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Onomatopoeia (occasionally spelled omomatopœia) is a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates the sound it is describing, and thus suggests its source object, such as “bang” or “click”, or animal such as “moo”, “oink”, “quack” or “meow”.

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Onomatopoeic words exist in every language, although they are different in each. For example:

In Latin, tuxtax was the equivalent of “bam” or “whack” and was meant to imitate the sound of blows landing.
In Ancient Greek, koax was used as the sound of a frog croaking.
In Dutch, kukeleku indicates the characteristic sound of cocks.
In Korean, meong meong is onomatopoeia for the sound of a dog barking.
In Chinese, wang wang is the sound of a dog barking.
In Japanese, doki doki is used to indicate the (speeding up of the) beating of a heart (and thus excitement).
Whereas in Hindi, dhadak (pronounced /ˈd̪əɖək/) is the word for a person's heartbeat, indicative of the sound of one single beat.
In Haitian Creole, beep imitates the sound of a collision (ex. a car crash).
In Turkish, hapşurmak is the verb for to sneeze, based on the sound "hapshoo" made by a person who sneezes.
Sometimes onomatopoeic words can seem to have a tenuous relationship with the object they describe. Native speakers of a given language might never question the relationship; however, because words for the same basic sound can differ considerably between languages, non-native speakers might be confused by the idiomatic words of another language. For example, the sound a dog makes is bow-wow (or woof-woof) in English, wau-wau in German, ouah-ouah in French, gaf-gaf in Russian, hav-hav in Hebrew, wan-wan, bau-bau, or kyan-kyan in Japanese, guau-guau in Spanish,bau-bau in Italian, vov-vov in Danish, woef woef [as English woof] or waf waf in Dutch and hau-hau in Finnish and Polish.

Some animals are named after the sounds they make, especially birds such as the cuckoo and chickadee. In Tamil, the word for crow is Kaakaa. This practice is especially common in certain languages such as Māori and therefore in names of animals borrowed from these languages.

2007-02-16 08:33:48 · answer #1 · answered by ash 3 · 0 0

onomatopoeia - 1 : the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it

2007-02-16 03:50:49 · answer #2 · answered by Jennifer B 3 · 1 0

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