Not to be confused with idiophone, a class of musical instruments.
Words evoking ideas of specific sounds or other sensations
A sculpture demonstrating an example of Japanese sound symbolism, "jaan!" (ジャーン)
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 syntactic category 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. They may include sounds that deviate from the language's phonological system, imitating—often in a repetitive manner—sounds of movement, animal noises, bodily sounds, noises made by tools or machines, and the like.[1]
While English does have ideophonic or onomatopoetic expressions, it does not contain a proper class of ideophones because any English onomatopoeic word can be included in one of the classical categories. For example, la-di-da functions as an adjective while others, such as zigzag, may function as a verb, adverb or adjective, depending on the clausal context. In the sentence 'The rabbit zigzagged across the meadow", the verb zigzag takes the past –ed verb ending. In contrast, the reconstructed example *"The rabbit zigzag zigzag across the meadow" emulates an ideophone but is not idiomatic to English.[2]
Dictionaries of languages like Japanese, Korean, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu list thousands of ideophones.[3] Sometimes ideophones are called phonosemantic to indicate that it is not a grammatical word class in the traditional sense of the word (like verb or noun), but rather a lexical class based on the special relationship between form and meaning exhibited by ideophones. In the discipline of linguistics, ideophones have sometimes been overlooked or treated as a subgroup of interjections.[4]
^Sasse, Hans-Jürgen (2015). "Syntactic categories and subcategories". In Kiss and Alexiadou (ed.). Syntax--Theory and Analysis: An International Handbook. De Gruyter. pp. 158–217. ISBN 9783110202762.
^"Linguistics. How do ideophones and onomatopoeia work in English?". linguistics.stackexchange.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
^Akita, Kimi (2009). A Grammar of Sound-Symbolic Words in Japanese: Theoretical Approaches to Iconic and Lexical Properties of Japanese Mimetics. Kobe University. Archived from the original on January 4, 2014.
^Sasse, Hans-Jürgen (2015). "Syntactic categories and subcategories". In Kiss and Alexiadou (ed.). Syntax--Theory and Analysis: An International Handbook. De Gruyter. pp. 158–217. ISBN 9783110202762.
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...
This article is list of ideophones in Basque language based on Ibarretxe-Antuñano's (2006) trilingual dictionary Hizkuntzaren Bihotzean - Euskal Onomatopeien...
a cat. An ideophone is "a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery". Unlike onomatopoeia, an ideophone refers to words...
service based in Tokyo, Japan. "Niconico" or "nikoniko" is the Japanese ideophone for smiling. As of 2021, Niconico is the 34th most-visited website in...
71. ISBN 9780810913004. "René Magritte - Les mots et les images". The Ideophone. Retrieved 25 July 2017. "René Magritte - La Clé des Songes". Artnet....
open class due to the productivity of ideophones. Further, "[i]n the vast majority of cases, however, ideophones perform an adverbial function and are...
beautiful purely in terms of its sound without regard for its semantics Ideophone – words that evoke an idea in sound Linguistic relativity, and the theme...
materializes "The Bells", a heavily onomatopoeic poem Bling-bling, an ideophone for ostentatious accessories Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias Old MacDonald...
Basquisation Languages of France Languages of Spain Aquitanian language List of ideophones in Basque Wiktionary: Swadesh list of Basque words Basque literature (in...
but other vegetables or fruits can also be used. Kkakduk-kkakduk is an ideophone related to dicing/cubing. Kimchi made with radish that are not diced into...
('words of saying') are a method of integrating onomatopoeic words and ideophones into grammar. Sometimes, things are named from the sounds they make. In...
Dingemanse, Mark (January 25, 2008). "The etymology of Zotero". The Ideophone. Retrieved 2008-12-01. "Reuters Says George Mason University Is Handing...
creamier and with unfiltered floating rice grains. The word dongdong is an ideophone for a small object floating by. Ihwa-ju ("pear-blossom wine") is so named...
character. The name "Gudetama" is derived from two parts: the first is the ideophone gudegude (Japanese: ぐでぐで), which is used to evoke the impression of something...
between them on morphological and syntactical grounds. Tamil has many ideophones that act as adverbs indicating the way the object in a given state "says"...
has three click consonants, but these are only used in interjections or ideophones, and tend only to be used by the older generation, and are therefore falling...
formatives; the rest (nouns, pronouns, some relatives, some adverbs, all ideophones, conjunctives, and interjectives) are complete words themselves which...
inventory of sound symbolic or mimetic words, known in linguistics as ideophones. Such words are found in written as well as spoken Japanese. Known popularly...
sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "wow!", or ideophones like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have...
"No Name": Ase Mou 'name none'. Although many languages have a class of ideophones with distinctive phonology, Numbami is unusual in having a morphological...
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