The

Japanese language is the principal language of the Japonic languages, Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese dia ...

has a large 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 as ''

onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia (or rarely echoism) is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetics, phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias in English include animal noises such as Oin ...

'', these words do not just imitate sounds but also cover a much wider range of meanings; indeed, many sound-symbolic words in Japanese are for things that make no noise originally, most clearly demonstrated by .

Categories

The sound-symbolic words of Japanese can be classified into four main categories: ; : words that mimic sounds made by living things, like a dog's bark (''wan-wan''). ; : words that mimic sounds made by inanimate objects, like wind blowing or rain falling (''zā-zā''). ; : words that depict states, conditions, or manners of the external world (non-auditory senses), such as "damp" or "stealthily". ; : words that depict psychological states or bodily feelings. These divisions are not always drawn: sound-symbolism may be referred to generally as

(though strictly this refers to imitative sounds, phonomimes); phonomimes may not be distinguished as animate/inanimate, both being referred to as ''giseigo''; and both phenomimes and psychomimes may be referred to as ''gitaigo''. In Japanese grammar, sound-symbolic words primarily function as

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...

s, though they can also function as verbs (verbal adverbs) with the auxiliary verb , often in the continuous/progressive form , and as adjectives (

participle In linguistics, a participle (; abbr. ) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adject ...

) with the perfective form of this verb . Just like ideophones in many other languages, they are often introduced by a quotative complementizer . Most sound symbolic words can be applied to only a handful of verbs or adjectives. In the examples below, the classified verb or adjective is placed in square brackets.

Other types

In their ''Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar'', Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui point out several other types of sound symbolism in Japanese, that relate

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s and psychological states. For example, the nasal sound gives a more personal and speaker-oriented impression than the velars and ; this contrast can be easily noticed in pairs of

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are a ...

s such as and which both mean ''because'', but with the first being perceived as more subjective. This relationship can be correlated with phenomimes containing nasal and velar sounds: While phenomimes containing nasals give the feeling of tactuality and warmth, those containing velars tend to represent hardness, sharpness, and suddenness. Similarly, i-type adjectives that contain the fricative in the group ''shi'' tend to represent human emotive states, such as in the words , , , and . This too is correlated with those phenomimes and psychomimes containing the same fricative sound, for example and . The use of the

gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

can create a more emphatic or emotive version of a word, as in the following pairs of words: , , , and many others.

Notes

References

Sources

* * Akutsu, Satoru (1994). ''A Practical Guide to Mimetic Expressions Through Pictures''. ALC Press, . * * Hasada, Rie (2001). "Meanings of Japanese sound-symbolic emotion words". In Harkins, Jean & Anna Wierzbicka (eds.) ''Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective'' (Cognitive Linguistics Research 17). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 217–253. * * Martin, Samuel E. (1964). "Speech labels in Japan and Korea", in Dell Hymes (ed.), ''Language in Culture and Society: A reader in linguistics and anthropology.'' New York: Harper and Row. * * Ono, Shuuichi (ed.) (1989). ''A Practical Guide to Japanese-English Onomatopoeia and Mimesis''. Tokyo: Hokuseidoo. * Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui, ''Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar'', The Japan Times, 1986. . * (esp p. 153vv). *

External links

''Onomatopoeic Expressions - gitaigo and giongo''
from Namiko Abe, About.com's guide to Japanese Language
''Nihongoresources - onomatopoeia dictionary''

''The Jaded Network - SFX Sound Effects Translations Online Dictionary''
from TheJadedNetwork.Com
"'Tokyo Year Zero' Gets Under Readers' Skin"
by Alan Cheuse, '' All Things Considered''. A review of a novel that uses Japanese phonomime.
Japanese Sound effects in Manga and what they mean
originally from www.oop-ack.com

Shoko Hamano's doctoral thesis
in its entirety. {{Japanese language Sound symbolism Sound symbolism Onomatopoeia Phonaesthetics ja:音象徴#日本語の音象徴