Words That Go Ping: The ridiculously wonderful world of onomatopoeia - Hardcover

Lasserre, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1760632198 ISBN 13: 9781760632199

Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2019

Synopsis

If it goes 'moo' then every child knows it's a cow. If it goes 'Wham! Bam! Crash!' we're in a fast-paced comic. But what goes 'krknout'?

Barbara Lasserre takes us on a playful journey through the delightful world of words that mimic sounds. Normally relegated to children's books, cartoons and comedians, she shows how these often ancient words reveal unexpected things about the way we think, speak and act.

A book for anyone who loves playing with words.

'When it comes to the crunch, Words That Go Ping is bound to reverberate. Zipping between Norwegian kisses and Japanese silence, my brain is still humming.' - David Astle, writer, crossword maker and general word nerd

'An immensely satisfying book covering a neglected aspect of language with impeccable skill, and written in an open, flowing and humorous style.' - Susan Butler AO, inaugural editor of the Macquarie Dictionary

'Barbara Lasserre has conjured up a magical world of word mimicry. Her wondrous little book will delight all who love language.' - Richard Walsh, author and publisher

About this title

About the Author

Barbara's passion for language led to her working for many years teaching and lecturing in English and Applied Linguistics. She lived for 10 years in France, and worked and studied at the University of Poitiers. In Australia, she taught Academic and Language skills at the University New South Wales, and at the University of Technology, Sydney she was a lecturer in Language and Academic Learning. She lectured in Applied Linguistics at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, and has also lived in Syria and studied Arabic.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Words That Go Ping

The Ridiculously Wonderful World of Onomatoeia

By Barbara Lasserre

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2018 Barbara Lasserre
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-76063-219-9

Contents

1 Aargh, miaow, ker-ching, 
2 Eek, a mouse, 
3 Whoopee, 
4 Gahshunk, 
5 Yum, throb, sob, 
6 Cucurrucucú, 
7 Jabber, natter, 
8 Rattle jangle ding-dong, 
9 Woops, yikes, hmm, 
10 Huh?, 
11 Slam dunk and the Big Bang, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgements, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Aargh, miaow, ker-ching

Means like it sounds

It started when I was playing Scrabble in France many years ago. My French opponent, very pleased with himself, placed the word han. Not a French word I'd heard of, and moreover French words starting with a strong breathy h are rare. I said, 'Huh?'

Then he said, 'You know, the han a woodchopper makes when he brings the axe down.' Aha! I wouldn't have been so confused if the word had been used in context, in the woods, or with the relevant image in a comic strip or animation — then all would have become clear. That set me to wondering about words — like han — that mimic sounds directly. Are they always part of an established language system and, if so, how free are we to use or interpret them, or indeed to invent our own? Are there commonalities across various languages? These questions set me off on a track that led through a thicket of inquiry and included how these words come about, the thorny problems involved in translating them from one language to another, and the inherent issues of cultural differences and taboos. But above all, in looking for answers to questions like these, I found that there is a great deal of fun to be had with word mimicry, especially when you are free to invent your own.

In the following example, from the written account of debate in the Australian parliament (as noted in the Sydney Morning Herald), the Hansard reporter did just that — she invented her own:

One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, accusing the Labor Party of catastrophising on the subject of the government's proposed industrial reforms, enriched his Chicken Little metaphor with some actual chicken noises and pecked his microphone, which performance was valiantly recorded in Hansard thus: 'bwok bwok bekerk!'

As demonstrated here, to describe what Senator Roberts did, you could use a verb (he pecked) or you could mimic and record that sound (bwok bwok bekerk). Both pecked and bwok bwok bekerk are instances of onomatopoeia. The term originates from Greek, from onoma, onomat- ('name') plus poios ('making', from poiein 'to make'). It simply refers to a word that imitates the sound being made — as we perceive it — of the object or action that it refers to. You could describe onomatopoeic words as 'mimic words'. They are part of languages all around the globe but they are especially recognisable as words that represent sounds made by animals — for example, bow wow or woof woof, the sounds a dog supposedly makes 'in English'. We once used to put such 'sound' words in inverted commas — for example, we would write about a thing that went 'ping'. Now we tend to use italics instead, but these written signals are simply telling us that it's an onomatopoeic word.

If we compare 'a thing that goes ping' with 'a thing that goes fast', we can see that fast is operating differently, because it intensifies the verb 'goes'. You can say 'it goes' or 'it says' and follow these words with a mimic word — for example, you can say 'it went bang', but you can't say 'it went shriek'. 'To shriek' is limited to being a verb and has grammatical inflections, such as tenses (for example, past tense: 'he shrieked'). The linguistic term for this is lexification. (The lexicon is all the units in a language that have meaning, and this includes prefixes and suffixes such as un or ful.) The lexification of a word unit means having meaningful bits added to it so that it fits the grammar patterns of the established language. For instance, these bits can include adding ed to the end of a word to show that it was an action that happened in the past.

Some words are so versatile they can have a grammatical label — such as verb, noun or adverb — and also function as a mimic or an exclamation word when needed. Thus 'he banged [verb] on the table', 'you get more bang [noun] for your buck', and so on, but we can also say 'the motor went bang when we started it'. A word like bang has a sensory onomatopoeic element, because it resembles the sound it describes, and it is also an integral part of a proposition, where you are telling me what happened. Ultimately it depends grammatically on the presence of the verb 'went' to make sense, and it can be described as a complement to that verb. On its own it's simply an onomatopoeic word, and sometimes classed as an exclamation. Bang!

We imitate animal sounds from an early age. A cat says miaow and the sound imitation has become a verb: 'the cat miaowed'. However, although a dog says (or goes) woof woof, we don't normally say it woofed. We say it barked. (The history of language can give an account of how this came about.) The word go is sometimes used with sounds other than those made by living creatures, as in 'the balloon wentpop'. Here the exhaled air and the movement of the lips seem to be a natural way to represent the sound of air escaping. But what about other languages, such as Arabic, which don't pronounce p with a burst of air as English speakers do — how do they express that sound? Are they hearing what we are hearing? It's farqa'a in Arabic — no p sound at all — but nonetheless to Arabic speakers this word represents the sound of a balloon popping.

In talking about how languages are written we refer to consonants and vowels. Now here's a brief 'technical' explanation of some of the terms linguists use when they talk about consonants. This is the realm of phonetics — of sounds — not necessarily of spelling. Basically, linguists describe the sounds we make in terms of where and how those sounds are produced. For example, when we block the airstream from the mouth then release it with a burst of air, we get types of consonants that are called stops. This category includes plosives such as p, t, k and b, d, g. P, t and k are Called voiceless plosives. If you add your voice to a plosive consonant it becomes a voiced plosive. B, d and g are voiced plosives: the b in barked is a voiced plosive, as is the d in dog. But note that we pronounce the ed in barked using the unvoiced plosive t. Same thing for popped, where the p sounds are also unvoiced.

Another important group of consonants are Called fricatives. These are produced when we narrow the passage of air and audible friction occurs. Examples of fricatives are the f sound in phew, the z sound in zip and the h in hiss. F when voiced becomes v, while s when voiced becomes z. (As an aside, I don't know why snoring is conventionally rendered in English by zzzzz — we don't produce fricatives when the mouth is wide open. It's more likely that we are producing the French r sound, when the back of the tongue touches the uvula, the small lobe hanging from the back of the soft palate. But our 'vocal architecture' is as varied as our genes.) A voiced h is called a voiced glottal fricative, rarely used in English, except maybe to clear one's throat, but common in other languages, such as Finnish. I will introduce more explanations for sound production in later chapters.

Onomatopoeia adds colour to the way we express ourselves. It is a communication tool that is playful, fun, and often seems arbitrary; but the jury is out as to what governs patterns across languages. Are there rules, for example, to explain why people go aargh but don't aargh each other? What are the cultural as well as first-language influences that shape how we approach onomatopoeia?

This area is largely neglected by linguists, who call it iconism or, more generally, sound symbolism. This roughly means ways of producing symbols through language by way of sound imitations (ha ha) or sound symbolism (the 'sausage sizzle'). Some theorists include some exclamations (yummy!) and interjections (hey!) in a category of onomatopoeia, although note that the border between exclamations and interjections is very fuzzy. Others maintain that onomatopoeia cannot be classed in a traditional grammatical way — as phrases for instance — although interjections can be sentence substitutes. This means they express mental states rather than describe them, and when we hear them we have to infer what the attitude or emotion of the speaker is, and often by way of their intonation — the rise and fall and tensions in the sound they make. For example, just by saying wow I can mean 'I am totally amazed' or 'Did he really?'. In Chapter 9 I have a closer look at interjections like wow! or yuk!

Writers and poets have loved onomatopoeic words ever since humans first began to imitate sounds from the world around them. For instance, Shakespeare gave us the song of the night owl who sings to-whit, to-who. Slowly norms have developed as to how we represent sounds, to the extent that comedians use them to marked effect, often by overturning them. In Spike Milligan's 'On the Ning Nang Nong', the fun is in his play with the norms and the nonsense rhymes. Teapots don't normally hang around with cows and monkeys in the countryside, nor do they make the vibrations associated with the sound jibber. Ping is a high-pitched nasal sound, very hard to pin onto a tree. Unless, of course, the tree is made of metal and hit with a tuning fork.

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.

Now, you might ask, would it seem likely to a speaker of Uzbek that cows go bong? Probably not, because bong is so far removed from what our ears identify as a sound that a cow makes. Thus, for example, in Japanese cows say mo mo or mau mau; in French, meuh; and it's ITLμITL in Uzbek. In a majority of written languages, the sound a cow makes begins with m (exceptions include Urdu, where cows say baeh and Dutch, where it's boe). A cow that said bong would have to use a relatively forceful movement of the lips to begin the sound, whereas a cow's lowing always begins with what we transcribe as a closed-lip humming sound that increases in volume as the cow widens its mouth.

These sorts of examples tell us about the conventions that have arisen in various languages to represent sounds. They confirm the sounds we try to imitate are transcribed by way of sounds that we already use in our speech. Another term for this is 'first language filter'.

Spontaneous inventive mimicry, such as Senator Roberts' bwok bwok bekerk, is more playful and fun than conventionalised onomatopoeic terms, but it presents enormous problems for translators. The challenge, when moving from one language to another, is to retain the psychological effect intended for the audience. And one language may have words for a reality that doesn't exist in the second language, resulting in an ineffective translation. Apparently in Chinese there are fifteen onomatopoeic words that imitate laughter! In Chapter 10 I will discuss some of these testing questions for brave translators in more detail.

Polish has some wonderful onomatopoeic terms that start with colourful consonants such as z, or consonant clusters such as dz or zg. You can't resist saying these sounds. Santa Clause's sleighbells go dzyn, dzyn, machinery screeching or grinding is zgrzyt, a fire crackling is trzask, thunder rumbling is grzmot, yawning is ziew, glass breaking is brzdek, and a hen goes gdak gdac.

* * *

Comic books and graphic novels are full of onomatopoeia, and the pictures together with the words-as-sounds create a powerful impact. But how well do they translate? I began researching this by comparing French-to-English translations of five books from The Adventures of Astérix series written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo.

Whether in Switzerland, Spain or Egypt, the gallant Astérix and his band of Gauls are almost continuously at war with the Romans, so the sounds most often rendered involve those made when metal shields bump into each other: schlang in French, or clang and bong in English. These words contain a final throaty or velar (meaning sounds made by the back of the tongue against the soft palate, or velum) nasal ng, which in fact occurs more commonly in English than in French (except in the vernacular of the south-east of France, such as the area around Cannes). Hitting a wooden peg in France is poc poc — translated into English as bang bang — and punching a person is paf paf paf, which in English is biff biff biff or wham. Being hit by someone in France elicits aïe, ouille or ouap (ow, ouch or oooh in translation). Open-mouth vowels are all the go here, but when it comes to the sound of Obélix kissing a fish we find tchouic (smack). Lots of consonants for busy lips.

So far, easy to follow. But for a speaker of English, what Would kaïikaïikaïikaïi conjure up? Maybe a song in Japanese? In the world of Astérix it is apparently the noise a French dog makes when it is running with a saucepan tied to its tail. It's translated as yelpyelpyelpyelp. The word yelp is much more conventional than kaïi, the French imitation of the sound itself but, unless you encounter kaïi within the context of the comic strip, it is hard to 'hear' the sound. And there is no French verb kaïer, but in English there is to yelp. The words in both languages attempt to indicate pain and movement. In both cases, urgent movement is indicated by the repetition of the sounds. The sound kaïi has a sharp urgency to it, more so than yelp.

In any context, a translator needs to have a framework, such as a comic or a social situation, to relate to. French–English dictionaries invariably give a translation of han, our woodchopper's grunt, as harrumph or oof, not very convincing in this particular case. Moreover, each translator brings to the task his or her own idiolects — that is, their own personal way of talking — and this influences how they translate such sounds. Also, sometimes pieces of essential contextual information, such as the age and gender of the person speaking, are suppressed in the target language (the language into which the translation is being made). So, for instance, an 85-year-old's version of ouch or yeow is not likely to be the same as that of an 18-year-old, who'd be more likely to say fuuuuck.

As we've seen with Astérix, onomatopoeia features frequently in fighting contexts. In the Batman comics, for instance, words like kapow, thunk, whamm, zgruppp and zzzzwap tell a hero's tale and have been called 'Bat-fight words'. Zlopp goes with an uppercut to the chin, and thunk, a kick to the chest. But we also encounter in Batman crunch-eth and ow-eth, which I frankly find puzzling. Is the former 'kind of like a crunch'? Is the latter the sound of someone recoiling from a blow?

By using newly created sounds, you can signal to others that you belong to the group-in-the-know. Thus, for example, the sound kerching in English is a relatively recent coinage, mimicking the sound of an old-fashioned cash register. It indicates that someone is getting a lot of money. But today, with cash registers (tills) obsolete, it is used ironically by some to provide a frisson of recognition — for those who are old enough to understand the reference.

In another example, a newspaper report tells the story of a newly invented phrase in Indonesia, om telolet om. According to the report, it is 'the onomatopoeic [phrase] for the uniquely melodic sound of the horns some intercity bus drivers in Java have installed'. The phrase became an obsession in Indonesia after a video was uploaded onto Facebook of children lustily beseeching drivers to honk their horns in Jepara, a regency in Central Java. Again, it became an in-group sign or code for the children. Slang operates in the same way, as do emoticons and text-messaging shortcuts like LOL.

Similarly, showing your familiarity with certain comic books can be a sign of belonging to a community of readers. We have the feeling of sharing an environment, of having the same reference points in a culture. Words such as splat and kazam are like sensory message sticks that convey states and emotions corresponding to the scenes we are looking at. This is similar to the way people used to say 'no problemo' or 'yadda yadda' to indicate they were fans of the TV shows The Simpsons or Seinfeld.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1760632198
• ISBN 13: 9781760632199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208