[Lingtyp] An ideophone for cough?

Jess Tauber tetrahedralpt at gmail.com
Fri Mar 11 18:22:44 UTC 2022


Dunno if this counts precisely but Tolkien's Gollum with his hacking cough
being the basis of his name (and the word 'hack' itself).

Jess Tauber


<http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
Virus-free.
www.avg.com
<http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>

On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 1:19 PM Christian Lehmann <
christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:

> Dear Raffaele,
>
> while I have no ideophone for 'cough' to offer, the following
> considerations may prove helpful:
>
> For some time, German has had a verb form which is morphologically the
> pure stem and whose syntactic distribution is essentially that of
> interjections. *Hust* 'cough' and *hüstel* 'cough slightly' are among
> these, just as *gähn* 'yawn', *grins* 'grin' and many others. German
> grammarians call them *Inflektiv* (inflective). (Inflectives may be
> onomatopoetic if the verb happens to be onomatopoetic; but this does not
> concern their essence.) They doubtless gained popularity in translations of
> English cartoons. The German wikipedia, and only this one, has an article
> on them.
>
> Some of the earlier answers to your question appear to concern
> inflectives. Regardless of whether they are onomatopoetic, I do not think
> inflectives should be subsumed under ideophones; but that, of course,
> depends on your definition of ideophone.
>
> Again, several of the forms offered in this thread are clearly not
> inflectives. Then again the question arises whether such words are
> ideophones. An ideophone holistically represents the perceptual impression
> of a situation; and on account of its holistic character, it either does
> not integrate into clause syntax or may at most be added as an adjunct.
> Does, e.g., *ahem* have the same distribution as the typical ideophone,
> like *zig-zag* and *helter-skelter*? It might rather be an interjection.
>
> Sorry for these qualms.
>
> Cheers, Christian
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Am 11.03.2022 um 10:58 schrieb Raffaele Simone:
>
> Dear all,
>
> working on a paper on ideophones and their place in grammar and lexicon I
> happened to wonder how things are concerning cough.
>
> Romance languages and other which I am familiar with do not seem to have a
> standard ideophone for it and even less a stable an accepted written
> version of it.
>
> Do you know languages that have an ideophone for cough and even more a way
> of indicating it in writing?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Raffaele
>
> --
> ===============
> Emeritus Professor, Università Roma Tre
> Hon C Lund University
> Membre de l'Académie Royale de Belgique
> Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France
> Accademico della Crusca
> ===============
> Attività e pubblicazioni // Activity and publications http://uniroma3.academia.edu/RaffaeleSimone
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing listLingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orghttp://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
> --
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
> Tel.: +49/361/2113417
> E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20220311/cf251264/attachment.htm>


More information about the Lingtyp mailing list