The point is, who judges accuracy? The speakers of any given language will inevitably feel that their version is more accurate, and will feel that those versions used in other languages, particularly where they differ greatly from said person’s mother tongue, are less accurate. The only parties in any position to judge the accuracy of any given onomatopoeia are whatever is making the sound in the first place. And even if they could communicate with said speaker, they would have to do so within the constraints of that speaker’s language, which will screw it all up again.
Essentially your argument, bob, seems similar to trying to say such-and-such an accent of English, for example, is more accurate than some other one.
Plus:
What? That’s exactly what you have been saying. See: your pop vs pyak comment.
Ooh I’d be the first to agree with you there. I thought about going back to school, but nah, pretty sure I couldn’t find one “field” that accurately captures my interest. And I doubt I could handle doing linguistics - prefer to Google stuff that seems interesting at the moment and see what’s out there, and of course debate it here - which I’m enjoying immensely being new at forumosa and all.
I am interested in how onomatopoeia become standard in a single language, though. I mean, why do we accept and use “buzz”, but might not (yet or ever) agree that cement mixers go “gloppity-glop”? Actually saw that latter one somewhere recently…
I don’t know why Taiwanese people say wong wong / wang wang (汪汪), but in my memory the older Canton generation usually name their dog as Ar Wong (阿旺). The word wong / wang (旺) in Chinese means flourish (興旺). There is also an old Chinese saying, 貓來窮﹐狗來富, which roughly means ‘cat brings poverty, dog brings wealth’. More interesting, the pronunication between 旺 and 汪 are if not the same but very very close.
I am not sure if this is the exact reason of why Taiwanese people say wong wong / wang wang, but this could be an possible explaniation. Keep in mind that Chinese people love to add/connect lucky meanings to things around them, in other word, the word wong wong / wang wang might has nothing to do with onomatopoeia.
But yuen raises an interesting point. Whereas in English onomatopoeia in are just phonetic sounds without any other meaning, onomatopoeia in Chinese are homonyms for words that do have meaning - much in the same way that while we’ve lost the original meanings for most English names, in Chinese, names are composed of meaningful words.
The dog sound “wong” is a homonym for other words, and the character can also be used in the phrase “wongyang” (boundless, of oceans) and by itself is a verb meaning to “collect or accumulate (liquids)”, or “to soak”. “Hong,” the Chinese word for bang or boom, can also mean “to attack” or “bomb” (as in “hongzha”) and “honghonglielie” means “vigorous, dynamic” or “on a grand and spectacular scale.”
Some of the written Chinese onomatopoeia, however, are not homonyms. “Miao” for a cat noise adds a “kou” radical to the character for “seedling”, and as far as I know it’s the only first tone “miao”. But Tetsuo’s point is still well taken - after all, I doubt anyone thinks of the ocean when they hear a dog bark (but maybe a bomb when they hear a “hong”?).
Yet another example of how crappy Chinese is with onomatopoeia. The word for bang doesn’t even start with an exploded sound for petes sake. :loco: [/quote]
Now who’s getting all over whom like a pack of grammar teachers?
I should’ve said “Hong” is a Chinese word for $#@&^#%&, and “boom” is an English word for $#@&^#%& that gives bob a hard-on. Besides, bobster, I was making a point about homonyms. In terms of frequency of usage, I hear people say “bong” much more often in Taiwan. And as for explosive sounds, what’s so explosive about the “k” in “kablooey” or “kaboom”? Seems to me like you’re blowing an explosive sound out your arse again…
“k” and “b” are both exploded sounds and as such are “more accurate” representations of the sound that an explosion makes than is “h”.
My point here is that the sounds exist independently of what anybodies social conditioning has taught them to think about them. Yes we will tend to be prejudiced in favour of the words from our own language, but we will, in each case, be more or less correct about this, and that fact will sometimes be obvious. It appears that in the case of hong and bong you agree with me.
No need explaining it all to me once again. I understand what you are saying. I just don’t entierely agree.
Harvey I’ve been teaching English pronunciation on and off for close to twelve years. It has been years since I gave up on words like “bilabial plosives” because they have absolutely nothing to do with teaching pronunciation. What “is” useful, for example, is understanding that the letters b, p, d and t are pronounced with a sudden release of air (actually the following vowel sound) when they are the first letter in a word. They will frequently represent a sudden stop of the preceeeding vowel at the end of a word, particularly if the “following” word in the thought group begins with a consonant, or if it is the last letter of the last word in a sentence. Their pronunciation mid sentence follows a similar pattern but the letter’s placement at the beginning or at the end of the syllable becomes the determining factor. But I digress…
Boom is an excellent representation of the sound of an explosion because the letter b “explodes” into the uw sound and the whole thing trails off with the continuant “m” which is made with the lips in the same position as for “b.” The sound erupts sudenly and trails off from the same place where it began. Pop is appropriate to smaller releases of energy, beginning as it does with the voiceless form of b and ending in the same position except with a stop as woud occur when the explosion is not large enough to cause any lingering reverberation.
Hey this fun…
Harvey you seem unwilling to recognize that while there may be an element of conditioning at work here it is not necesarily the whole story. I am guessing that if one were to look at the places where languages converge in their onamatopoeia then you would discover where they are all in fact most accurate. By the same token the languages that diverge most would tend to be least accurate. I would further speculate that languages with fewer sounds at their disposal would tend to be less accurate than languages with more sounds. These are just a theories of course but anyway lets keep this up. As I said before this is an area of language that interests me though perhaps more for it’s emotive potential than anything else. I’ve never been much of an academic.
By the way, in English, the letter k is always associated with a sudden release of air, so it’s use in words like kaboom seems perfectly onamatopoeiaic to me.
While this could be true - although there are some other factors that could cancel that out - how do you say which one is more accurate? Or are they all inaccurate? And what happens in cases like “woof”, where there are two groups of fairly sizable numbers which differ from each other substantially? (ie the “wan(g)” sounds versus the “woof”/“vuv” sounds)
One of the cancelling factors would be if we’re talking about animal sounds. Those could diverge for one simple reason - the language is going to pick up onomatopoeia that sound close to the most common type of that animal. So if the predominant type of dog way back in the mists of time in one place was a poodle and in another a rottweiler, naturally the two places would pick a different sound to represent the noise a dog makes. Over time this might evolve to be more applicable to new kinds of dog as each culture is exposed to them, but it’s always going to be linked back in some fashion to the original word.
Harvey I think I may have given the wrong impression here. I used the word “superior” some time ago to describe languages that were based on some reasonable sort of phonetic script but I didn’t intend for that to mean that I thought that English was necessarily superior to all other languages. I don’t know enough about any other language to make that claim and certainly wouldn’t pretend to. I do however still have the impression that English is, lets say, more flexible, than Chinese in regard to onamatopoeia. It is presumptious to say even this I realize but I do have to admit that it is still my impresssion. Perhaps some day there will exist the technology necessary to prove me right or wrong. Till then we are left with our impressions I suppose, and the fact that English posesses about four times the number of syllables in contemporary use, and an alphabet system that makes it easier to generate new sound combinations. Today I was teaching the consonant cluster VR, as it occurs in the word “driver”. When I teach pronunciation I like to get really carried away in terms of providing a whole body experience, so I had her pretend she was reVVing one of those new big bikes which, as I was teaching, I realized really do sound like VVVRR VVVRR. Try it really loud and tell me it doesn’t sound awfully darn close despite the fact that you could not have been conditioned to this word. It wouldn’t suprise me if others notice this and it becomes part of written language much like grrr… I doubt Chinese with it’s character system would be able to create and adopt such an “accurate” (I have faith in my senses) “word” as easily as English could. I have a lot to learn about Chinese too so perhaps someone would like enlighten me as to the limits my understanding or the error of my reasoning here.
