Concept

Onomatopoeia

Summary
Onomatopoeia is the use or creation of a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as oink, meow (or miaow), roar, and chirp. Onomatopoeia can differ by language: it conforms to some extent to the broader linguistic system; hence the sound of a clock may be expressed as tick tock in English, tic tac in Spanish and Italian (shown in the picture), in Mandarin, kachi kachi in Japanese, or tik-tik in Hindi. The English term comes from the Ancient Greek compound onomatopoeia, 'name-making', composed of onomato- 'name' and -poeia 'making'. Thus, words that imitate sounds can be said to be onomatopoeic or onomatopoetic. In the case of a frog croaking, the spelling may vary because different frog species around the world make different sounds: Ancient Greek brekekekex koax koax (only in Aristophanes' comic play The Frogs) probably for marsh frogs; English ribbit for species of frog found in North America; English verb croak for the common frog. Some other very common English-language examples are hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, moo, and splash. Machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia: honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. In speaking of a mishap involving an audible arcing of electricity, the word zap is often used (and its use has been extended to describe non-auditory effects of interference). Human sounds sometimes provide instances of onomatopoeia, as when mwah is used to represent a kiss. For animal sounds, words like quack (duck), moo (cow), bark or woof (dog), roar (lion), meow/miaow or purr (cat), cluck (chicken) and baa (sheep) are typically used in English (both as nouns and as verbs). Some languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that the process is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia.
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Related publications (1)

Sound Pattern Matching for Automatic Prosodic Event Detection

Hervé Bourlard, Philip Neil Garner, Milos Cernak, Afsaneh Asaei, Pierre-Edouard Jean Charles Honnet

Prosody in speech is manifested by variations of loudness, exaggeration of pitch, and specific phonetic variations of prosodic segments. For example, in the stressed and unstressed syllables, there are differences in place or manner of articulation, vowels ...
Idiap2016
Related concepts (16)
Phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme (ˈfoʊniːm) is a unit of phone that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west of England, the sound patterns sɪn (sin) and sɪŋ (sing) are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /n/, for another phoneme, /ŋ/. Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair.
Vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice).
Ideophone
An ideophone is any word in a certain word class evoking ideas in sound imitation (onomatopoeia) to express an action, manner, or property. The class of ideophones is the least common cross-linguistically; it occurs mostly in African, Australian, and Amerindian languages, and sporadically elsewhere. It is globally the only known word class exotic to English. Ideophones resemble interjections but are unclassifiable as such owing to their special phonetic or derivational characteristics, and based on their syntactic function within the sentence.
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