Talk:Ideophone

Cited[edit]

The lead of the december 2004 version of this article was cited in the academic journal Oceanic Linguistics. The author suggests that 'one indication that the term "ideophone" has come of age is that it has recently (December 2004) been added to Wikipedia' (Bradshaw 2006:53). Full ref:

Bradshaw, Joel. 2006. Grammatically Marked Ideophones in Numbami and Jabêm, Oceanic Linguistics, 45, 1, 53-63.

Tones of Ideophones[edit]

Perhaps mention should be made of the fact that ideophones are often phonetically different from ordinary words. Among other things, for example, they have tones, e.g. whoops! (rising tone), boing! (level tone), aha! (high-low fall on the second syllable), and so on. Kanjuzi (talk) 18:27, 7 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Onomatopoeia vs Ideophones[edit]

How is this different from onomatopoeia? This article does reference onomatopoeia, but it doesn't distinguish itself from onomatopoeia. There should not exist a separate English article for every language's word for onomatopoeia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.71.211.71 (talk) 01:10, 12 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It does distinguish ideophones from onomatopoeia. As it says, ideophones representing sounds (like "splash!") are only one type; but there are other types too, such as Chichewa dzandi-dzandi, representing the wobbly way someone walks when drunk, or D'oh!, representing the idea that someone has done something unusually stupid. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:12, 12 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Non-(less?)-onomatopoeic English ideophones[edit]

I suspect English has at least a few ideophones that are not onomatopoeic. Potential examples that come to mind are words like zigzag, which uses its sound and possibly even the shape of the letter Z to suggest back and forth motion, even though zigzagging things don't make a similar sound. Others are lickety-split and hoity-toity, in which the sounds evoke a sense of quickness and pompousness, respectively, though don't seem to be imitations of any sounds made by what they describe. Rriegs (talk) 21:34, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Good examples. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:04, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ideophones in Western languages[edit]

it might be a good idea to delete this sentence "they are claimed to be relatively uncommon in Western languages". This is quite outdated given current research on ideophones. There are detailed studies about Estonian, Basque, and Turkish ideophones that demostrated that some "Western" languages do have very rich ideophone inventories. Just a few references.... Jendraschek, Gerd. 2001. Semantic and structural properties of Turkish ideophones. Turkic Languages 5: 88-103. Jendraschek, Gerd. 2002. The struggle against monolingualism. Journal of Universal Language 3:55-75. Jendraschek, Gerd. 2002. Semantische Eigenschaften von Ideophonen im Türkischen. München: LINCOM Europa (Edition Linguistik, 30). Mikone, E. 2001. Ideophones in the Balto-Finnic languages. F.K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz (eds.). Ideophones. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. 2017. Basque ideophones from a typological perspective. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / Revue canadienne de linguistique 62.2: 1-21. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. 2019. Towards a semantic typological classification of motion ideophones: The motion semantic grid. K. Akita & P. Pardeshi (eds.), Ideophones, Mimetics, and Expressives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 137-166. Iia-iia (talk) 00:12, 20 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sourcing the claim would be better than removing it. 46.114.37.186 (talk) 08:41, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

examples subheaders are links to languages[edit]

is this necessary? no other page I've seen does this. Binarycat64 (talk) 00:02, 8 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Rewrite?[edit]

Based on Sasse's article Syntactic Categories and Subcategories in Syntax, edited by Kiss and Alexiadou 2015, English does not have ideophones. Some have suggested above that the difference between onomatopoeia and ideophone is now unclear. Zigzag, for example, is an example of onomatopoeia. It can, for instance, be used as a verb, but ideophones make up their own part of speech, i.e., they are not verbs. The formal difference is that ideophones lack verbal (or other) particles unlike in the example 'The rabbit zigzagged across the meadow' - we see from the -ed suffix that this is a verb. But some languages can break the pattern and say something like 'And then the rabbit zigzag zigzag across the meadow'. Сабріель (talk) 06:10, 29 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Haha, wat? The notion of "particles" comes from African languages where ideophones were described first. -ed is not a particle in that sense, because it is morphosyntactically fused. 80.152.206.197 (talk) 08:25, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The most likely reason why zig-zag may be considered not a word is the voiced sibilant. As a rule, initial s is voiceless in English (opposite to German), even in loan words (just as English h is not viable in French, for example).

It may be notable that in the alphabetic tradition we have wikt:שש, wikt:𐤔𐤔 for "6", which is one of the few words that is legitimately compared to other language families (debatable). As unary tally counting is quite frequent for small numbers in the worlds writing systems, especially in Egyptian Hieroglyphs as well as Hieratic, the token 𐤔𐤔 looks like a tally mark, simply speaking. The meaning of 𐤔 shin "tooth" is well compatible with wikt:sawtooth, German wikt:Sägezahn etc. SÄGE 80.152.206.197 (talk) 09:10, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Reduplication[edit]

It could be interesting to discuss why reduplication is so common for ideophones - is the sense of fun important? Cerulean Depths (talk) 22:04, 25 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]