Words That Go Ping: The Ridiculously Wonderful World of Onomatopoeia - Hardcover

Lasserre, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1760632198 ISBN 13: 9781760632199

Verlag: Allen & Unwin, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

If it goes "moo" then every child knows it's a cow. If it goes "Wham! Bam! Crash!" we're in a fast-paced comic. But what goes "krknout?" Barbara Lasserre takes us on a playful journey through the delightful world of words that mimic sounds. Normally relegated to children's books, cartoons, and comedians, she shows how these often ancient words reveal unexpected things about the way we think, speak, and act. A book for anyone who loves playing with words.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Lasserre has taught and lectured in English and Applied Linguistics for many years.

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Words That Go Ping

The Ridiculously Wonderful World of Onomatoeia

By Barbara Lasserre

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2018 Barbara Lasserre
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-76063-219-9

Contents

1 Aargh, miaow, ker-ching, 
2 Eek, a mouse, 
3 Whoopee, 
4 Gahshunk, 
5 Yum, throb, sob, 
6 Cucurrucucú, 
7 Jabber, natter, 
8 Rattle jangle ding-dong, 
9 Woops, yikes, hmm, 
10 Huh?, 
11 Slam dunk and the Big Bang, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgements, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Aargh, miaow, ker-ching

Means like it sounds

It started when I was playing Scrabble in France many years ago. My French opponent, very pleased with himself, placed the word han. Not a French word I'd heard of, and moreover French words starting with a strong breathy h are rare. I said, 'Huh?'

Then he said, 'You know, the han a woodchopper makes when he brings the axe down.' Aha! I wouldn't have been so confused if the word had been used in context, in the woods, or with the relevant image in a comic strip or animation — then all would have become clear. That set me to wondering about words — like han — that mimic sounds directly. Are they always part of an established language system and, if so, how free are we to use or interpret them, or indeed to invent our own? Are there commonalities across various languages? These questions set me off on a track that led through a thicket of inquiry and included how these words come about, the thorny problems involved in translating them from one language to another, and the inherent issues of cultural differences and taboos. But above all, in looking for answers to questions like these, I found that there is a great deal of fun to be had with word mimicry, especially when you are free to invent your own.

In the following example, from the written account of debate in the Australian parliament (as noted in the Sydney Morning Herald), the Hansard reporter did just that — she invented her own:

One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, accusing the Labor Party of catastrophising on the subject of the government's proposed industrial reforms, enriched his Chicken Little metaphor with some actual chicken noises and pecked his microphone, which performance was valiantly recorded in Hansard thus: 'bwok bwok bekerk!'

As demonstrated here, to describe what Senator Roberts did, you could use a verb (he pecked) or you could mimic and record that sound (bwok bwok bekerk). Both pecked and bwok bwok bekerk are instances of onomatopoeia. The term originates from Greek, from onoma, onomat- ('name') plus poios ('making', from poiein 'to make'). It simply refers to a word that imitates the sound being made — as we perceive it — of the object or action that it refers to. You could describe onomatopoeic words as 'mimic words'. They are part of languages all around the globe but they are especially recognisable as words that represent sounds made by animals — for example, bow wow or woof woof, the sounds a dog supposedly makes 'in English'. We once used to put such 'sound' words in inverted commas — for example, we would write about a thing that went 'ping'. Now we tend to use italics instead, but these written signals are simply telling us that it's an onomatopoeic word.

If we compare 'a thing that goes ping' with 'a thing that goes fast', we can see that fast is operating differently, because it intensifies the verb 'goes'. You can say 'it goes' or 'it says' and follow these words with a mimic word — for example, you can say 'it went bang', but you can't say 'it went shriek'. 'To shriek' is limited to being a verb and has grammatical inflections, such as tenses (for example, past tense: 'he shrieked'). The linguistic term for this is lexification. (The lexicon is all the units in a language that have meaning, and this includes prefixes and suffixes such as un or ful.) The lexification of a word unit means having meaningful bits added to it so that it fits the grammar patterns of the established language. For instance, these bits can include adding ed to the end of a word to show that it was an action that happened in the past.

Some words are so versatile they can have a grammatical label — such as verb, noun or adverb — and also function as a mimic or an exclamation word when needed. Thus 'he banged [verb] on the table', 'you get more bang [noun] for your buck', and so on, but we can also say 'the motor went bang when we started it'. A word like bang has a sensory onomatopoeic element, because it resembles the sound it describes, and it is also an integral part of a proposition, where you are telling me what happened. Ultimately it depends grammatically on the presence of the verb 'went' to make sense, and it can be described as a complement to that verb. On its own it's simply an onomatopoeic word, and sometimes classed as an exclamation. Bang!

We imitate animal sounds from an early age. A cat says miaow and the sound imitation has become a verb: 'the cat miaowed'. However, although a dog says (or goes) woof woof, we don't normally say it woofed. We say it barked. (The history of language can give an account of how this came about.) The word go is sometimes used with sounds other than those made by living creatures, as in 'the balloon wentpop'. Here the exhaled air and the movement of the lips seem to be a natural way to represent the sound of air escaping. But what about other languages, such as Arabic, which don't pronounce p with a burst of air as English speakers do — how do they express that sound? Are they hearing what we are hearing? It's farqa'a in Arabic — no p sound at all — but nonetheless to Arabic speakers this word represents the sound of a balloon popping.

In talking about how languages are written we refer to consonants and vowels. Now here's a brief 'technical' explanation of some of the terms linguists use when they talk about consonants. This is the realm of phonetics — of sounds — not necessarily of spelling. Basically, linguists describe the sounds we make in terms of where and how those sounds are produced. For example, when we block the airstream from the mouth then release it with a burst of air, we get types of consonants that are called stops. This category includes plosives such as p, t, k and b, d, g. P, t and k are Called voiceless plosives. If you add your voice to a plosive consonant it becomes a voiced plosive. B, d and g are voiced plosives: the b in barked is a voiced plosive, as is the d in dog. But note that we pronounce the ed in barked using the unvoiced plosive t. Same thing for popped, where the p sounds are also unvoiced.

Another important group of consonants are Called fricatives. These are produced when we narrow the passage of air and audible friction occurs. Examples of fricatives are the f sound in phew, the z sound in zip and the h in hiss. F when voiced becomes v, while s when voiced becomes z. (As an aside, I don't know why snoring is conventionally rendered in English by zzzzz — we don't...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Allen & Unwin
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1760632198
• ISBN 13: 9781760632199
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Zeichner: Wlodarski Daniel
• Anzahl der Seiten: 197
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Technicolour; enquiries@roughtrade.com; ; Glogauer Stra�e 5; Berlin; 10999; Deutschland