Similarly, alliteration has been used in the line "as the surf surged up the sun swept shore. The words "followed" and "free" are not onomatopoeic in themselves, but in conjunction with "furrow" they reproduce the sound of ripples following in the wake of a speeding ship. The most famous example is the phrase "furrow followed free" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Onomatopoeic effect without onomatopoeic wordsĪn onomatopoeic effect can also be produced in a phrase or word string with the help of alliteration and consonance alone, without using any onomatopoeic words. Similarly, the "honk" of a car's horn is ba-ba ( Han: 叭叭) in Mandarin, tut-tut in French, pu-pu in Japanese, bbang-bbang in Korean, bært-bært in Norwegian, fom-fom in Portuguese and bim-bim in Vietnamese. For example, the snip of a pair of scissors is cri-cri in Italian, riqui-riqui in Spanish, terre-terre or treque-treque in Portuguese, krits-krits in modern Greek, cëk-cëk in Albanian, and katr-katr in Hindi. This practice is especially common in certain languages such as Māori, and so in names of animals borrowed from these languages.Īlthough a particular sound is heard similarly by people of different cultures, it is often expressed through the use of different consonant strings in different languages. In Tamil and Malayalam, the word for crow is kaakaa. In English, for example, there is the universal fastener which is named for the sound it makes: the zip (in the UK) or zipper (in the U.S.) Many birds are named after their calls, such as the bobwhite quail, the weero, the morepork, the killdeer, chickadees and jays, the cuckoo, the chiffchaff, the whooping crane, the whip-poor-will, and the kookaburra. Sometimes, things are named from the sounds they make. Verba dicendi ('words of saying') are a method of integrating onomatopoeic words and ideophones into grammar. One example is the English word bleat for sheep noise: in medieval times it was pronounced approximately as blairt (but without an R-component), or blet with the vowel drawled, which more closely resembles a sheep noise than the modern pronunciation.Īn 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 its vowels have not changed as they have in the word furrow. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that the process is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia. Some languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. įor animal sounds, words like quack (duck), moo (cow), bark or woof (dog), roar (lion), meow/ miaow or purr (cat), cluck (chicken) and baa (sheep) are typically used in English (both as nouns and as verbs). Human sounds sometimes provide instances of onomatopoeia, as when mwah is used to represent a kiss. In speaking of a mishap involving an audible arcing of electricity, the word zap is often used (and its use has been extended to describe non-auditory effects of interference). Machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia: honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. Some other very common English-language examples are hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, moo, and splash. In the case of a frog croaking, the spelling may vary because different frog species around the world make different sounds: Ancient Greek brekekekex koax koax (only in Aristophanes' comic play The Frogs) probably for marsh frogs English ribbit for species of frog found in North America English verb croak for the common frog. Usesįurther information: List of animal sounds According to Musurgia Universalis (1650), the hen makes "to to too", while chicks make "glo glo glo". Thus, words that imitate sounds can be said to be onomatopoeic or onomatopoetic. The English term comes from the Ancient Greek compound onomatopoeia, 'name-making', composed of onomato- 'name' and - poeia 'making'. Onomatopoeia can differ by language: it conforms to some extent to the broader linguistic system hence the sound of a clock may be expressed as tick tock in English, tic tac in Spanish and Italian (shown in the picture), dī dā in Mandarin, kachi kachi in Japanese, or tik-tik in Hindi. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as oink, meow (or miaow), roar, and chirp. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is the use or creation of a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. For other uses, see Onomatopoeia (disambiguation).Ī sign in a shop window in Italy proclaims these silent clocks make "No Tic Tac", in imitation of the sound of a clock. This article is about the category of words.
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