[Lexicog] Onomatopoeia

[Mike Maxwell]

Kennethe Keyes wrote:
> Does anyone have suggestions as to how to include information about 
> onomatopoeitic words? What field should this go under?

In the interest of (at least my) better understanding the question, let 
me try to rephrase it.

There are some words that are at least somewhat onomatopoeic, in the 
sense that they sort of suggest the sound in question.  Scott Nelson's 
example of 'buzz' is one such: the /z/ sound at the end is reminiscent 
of the sound the word represents.  But 'buzz' is at the same time an 
ordinary English word, namely a noun ("The buzz annoyed him") and a verb 
("The bees were buzzing").

There are other words which when pronounced are more or less similarly 
to the sound the represent, but which have not been incorporated into 
the grammatical categories of the language.  Example: "The dog goes 
'roof, roof!'" (where the pronunciation of the word I have spelled 
'roof' may or may not be quite the same as the pronunciation of the word 
for the thing on top of my house).  The more the pronunciation is like 
the sound it represents, the less likely it is to fit normal grammatical 
categories, at least in English.  So if I imitate the sound a cat makes 
(I'm good at that, trust me :-)), it's hard to put that into a sentence, 
other than as the "object" of "the cat goes __".  But if I pronounce 
'meow' as something like 'miyaw', then I can use ordinary English 
inflectional morphology, like "My meows are better than your meows" or 
"He meowed loudly".

In the latter case, where the onomatopoeic word more or less fits the 
ordinary grammatical patterns of the language, I would say it's just a 
noun or a verb, and maybe mark it as onomatopoeic in an etymology field. 
  In the former case, where the "word" does not fit into the grammar, 
then I might mark its part of speech as onomatopoeic, with an indication 
in the dictionary's description of the parts of speech, that this is not 
a grammatical category in the ordinary sense.

Does that make sense?

Incidentally, there's a word more or less like /mis/ in a large number 
of Middle and South American Indian languages.  The word means "cat", 
but it is not cognate with the Spanish word for "cat" (which is 'gato'). 
  Rather, I am told it comes from the onomatopoeic sound used to _call_ 
a cat in Spanish.  One exception is the language isolate Waorani, where 
the word for 'cat' is "kitty" (not spelled that way, but pronounced 
almost exactly that way).  I leave it to you to guess where that came from.
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


 
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