LL-L 'Etymology' 2007.01.24 (04) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 24 January 2007 - Volume 04

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L 'Etymology' 2007.01.24 (02) [E/LS]

> From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
> Subject: LL-L 'Etymology' 2007.01.24 (01) [LS]
>
> Dear Lowlanners,
>
> some of you might know me as a very respectless person as far as books
> and other written sources are concerned. Perhaps I read to much of
> them...
>
> Now I stumbled about the term G: _lautmalerisch_, E:
> 'onomatopoetic' (what a cruel word; the true translation of the German
> expression would be 'painting a sound'!) which you can find in many
> (German) dictionaries if different etymological sources are unknown.
>
> What exactly does it mean? Isn't the origin of all basic words
> "lautmalerisch"? Very old words like G: 'Kuckuck', E: 'cuckoo' are

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that all words are onomatopoetic,
although there is a whole theory of the onomatopoetic construction of
words.

For example, there's the idea that liquid consonants (eg "L" and "R")
are used in describing liquids, and certainly there are plenty of words
to support this idea, for example, "liquid", "flow", "river", "oil",
"splash".

There's also the idea that the very short vowel of "i" is used in
describing tiny things and quick movement: "quick", "pip".

You can add the idea that consonantal stops to indicate actual stops:
"stop", "slap", ""trip", "brake".

You can take the repeated trill of "r" to have originally indicated
repetition, as for example in the "re-" prefix in Latin and its
derivatives meaning to do over again or in the "-er" suffix to mean
someone who keeps on doing something. For example, a "miner" is someone
who keeps on mining.

Then you can combine such ideas into single words having all the
necessary relationships: "slip" (quick movement + flow + stop),
"hit" (effort + quick movement + stop).

And so on.

One problem with this, I think, is that for any group of words that fit
the theory you can find plenty that don't. It might be that any given
language offers so much variety in semantic-to-phonetic relationships
that you can look for order and find order, or you can look for chaos
and find chaos.

I think the practical, everyday meaning of the word "onomatopoeia" is
that there are some words that immediately strike you as having been
developed or invented to describe a sound, but it's not necessarily so
that all words are like this, and it's not useful for purposes of
self-expression to think of all words as onomatopoeiae.

If you look at sign languages, you'll find that visual onomatopoeia are
much more common than aural onomatopoeia are in spoken languages. The
reason for this seems clear enough: much more of human discourse
describes what we see than describes what we hear. The proportion of
words that are onomatopoetic depends on how much of the human world
occurs in the medium of the language, and therefore in spoken languages
onomatopoeia are relatively thin on the ground.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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