues about how people perceive sounds.

Before looking into how people perceive sounds using onomatopoeia, one thing to notice is that despite its non-arbitrariness, onomatopoeias representing the same meaning can vary a lot in distinct languages. For example, the laughing sound can be represented as [haha] or [xaxa]. The sound of pig grunting varies even more drastically: [ɔɪŋk], [bʉ], [knɔr], [ɪʔoŋ], etc. While the laughing sound is only slightly different in the fricative sound, the pig grunting in different languages doesn't even have the same syllable structure—some starts with vowel, while others starts with consonant. In fact, from the chart in page 21 of the textbook, we can see there is no sound that is represented by one ‘transcription’ across different languages.

Meanwhile, this variety of representations offers a scale to compare different allophones, as onomatopoeias within the same group (aka, those imitating the same sound) are more or less similar to each other to the perceivers.

    In the example of the laughing sound, [haha] and [xaxa] only differ in [h] and [x]. If we look into their place of articulation and the manner of articulation, we can find [x] and [h] are both fricatives, with one velar and the other glottal. The similarity of different laughing sounds and the similarity in IPA transcription is not coincidence, as we know sounds that differ only in the place of articulation share a lot of similarity to each other. The case of pig grunting is more complicated. However, after repeating the four onomatopoeias I listed, I found three sounds—[ɔɪŋk], [knɔr], and [ɪʔɔŋ]—are similar. As it’s tough to produce the actual pig grunting sound, all the three imitations are more or less similar to the actual sound, with no one best imitation. Again, after analyzing them carefully using the IPA chart, I found although the three look different at the first glance, they share a lot in common in terms of articulations: they are all produced in the nasal cavity as well as at the back of the oral cavity; they all have a nasal stop, a ‘ɔ’ sound, and a stop (two velar and one glottal). This again supports the articulation place and manner claim. Furthermore, from the two specific examples, we can make the conjecture that velar and glottal consonants sound similar to perceivers.

Of course, there are questions to be solved if we want to compare allophones by looking at groups of onomatopoeias. For instance, [bʉ], as a fourth pig grunting sound, is obviously different from the other three sounds; the Indian version of cow lowing is also astonishingly different from the cow lowing in many other languages. (See the video link in the citation).

Citation: http://vimeo.com/25215616,

              Page 21, Language Files, Eleventh Edition