tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 01 09:02:19 2001
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Re: onomatopeia
- From: "Sean Healy" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: onomatopeia
- Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 05:54:48 -0900
> > In English we can say something like 'The monkey said, 'Ooh-ooh-ah-ah',
>but
> > I guess in Klingon we'd have to say 'The targ made a targ noise'.
>
>jatlh targh rrrrrrrrrrrrrrghghghghghghghghgh!
>jatlh tlhIngan ha ha ha ha ha ha!
A little clarification on jatlh, please. As I understand it, in the OVS
structure, O is the person being spoken to, and what is actually being said
is placed after the OVS phrase, and usually surrounded with < >. It's just
that without anything in the O position, the above sentences jar me, and
make me want to put the utterance into the O position, but my conscious mind
tells me the above sentences are correct as is.
>By the way,
>
>on·o·mat·o·poe·ia (n-mt-p, -mät-)
>n.
>The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the
>sounds
>associated with the objects or actions they refer to. (The American
>Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Interesting. I took two linguistics classes while in college (the
entry-level class and a second-year class), and the teacher in one of them
made a clear distinction between words like 'meow' (has become an actual
word) and words like 'ugh' (has not become an actual word). The first were
referred to as onomatopoetic words, the second as onomatopoeia. I wonder if
the word is used differently by linguists in general as opposed to its usage
by English-language grammarians. Or perhaps the professor was not being as
precise as he ordinarily would, since they were lower-level classes. I also
noticed when I looked the word up that the 'o' in -'poeia' cannot be
dropped, contrary to what you would expect, considering that the vast
majority of Greek words borrowed into the English language with an 'oe' have
lost the 'o', either as a variant spelling or as the preferred spelling.
(One example: 'economics' was originally borrowed as 'oeconomics', and the
latter is still included in my dictionary - although the entry is simply
'see economics'.)
Well, this is degenerating into a discussion of linguistics in general, so
I'd better stop here.
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