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Information about Ideophone

Not to be confused with Idiophone, a class of musical instruments.


Ideophones are words utilizing sound symbolism to express aspects of events that can be experienced by the senses, like smell, color, shape, sound, action, or movement. Ideophones are attested in all languages of the world, however, languages differ in the extent to which they make use of them. Because of this, some linguists do not think it is useful to talk about a universal 'class' of ideophones, and maintain that the concept makes sense only within the context of an individual language. In this narrow sense, the validity of the class of ideophones is rarely disputed.

The word class of ideophones is often called phonosemantic to indicate that it is not a grammatical word class in the traditional sense of the word (like 'verb' or 'noun'), but rather a grouping based on form and meaning.

In the discipline of Linguistics, ideophones have long been overlooked or treated as mysterious words. Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz (2001:2) suggest this might be due to the fact that ideophones often transcend traditional categorizational boundaries in languages, thus providing a problem to the generally orderly divided grammatical classes.

Characteristics

An oft-cited definition of the notion of ideophone is the one by Doke 1935:118:
Ideophone
‘A vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, colour, sound, smell, action, state or intensity.’


Ideophones denote aspects of events that can be experienced sensorially. Reduplication figures quite prominently in ideophones, often bringing in a sense of repetition or plurality. A well known instance of ideophones are onomatopoeic words, i.e., words imitating the sound (of the event) they refer to. Some ideophones may be derived from onomatopoeic notions. A case in point is the English ideophonic verb to tinkle, which is likely to be derived from an imitation of a brief metallic sound.

It is maintained by some (e.g. Kilian-Hatz 2001:157, Kock 1985) that ideophones denote a complete utterance and as such have a sentence-like character. However, reports from other languages (Cantonese, Yoruba, Hausa, Ewe, to name a few) challenge this statement, showing instead that ideophones can be fully integrated into sentences, just like ordinary verbs and nouns. This difference of opinion is attributable to the fact that languages vary in the manner they make use of ideophones.

Languages also differ in the context in which ideophones are used. In some languages, ideophones are primarily used in spoken language (e.g. narrative contexts) and are rarely encountered in written language. In other languages (e.g. Ewe, Japanese), ideophones can be freely used in all registers. In general, however, ideophones tend to occur more extensively in spoken language because of their expressive or dramaturgic function.

Ideophones are restricted to certain grammatical classes in some languages (e.g. Welayta, Yir-Yiront, Finnish). In others, ideophones pervade many different word classes and syntactic constructions (e.g. Mundang, Ewe, Sotho). A common feature across languages, especially in narrative contexts, is the possibility of introducing ideophones via a verbum dicendi, for example:
  • É-ƒÃº así nu bé bóbóbó   (3SG-strike hand mouth like IDEOPHONE)   ‘S/He raised an alarm and went “bóbóbó”.’ (Ewe, adapted from Ameka 2001).

Examples

This article or section uses Ruby annotation. Some web browsers may not be able to view this correctly; you may see transcriptions in parentheses after the character, like this:
了(le)
instead of on top of the character as intended.
Cantonese (romanizations given in Jyutping)
  • <ruby style="ruby-align: center; font-size: x-small;" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh"><rb>嗱</rb><rp>(</rp><rt class="pinyin" style="font-family:'Arial Unicode MS', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'; font-family /**/:inherit;">laa4</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby> <ruby style="ruby-align: center; font-size: x-small;" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh"><rb>嗱</rb><rp>(</rp><rt class="pinyin" style="font-family:'Arial Unicode MS', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'; font-family /**/:inherit;">laa2</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby> <ruby style="ruby-align: center; font-size: x-small;" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh"><rb>聲</rb><rp>(</rp><rt class="pinyin" style="font-family:'Arial Unicode MS', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'; font-family /**/:inherit;">seng1</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby> — quickly (as in <ruby style="ruby-align: center; font-size: x-small;" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh"><rb>嗱</rb><rp>(</rp><rt class="pinyin" style="font-family:'Arial Unicode MS', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'; font-family /**/:inherit;">laa4</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby> <ruby style="ruby-align: center; font-size: x-small;" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh"><rb>嗱</rb><rp>(</rp><rt class="pinyin" style="font-family:'Arial Unicode MS', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'; font-family /**/:inherit;">laa2</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby> <ruby style="ruby-align: center; font-size: x-small;" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh"><rb>聲</rb><rp>(</rp><rt class="pinyin" style="font-family:'Arial Unicode MS', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'; font-family /**/:inherit;">seng1</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby> <ruby style="ruby-align: center; font-size: x-small;" lang="zh" xml:lang="zh"><rb>做</rb><rp>(</rp><rt class="pinyin" style="font-family:'Arial Unicode MS', 'Bitstream Cyberbit', 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'; font-family /**/:inherit;">zou6</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>, literally meaning "la la sound do" but actually meaning "do [it] quickly")
English
  • bling bling — glitter, sparkle -> richness, glamour
  • hippetyhop — ideophonic adverb of manner (as in "The rabbit goes hippetyhop")
  • gobble — to devour in greedy gulps
Ewe
  • gbadzaa — flat, spreading out over a wide area
Finnish
  • Various expressive loans, e.g. tytinä< Russian stúden "aspic", but also symbolises "wobblyness"
  • Onomatopoetic frequentative and momentane verbs, e.g. momentane-frequentative lätsähdellä "to splat over a larger area, suddenly and repeatedly", from onomatopoeia läts "splat".
Japanese
  • doki doki — heartbeat -> excitement
  • kira kira — glitter
  • shiin — silence
Vietnamese
  • loảng xoảng — sound of glass breaking to pieces or metallic objects falling to the ground
  • hớt hơ hớt hải (also hớt ha hớt hải) — hard gasps -> in extreme hurry, in panic, panic-stricken
  • lục đục — the sound of hard, blunt (and likely wooden) objects hitting against each other -> disagreements and conflicts inside a group or an organisation
Yoruba
  • fẹrẹgẹdẹ — big and wide
  • róbótó — little and round (object)
  • gbẹ̀m — round and big
  • gbàyàù — open and loose
Navajo
  • dil dil — sound of several people walking
  • ts'os ts'os — sound of sucking or kissing
  • k'az k'az — sound of shearing sheep

See also

References

  • Ameka, Felix Kofi (2001) ‘Ideophones and the adjective class in Ewe’. In Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001, 25-48.
  • Awoyale, Yiowola (1989) ‘Reduplication and the status of ideophones in Yoruba. Journal of West African Languages 19, 1, 15-34.
  • Bodomo, Adams. A corpus of Cantonese Ideophones. Online publication (PDF).
  • Childs, G. Tucker (1994) ‘African Ideophones’. Hinton et al (eds.) Sound Symbolism, 178-204. Cambridge: CUP.
  • Doke, C.M. (1935) Bantu linguistic terminology. London: Longmans, Green.
  • Kilian-Hatz (2001) ‘Universality and diversity’. In Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001, 155-164.
  • Kock, I (1985) ‘The speech act theory: A preliminary investigation’. In South African Journal of African Languages, 5, 49-53.
  • Voeltz, F.K. Erhard & Kilian-Hatz, Christa (eds.) (2001). Ideophones. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument vibrating itself, without the use of strings or membranes. It is one of the four main divisions in the original Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification.
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verb is a word belonging to the part of speech that usually denotes an action (bring, read), an occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand).
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A proper or common noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. As usual, a `*' in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical.
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
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Reduplication, in linguistics, is a morphological process by which the root or stem of a word, or only part of it, is repeated.

Reduplication is used both in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc.
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Onomatopoeia (occasionally spelled onomatopœia) is a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as "click," "buzz," or "bluuuh," or animal noises
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A narrative is a concept, composed and delivered in any medium, which describes a sequence of real or unreal events. It derives from the Latin verb narrare, which means "to recount" and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning "knowing" or "skilled".
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Ewe (native name: Eʋegbe) is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana and Togo by approximately three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, stretching from eastern Ghana to western Nigeria.
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In linguistics, a register is a subset of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.
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Welayta language (vars: Wolaita, Wolaita, etc., also called Wolayitigna, Wolaitatuwa) is an Omotic language spoken in the Wolaita Zone and some parts of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region of Ethiopia.
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Yir-Yoront (several other names; see below) is a moribund Australian Aboriginal language spoken on Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. It is the traditional language of the Yir-Yoront people, most of whom now speak Torres Strait Creole.
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Finnish ( suomi   (help info ) , or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (91.
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Ewe (native name: Eʋegbe) is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana and Togo by approximately three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, stretching from eastern Ghana to western Nigeria.
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Sesotho (Sotho, Southern Sotho, or Southern Sesotho[1]) is a Bantu language spoken primarily in South Africa, where it is one the 11 official languages, and in Lesotho, where it is the national language.
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A verbum dicendi (Latin for declaratory word, which is also used) is a word that expresses speech, introduces a quotation, or marks a transition to speech which may be considered non-standard. In the field of linguistics, a verbum dicendi is also known as a quotative.
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Ewe (native name: Eʋegbe) is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana and Togo by approximately three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, stretching from eastern Ghana to western Nigeria.
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For other uses, see Ruby (disambiguation).
Ruby characters are small, annotative characters that can be placed above or to the right of a Chinese character when writing logographic languages such as Chinese or Japanese to show the pronunciation.
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Cantonese or Yue (粵語) is a major Chinese dialect group or language, a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. The exact number of Cantonese speakers is unknown due to a lack of statistics and census data.
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romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system (or none).
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Jyutping (sometimes spelled Jyutpin
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English}}} 
Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng  
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Ewe (native name: Eʋegbe) is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana and Togo by approximately three million people. Ewe is part of a cluster of related languages commonly called Gbe, stretching from eastern Ghana to western Nigeria.
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Finnish ( suomi   (help info ) , or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (91.
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An expressive loan is a loanword incorporated into the expressive system of the borrowing language, making it resemble native words or onomatopoeia.
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In grammar, a frequentative form of a word is one which indicates repeated action. The frequentative form can be considered a separate, but not completely independent word, called a frequentative.
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In Finnish grammar, the momentane is a verb aspect indicating that an occurrence is sudden and short-lived.

Finnish has a number of momentane markers; they differ in the valency and voice of the verbs they produce, but all indicate sudden, short-lived occurrences; for
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This article contains Japanese text.
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Japanese
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Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ[1]), formerly known under the French colonization as Annamese (see Annam), is the national and official language of Vietnam.
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Yoruba}}} 
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Official language of: Nigeria
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ISO 639-1: yo
ISO 639-2: yor
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Yoruba (native name èdè Yorùbá
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