Nah. It’s important information for those who are considering getting (or already own) a dog and wonder why Taiwan dogs bark the way the way they do.
I speak dog with our dog. My wife doesn’t speak dog, so he tells me stuff she gets up to during the day. He’s got a taiwanese accent tho.
I am posting this again because I’m not sure titso and harvey read it the first time. The point I’m trying to make really is that the use of an alphabet allows more flexibility than the use of characters does. The fact that Japanese is so rich in onomatopoeia is merely proof of this since Japanese has romaji. It’s pretty simple really. If your language contains a broad range of sounds: consonants, consonant clusters, vowels, dipthongs and these can be arranged and re-arranged freely into differents sorts of syllables then you are more likely to invent words that are truly onomatopoiea. Buzzz for the sound that a fly makes, splash for a tree falling in a lake, ploop for a big turd landing in the toilet. English is extraordinary in it’s use of these kinds of words and this amazing versatility is made possible by the alphabet and the freeedom that native speakers feel about experiment with it. I don’t think the same can be said about Chinese and I think characters are at fault.
Sorry I have no research to back this up “harvey.” I tend to think for myself about these matters.
Talk about not reading posts before posting
They have smaller wongs, so they say it twice, to feel bigger.
Another steaming pile of horseshit bob. Firstly, Japanese doesn’t use romaji as part of everday language any more than Chinese uses pinyin, and romaji is constrained by the limits of valid kana which also makes that wee point utterly irrelevant, so that’s proof you don’t know what you’re talking about there. Plus, having an alphabet is secondary - regardless what writing system you use, you can’t write sounds that don’t exist in your language. Like I said, if the alphabet is so wonderous and all-powerful, spell that clicky sound in some African languages in it, or differentiate between “she”, 西, and 是 with it. And also, the alphabet, when used in English, does not allow “free” rearrangement. Is xxqtqp a defined sound? There are rules to English just as there are to any language. And finally, which you seem to have totally avoided, if English is so capable of “truly” onomatopoeic words, why is it the list of sounds in other languages that dogs are said to make seems nicely split between English-esque “woof”/“vuf”-like sounds and Chinese-esque “wa”/“wan” sounds?
Sorry if my tone offended you guys. I thought we were engaging in a bit of friendly banter here. You are right tetsuo I don’t know much about Japanese and harvey you are probably right about something or other as well…
It baffles me though how you fail to see the basic flaw in both of your arguements. You seem willing to recognize that onomatopoetic words exist (although harvey prefaces this with the notion that they are somehow “not truly” so) so I’m assuming that you would accept that some words fall into that category more accurately than others. Some words more closely resemble the thing they represent. If they didn’t the word onomatopoetic would be meaningless. Either all words would be onomatopoetic or none would. Plop, pop, splash, splat, whoosh buzz etc. are lively words precisely because their very sound hints at their meaning regardless of whether or not anyone has been conditioned to associate them. They are not exact representations of those things but they are frequently pretty close. The zzz in buzz for the sound that a fly makes is probably about as close as a human voice can comfortably come to a precise copy. English is quite rich in this kind of language it seems. I haven’t noticed the same thing about Mandarin, but I am more than willing to admit that my knowledge of Mandarin is far from exhaustive. If the two of you would like to provide some examples that would be a real and much appreciated contribution to the discussion. If you can’t then I’m afraid you are left with one pretty unimpresive little “wang” to defend your position that Chinese is as rich in this kind of language as English. That is your position isn’t it?
Bzzt, wrong answer. My point, at least, is that not that Chinese is as “rich” - however you define that - as English, nor that it is less so. My point is that unless you speak dog, there is no objective way you can say any given language is more or less accurate in representing those sounds. You, the same as the rest of us, are coming from a perspective inherently colored by your own particular sociolinguistic background. English onomatopoeia only sounds more accurate to you because you have grown up knowing that that is the sound such-and-such - in this case a dog - makes. To you, as with many of us here, a dog goes “woof” because you’ve been taught all your life that “woof” is the sound a dog makes. None of us are in any position to objectively say “This is the best representation of the sound a dog makes” because our perspectives are colored beyond all repair by our backgrounds, cultural and linguistic.
And I may be wrong, but what I think Harvey is getting at with the “not truly onomatopoeic” thing is the same point I was making before - onomatopoeia is just a close approximation to a sound that does not and cannot exist in a particular language. Just like I said how “woof” can’t exist in Chinese because the “f” sound is not a valid final sound, nor can can words like 這 (in Mandarin) in English because ㄓ (in the full Beijing, rolled-tongue form) doesn’t exist in English.
Oh, and to assume Chinese somehow lacks onomatopoeia is just ignorant. And if quantity is your measure, surely Japanese must be a much better language than English, which blows your whole “alphabets are best” concepts right down the shitter. Anyway, here’s some examples off the top of my head: 哈哈 (ha1ha1 - laughing))， 咕嚕 (gu1lu1 - grunting)， 啦 (la1 - la)， 噹 (dang1 - bell sound)， 喵 (miao1 - meow)，咳 (hai1 - sighing/ke2 - cough)， 唉 (ai1 - oh!/ai4 - dispirited sigh)， 滴 (di1 - drip)， 噓 (xu1 - hiss, shh)， 呼吸 (hu1xi1 - verb meaning “breathe”)， 哇 (wa1 - baby’s cry)…
At the heart of it bob, what exactly are you arguing? That Chinese lacks onomatopoeia? That Chinese onomatopoeia is wrong? That English has the most accurate onomatopoeia? That alphabets are crucial to onomatopoeia?
I’m arguing that the flexibility of an alphabet (or any other phonetic system) makes the possibility for creating accurate onomatopoeia a lot more likely. And I reject the idea that words sound to me like the thing they represent solely through associations that have been created through exposure to the language. For example I could listen to a dog and tell you whether the sound he made was more like an arooo or a woof or a yipe. So could you, and so could a person from a totally different linguistic background. And we would all be likely to agree that the zzzz in buzzz represents the sound of a fly better than the ooo in arooo. This is what onomatopoeia “is” basically. Trying to argue otherwise seems to me like fancy nonsense, and if there is one thing I can be counted on to reject at every opportunity, it is fancy nonsense.
'Sfar as I’m concerned, we still are. No offense taken in the slightest.
The point is quite simple, and it seems from Tetsuo’s reply that we are in complete agreement. Let me break it down for you. Infinite range of sounds in nature. Finite set of a hundred or so speech sounds in human language. Dogs don’t speak human language any more than trees do. Nor do we speak dog. Hence a basic
At no point did I say that English was the language with the most or the most accurate onomatopoeia. My only point is Chinese does not seem particularly rich in this regard and that the character system might be partially responsible for this. So far nobody in this discusion has offered any evidence to the contrary.
It should also be pointed out also that I am not actually too concerned with an infinite range of sounds here. I am concerned with the kinds of sounds that human beings regularly come into contact with: a squeeky creeeky hinge, a horses clop clop clop, the drip drip drip of a coffee percolator, the pop of a bottle opening. The natural world is filled with sounds that have found their way into the very fabric, apparently, of many languages.
Your pyak example was a good one (for my arguement) because this is a situation where the accuracy is quite clear. The p in both languages is an obvious good choice but where Englsh goes with the short o which is made with the interior of the mouth resembling as close as possible an empty cavity, Chinese goes into a “y” that involves movement of the tongue. English finishes off with a stop using the same speech organs that were involved with the initial exploded sound. The stop is appropriate in this instance since the initial force that created the pop in the first place would be quickly disipated. Chinese (cantonese I’m guessing actually) on the other hand finishes off not only with another exploded sound but one coming from a different place. It just isn’t as accurate. Try again.
I think buzzz is just as good as summsumm (German) or ong ong (Chinese), but then again I don’t “speak” fly. And I can’t fly either. And the fly doesn’t speak the sound, it flies it. And I don’t even have wings. Besides there may be dialects, South American Fly East Asian Fly… . What about mosquitos? Xiao Hei Wen don’t seem to make any noise. How can we onomatopoetically represent the non-sound?
And for the woof, has anybody done any research about what a dog does with its mouth and tongue while it barks? Does it put its upper teeth on its lower lips at the end of a bark?
Sorry, but this whole discussion about accuracy is pointless. The language speaker doesn’t care about whether the onomatopoeticon is accurate or not. The only things he cares about is that 1. he is understood by the listener and that 2. he adds some flavour to his speech.
The most amazing thing about this thread is its length. I saw a dog that said “wong wong”. It was this long but it ran away.
Considering your own admission of how pitiful your knowledge of Chinese onomatopoeia is, this is possibly the most bullshit argument you’ve ever put up. Normally you come across as oddly insightful, but here you’re just being ignorant. Did you even see the list of examples I put in, without even trying, from Chinese? Damn near a dozen, in a second language, without even missing a beat. There were even a few others I had but I’m not entirely sure of. And another point - exactly what do you mean by “rich” here? Because this seems to be the crux of your argument, but it’s a remarkably vague crux.
Your dislike of characters is understandable and well known, but this is just nonsense bob.
You keep flouting the words
That said, there is a certain amount of accuracy required to allow any onomatopoeia to gain traction in a given language. The sounds used aren’t arbitrary, but merely that languages best approximation. In this much, I agree with bob. From there we diverge, rapidly. Because of the different phonetic and phonemic structures of each language, “best approximations” are going to vary. Potentially wildly. But they only gain currency in their respective languages because they are deemed the best approximation at the time. Any judgement of their relative “accuracy” is basically futile and impossible.
And Harvey, I disagree on your last comment - names for objects, ideas, whatever, can, and at some point had to, be arbitrary. Onomatopaeia are constrained somewhat by the sound they try to convey - any attempted onomatopoeia that doesn’t bear some sort of resemblance is going to be met with “WTF? That sounds nothing like it!” responses. And I think this is part of bob’s argument.
Actually, to me this is the most interesting aspect of the whole discussion. Of course Bob
Harvey I did in fact miss tetsuo’s list of Chinese onomatopoeia. I may change my mind after looking at it and that would be a wonderful thing for me because this is an aspect of language that I happen to enjoy and I haven’t discovered much of it so far in my study of Chinese. You haven’t given me much reason to believe though that one language’s onomatopoeia for a given sound could be better or worse than another’s. Pop was a great example of that. Does this lead me to believe that English is neccesarily always better? Of course not. But neither will I reject the notion that it might be. And yes I am aware that this would be an incredibly difficult thing to prove. All that I ever said… oh fuck it, if you haven’t figured it out by now there is no point saying it again. Especially not if you are too dim to understand that there exist in nature recurring patterns of sound that may be imitated with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy. Next you’ll be telling us there is no such thing as reality and that ethics are relative. Too much school will do that to a person.
Well, there are a great many of them and someone may have even compiled a list out there somewhere - I’ll be on the lookout. I
In that case you must not have got ENOUGH education. 