<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n You may wonder what the word \u201cOnomatopoeia\u201d means, and so did I when I first saw it. It’s one of those unnecessarily long foreign words which meaning is unguessable unless one is very good with greek. Wikipedia has an article on it that makes it easy to understand.1<\/sup><\/a> It means sound words (danish \u201clydord\u201d) which are the words that are (somewhat) made after some sound of a thing, like the sound of a cat meowing (meow) or of a dog barking (woof).2<\/sup><\/a> It is not constrained to ‘natural’ sounds. For instance, it includes sounds from a camera blitz (snap). I shall just call them sound words.<\/p>\n 26. It has been said, \u201cThe relation between language and the world is conventional.\u201d There are ways of twisting this remark so that it turns [out] true: as it stands, it is at best false.<\/p>\n ‘Conventional’ sometimes indicates that which is customary: wearing a tie, saying ‘How do you do?’ when introduced to a person, shaking hands, and so forth are matters of convention, custom. That a speaker in using \u201cI\u201d may be speaking of himself is not a matter of custom.<\/p>\n ‘Conventional’ sometimes indicates that which is in some sense agreed upon; we can adopt the convention that in this essay ‘thater’ is to be employed as an exact synonym of ‘that’. Perhaps we would then say, \u201cThe relations between ‘thater’ and the world are conventional.\u201d It does not follow that something of the same sort must be said about the word ‘that’. The point here can be readily seen in connection with onomatopoeia. The word ‘meow’ stands in a relatively natural relation to a cat’s meow in that the sounds made in uttering the word are somewhat similar to the sound of a cat meowing. Let ‘woem’ be an exactly synonym of ‘meow’; then perhaps any regularity pertaining to ‘woem’ and a cat’s meow is conventional: it does not follow that the resemblance between an utterance of ‘meow’ and a cat’s meow is conventional.<\/p>\n Surely Ziff is right about some of the things that he said. This part:<\/p>\n \u201cBut the possibility of it indicates that not every semantic regularity can sensibly be characterized as \u201cconventional.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n \n appears to be a misstatement. Why would he talk about the possibility of it when he has just shown that it is actual? Nothing useful follows from the possibility (what kind of possibility?) of sound words, but his point does<\/em> follow from the actuality of sound words.<\/p>\n As for the ‘natural relation’ (meaning similarity in sound?), it is much less strong than he gives one (or I got) the impression of. When I was looking up the word \u201conomatopoeia\u201d on Wiktionary and Wikipedia, I stumbled upon an article that compares the sound words in various languages for the same sounds<\/em>. (Unless one wants to say that a cat suddenly starts meowing differently when taken to China!) Unsurprisingly they don’t have much in common but they do have a little. Consider the sound words for a cat’s meow:<\/span><\/p>\n \n * In Tagalog meyaw,”ngiyaw”<\/p>\n * In Arabic, miao<\/p>\n * In Bengali: miu miu<\/p>\n * In Bulgarian, miau<\/p>\n * In Catalan, m\u00e8u [m\u025bu]<\/p>\n * In Czech, m\u0148au<\/p>\n * In Chinese, Cantonese, m\u0113u-m\u0113u<\/p>\n * In Chinese, Mandarin, mi\u0101o mi\u0101o<\/p>\n * In Danish, mjau, mjav, miau, miav<\/p>\n * In Dutch, miauw, mauw<\/p>\n * In English, meow [mi\u02c8a\u028a], miaow (UK), or mew [mju\u02d0]<\/p>\n * In Estonian, m\u00e4u, n\u00e4u<\/p>\n * In Filipino, ngyaw<\/p>\n * In Finnish, miau, mau, nau, kurnau<\/p>\n * In French, miaou [mja.u]<\/p>\n * In German, miau<\/p>\n * In Greek, niau,<\/p>\n * In Hebrew, miaw<\/p>\n * In Hungarian mia\u00fa, nyau<\/p>\n * In Japanese nyaanyaa<\/p>\n * In Korean yah-ong<\/p>\n * In Norwegian mjau<\/p>\n * In Hindi Myaau, Myaaoo<\/p>\n * In Icelandic, mj\u00e1<\/p>\n * In Italian, miao miao<\/p>\n * In Indonesian, meong<\/p>\n * In Japanese, ny\u0101<\/p>\n * In Korean, yaong<\/p>\n * In Lithuanian, miau<\/p>\n * In Macedonian, myau (\u043c\u0458\u0430\u0443)<\/p>\n * In Malayalam, “myaoo myaoo”<\/p>\n * In Polish, miau<\/p>\n * In Portuguese, miau<\/p>\n * In Romanian, miau<\/p>\n * In Russian, myau<\/p>\n * In Sinhalese, \u00f1\u0101vu and puru puru – purring<\/p>\n * In Slovene, mijav<\/p>\n * In Spanish, miau [mja\u028a]<\/p>\n * In Swedish, mjau or mjao<\/p>\n * In Thai, miaw<\/p>\n * In Turkish, miyav<\/p>\n * In Telugu, miao(m)<\/p>\n * In Tamil, miaow(m)<\/p>\n * In Urdu, meow<\/p>\n * In Vietnamese, meo3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n \n They have some things in common: They generally feature the vocals \u201ci\u201d and \u201ce\u201d in the beginning of the word (and these two are often, I guess, pronounced similarly) and the vocal \u201co\u201d in the end. Also, they generally feature the consonants \u201cm\u201d and \u201cn\u201d (also sounds similarly) in the beginning and the consonants \u201cv\u201d and \u201cw\u201d in the end.<\/p>\n Similarly for other sound words though the words for a balloon popping are quite dissimilar. I would not be surprised that this is because the sound a balloon makes when it pops is very dissimilar to the sounds that human beings are capable of making in general. We thus find it hard to reproduce the sound and select some sound that is somewhat ‘far away’ (in sound) from how we hear it.<\/span><\/p>\n The above indicates that the ‘natural connection’ is pretty weak. Even words that are not generally considered sound words may have a weak ‘natural connection’ to the sound of whatever it is that they refer to. For instance the danish word for electric socket (\u201cstikkontakt\u201d) sounds somewhat similar to the sound it makes when one turns on the socket (click). Though the word’s etyomology is unrelated.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 1<\/a>http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Onomatopoeia<\/a><\/div>\nOnomatopoeia<\/h3>\n
Quote from Semantic Analysis<\/h3>\n
Onomatopoeia is of no great importance in language. I would not \tsuggest otherwise. But the possibility of it indicates that not \tevery semantic regularity can sensibly be characterized as \t\u201cconventional.\u201d What is important and true about the thesis that \t\u201cthe relation between language and the word is conventional\u201d is \tthis: only those semantic regularities that can more or less \tfelicitously be characterized as \u201cconventional\u201d are generally \trelevant in semantic studies. The only semantic regularities \tpertaining to ‘meow’ that are in general semantically relevant are \tthose that pertain equally to ‘woem’. If I say ‘What’s making that \tcat meow?’ then whether I like it or not part of my utterance stands \tin a natural relation to a cat’s meow, but this natural relation \tmust generally be semantically irrelevant for generally (but not \tabsolutely invariably) I could have asked the same question by \tasking ‘What’s making that cat woem?’. (In an appropriate context, \te.g. one in which a cat is meowing loudly and plainly, there might \twell be a striking and semantically relevant difference between the \tutterance ‘The cat is meowing.’ and ‘The cat is woeming.’ for the \tstress on ‘woeming’ might be puzzling in a way that the stress on \t‘meowing’ might not. See 56 below.)<\/ol>\n
Cross-language sound words<\/h3>\n
Notes
\n<\/span><\/h3>\n