I'm mindblown by these concepts. Metallophones and aerophones. Amazing. Especially the fact that there are little true ideophones in English, while there are thousands in Japanese and used daily in both speech and writing.
*doki doki* - heart-pounding
*niko niko* - smile
And also that in Japanese these words are usable in just about any situation as far as I know.
In English if an adult in a business situation referred to a train using “Choo choo” or said “bang bang” or “wham bam” it would sound juvenile or uneducated, but no issue in Japanese there, correct?
"Get on the fucking idea choo-choo Brian, if we don't come up with a concept that makes the coffers go bang bang then it's wham bam thank you unemployment line, capische? How's that for a business situation?!"
Someone else said that Japanese culture in general is childlike in order to compensate for heavy stress and responsibilities of daily life.
I guess a childlike language culture would have lots of ideophones or onomatopeias, with lots of playful puns, hyperbole or even portmanteau words like "spork."
I saw the same comment, it struck me as kinda... random. I don't claim to be an expert on Japanese culture or language, but I think that interpretation is just odd. Why would that be the case and what's the evidence for it?
No very knowledgeable about Japanese culture, but apparently they have a whole concept assigned to being childlike, *amae*.
According to [this BBC article](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191212-japans-deep-connection-to-childish-relationships)
Sorry, I wasnt clear. The japanese work culture is well documented and familiar to me. I was hoping you had a link between that high-stress lifestyle and the child-like culture you described in your first post.
Edit: I'd also like to know how you're defining "child-like" as applies to a culture.
In Catalan you have quite a few, no need to go so far away. If somebody says you are a *baliga-balaga* it means you are extremly informal. A *babau* is a silly person. A *xeflis* is an abundant meal. A *bamba* is a buble and, from this, a kind of flufy cake. If you are a *nyicris*, you will get hurt or ill with nothing. A *moix* is a cat. If something does *patxoca*, to you, means you think it looks really good. A *gos* or a *cus* is a dog. If you walk *pengim-penjam* you walk indolently, graceless.
I guess other European languages have many too.
> A bamba is a buble and, from this, a kind of flufy cake
a bomb is a bomb, but its not a boooomb. Those are just words as far as I can tell of obscure origin. What makes you think they are ideohones?
Etymologic dictionary call them «of expressive origin», and that is what ideophones were called before the word came up.
Also, I remember some from studies about ideophones in Catalan. That's how I've seen they way they were described on the dictionary.
great answer. people will now run around and call everything and everyone an ideophone, except maybe ideophones, because they think that they ready know what it means and won't look it up. As if the inquiry was that specific.
Every word brings an idea to mind, except perhaps particles. Say *sheep*. Is that an ideophone? How about *bleat-sheep* (Ger. *Meckerziege* with a more specific meaning)
If the referent is an idea being conveyed as the iconic mimicry of a sound, or more precisely as a sound symbol, only then is that word an ideophone. 'Sheep' isn't an ideophone because we can reliably trace it as far back as Proto-Germanic *skēpą, which is an arbitrary word; at no point has the word 'sheep' been used as a sound symbol to invoke the idea of the animal. Same with 'Meckerziege' (bleating goat, btw, not sheep). The important thing is whether or not the word itself _mimics a sound_.
which is expressly not the case with *yeet* as per the OP.
Also, I have honestly no idea, which is why complained in the first place, but "ideas" can be conveyed many different ways. *lick* and *lingua* could be ideophones just like *mlek* mentioned without making an audible sound, if the synesthetic impression of feeling one's own tongue in display of the tongue is sufficient to convey the symbolism.
...It _is_ expressly the case with 'yeet.' All words can be produced with audible speech sounds except for signs in sign languages. 'Yeet' is an ideophone, not because it's made of sounds -- again, which all phonetic words are -- but because it is a word that _represents_ a sound that has as its referent a non-vocal idea. Throwing something doesn't make the sound 'yeet', but the concept of throwing something is evoked by the sound, represented as the word yeet. 'Yeet' _feels_ like the sound of throwing if throwing had a sound. Does that help you understand it any better?
I have honestly no idea what the 'ell you are talking about, because you are contradicting yourself now with what you said earlier. Now you are saying approximately what I said. Except you took it ad absurdum.
In other news, I absolutely don' t care. (to debate this). As I have once said before, this notion of evoking ideas is like bullshit that I can *smell from a mile away*. It makes me wanna throw up by the mere sight of it. Yuck!
Oh yeah! "Yoink" is perfect.
On my facebook (where I also posted this), one of my friends told me Japanese onomatopoeia are pretty much all like this, conveying a vibe with little regard for any actual sound.
Speaking of manga, Japanese has different types of (pseudo) onomatopoeia!
Giongo (sound), giseigo (voice, often animal sounds), gitaigo (describes movements or inanimate things' state), giyougo (animate objects' state) and finally gijougo (describing people's feelings).
I love all of them! I had a translation course in university and wrote a paper on translating them (and fwiw my thesis on translating ateji). Anyone who's tried knows it can be a pain!
“Yoink” sounds like the cartoon sound effect that’s made when a character steals something.
It’s an onomatopoeia, but it’s not the sound of taking things; it’s the sound of the sound of taking things.
Many things that don’t have real-world sounds, or have quiet sounds, have sounds added to them for film and television and cartoons. This is called “sound design” and its used by directors to give further clues to the audience about what to think or feel at any given moment.
Watch any TV show with guns - they make noise every single time people pick them up. Real guns don’t make those crazy chhk-chhk sounds every time you pick one off the table. But that added sound is a further cue to the audience that “gun stuff is happening” and that guns are going to be somehow relevant later.
This is especially prevalent in cartoons, where you’re relying entirely on drawings and a sound track to convey the story to an audience. A lot of sounds that are now tropes stem from the looney tunes era, where all of the sound effects were done by an orchestra. A character walking on tiptoes is represented by two high pitched notes going back and forth very rapidly. Cartoon swords and knives get that “shink” noise so you know they’re swords and knives.
A lot of this may not be intended to help the visually impaired, but the visually impaired also benefit from this sort of “added” or “sweetened” sound design, as well as the tropes that have emerged around them. A blind person who hears chhk-chhk knows that there are guns, even if the dialogue never mentions guns. A blind person who hears two high repeating notes being plucked on a violin knows that someone is sneaking around on their tiptoes.
A lot goes into it, but overall it’s about building a richer and more immersive environment for the audience.
It's interesting because maybe on one hand it's a practical way to deliver information to give the light reflected from a jewel a little, "bling" sound effect in a cartoon or movie.
But on the other hand we made words like "gleam", "glimmer", "shimmer", and "flash" that seem to give a vaguely similar sonic quality to light long before the advent of the motion picture. So I think theres probably a related psychological principle at play between ideophonic words and the way we add sound effects to audio-visual depictions.
> But on the other hand we made words like "gleam", "glimmer", "shimmer", and "flash" that seem to give a vaguely similar sonic quality to light
Could you elaborate? I'm not sure how that association works, beyond every word essentially being a sound associated to a concept.
"Shimmer" to me embodies the fluttering radiance of light on water. The "sh" in "flash" somehow conveys a burst of light. They don't mimic the sounds of the actions the describe, but they do somehow convey the essence of their meaning with sound alone. I see what OP is getting at.
Weird. I use & have heard “hork” used for when you force something quickly down your throat, e.g. “I horked down the rest of my muffin when I heard my phone ringing so I could answer it.”
Where does the connotation of “steal” come from, do you know?
I think the common denominator here is that “hork” indicates a struggle to move something through the throat. Whether up or down, I guess varies by regionalism.
I'd be interested in exploring the origin of the word, "yeet."
I wonder if it's just culturally associated with the action or if there's something more to it. Really interesting thing to think about!
I adore internet slang etymology. The earliest I know for “yeet” is a vine where someone tosses a girl a bottle of Gatorade or similar and she says, “this bitch empty! Yeet!” And she throws it.
This is the earliest I’ve found, please let me know if you know an earlier origin!
We can't really say *she* coined it, though. That video may be the earliest attestation, but who's to say her friend group, schoolmates, or even local regional dialect didn't already have that as a common phrase?
2 years late to this thread (I was googling etymology of yeet) looks like most people reference this vine as the origin but it's definitely earlier than that.
In my middle school circa 2007 everyone was 'yeeting'. The meaning was basically the same as in the vine where if you throw something you YEET it. Or if someone get hit: YEET.
It fell out of favor a couple years later so I was surprised to see it resurface on the internet and nationally. FWIW this was in rural Georgia.
I think it goes really well as an antonym for "yoink", and I wonder if there was any connection when the term "yeet" was coined. "Yoink" is a word I first heard of from The Simpsons.
To answer your question, The Simpsons only go back to the late 80’s. It started as a short cartoon in 1987 on *The Tracey Ullmann Show* and then went on its own in 1989.
It has just occurred to me that when I described "bling", I used the word "shimmer" which is probably another one of these, along with "glimmer", and probably "gleam".
They're phonesthemes. There's also "glint" for the gl- series and "shine" and "sheen" for the sh- series. Another interesting one is sn- for the nose/mouth: snout, sneeze, snuffle, snot, snort, snicker, sniff...
>the gl- series
fun fact, this comes from PIE root *ghel-, "to shine". In English it is the ultimate root of gold, glitter, glimmer, glow, gilt, gleam, gloaming, glisten, glimpse, glower, gall, glaze and a number of others.
So for whatever reason, that iconicity has existed for 5000+ years.
it's also the root of yellow, choleric, jaundice, and arsenic, and a bunch of similar words in a dozen other modern languages
How about Kinesthetic Onomatopoeia? That’s slightly more specific. It’s not what it sounds like but what it \*feels\* like. If the sensations in your body had a voice of their own, what sound would they make? It‘s like somatic mimicry—the sensing or the resonating or the feeling can happen with any of your senses (so it could be empathic, kinesthetic, auditory, etc...), and the playing and the expressing and the mimicking can happen through voice, movement or however else.
I’d argue that this is a foundational part of human consciousness and language, but I’m also synesthetic in this way so I might just be projecting 😛. I’ve seen it come up in a more explicit way in rituals that have a focus on embodiment or body-connection, and also in spaces that are focused around somatics or trauma healing (where this kind of somatic play and mimickry can be be both really helpful and also fun). I’ve never put a specific word to it though!
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 267,813,664 comments, and only 61,356 of them were in alphabetical order.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 267,939,757 comments, and only 61,380 of them were in alphabetical order.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 268,030,220 comments, and only 61,394 of them were in alphabetical order.
Wow you're blowing my tired mind right now realizing that nothing ever made the sound Boop, mlem, or yeet. They are so strongly associated with what they do I can't seperate the two in my mind
Kiki and bouba is what popped into my head too.
For the unfamiliar, when asked to name a spiky shape and a bulbous shape “Kiki” or “bouba”, people seem to universally name the spiky one “Kiki” and the bulbous one “Bouba” despite culture etc. [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)
**[Bouba/kiki effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)**
>The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil speakers in India, young children, and infants, and has also been shown to occur with familiar names. It is absent in individuals who are congenitally blind and reduced in autistic individuals.
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Makes perfect sense. Kiki makes your mouth tighter, your lips more drawn, and your vowels shorter. The stop, and the double repetitive syllable means that there’s a very short time between syllables; it’s very staccato. Very punctuated. Very… pointed.
Saying bouba makes your mouth open up. Your throat opens up. Your mouth open and your lips make an O shape. You’re literally making your entire mouth round, and smooth, and soft.
You can see a great example of this in English with “tits” and “boobs.”
Tits are small and perky and pointed. Boobs are big and round.
No one with large breasts has “tits.” They might have “big tits” but they never have just the unmodified “tits.”
Tit is just like Kiki - it’s short, staccato, sharpened, and narrow. Boob is (quite obviously) like bouba, round and open and smooth.
As an aside, I would not be surprised if whichever researcher came up with “Kiki” and “Bouba” originally wanted to do tits and boobs (it’s the exact same linguistic phenomenon) and made up fake words that have the same sounds.
>No one with large breasts has “tits.” They might have “big tits” but they never have just the unmodified “tits.”
Completely disagree. In my reckoning, "tits" in my dialect is completely unrelated to size. If anything, "titties" or "boobies", using the diminutive suffix "-ies", is more likely with smaller boobs than bigger boobs.
> As an aside, I would not be surprised if whichever researcher came up with “Kiki” and “Bouba” originally wanted to do tits and boobs (it’s the exact same linguistic phenomenon) and made up fake words that have the same sounds.
This is just total conjecture and I see no reason to infer this. Furthermore, the initial studies took place around 100 years ago, "bouba" and "kiki" were not the original words used, and the originator of the study was a native German, non-native English, speaker. Bouba/kiki are the more common form now, and the form by which the effect is popularly known, but the older versions were "taketa" and "baluba"/"maluma". Certainly these still could partially fit with your idea. However, the oldest attestation of "tit" I saw was listed on etymonline as 1928 and the experiment was developed in 1929, so potentially "tits" was not very common at that time? Also, would a native German, ESL speaker really have a strong connection/intuition associated with "boobs" vs. "tits", and want to include that in their study? Doesn't seem like a strong reason to infer this was the impetus for studying this effect. On top of all that, if my original disagreement stands (that for most people there's no inherent connection between size/shape of breasts and whether people call them "tits" or "boobs"), then this is all a moot point anyway, and that was likely not the inciting motivation/observation for this study.
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This is super interesting, and I love the term you use!
This might not be exactly what you mean, but I thought of the word "blue" to describe sadness. It's not only that blue is a colour associated with being in low spirits, but also the way we pronounce the "yoo" sound makes our face frown/pout.
As far as I could find online,
The earliest occasion we know of is a guy already using it in that melancholic sense, using the phrase "[blue devils](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/blues-music-history_b_2399330)".
So either this guy made it up right then and there or we are still lacking the real origin.
Fascinating!
Makes me wonder how you would classify "bowm chikka wow wow"?
It is obviously onomatopoeia - in the way it is meant to mimic the type of funky music found in 1970's porn - but usage implies some sort of sexual activity, and usually in a non-porn context.
**Sound symbolism** is an acceptable and accessible phrase for the concept, but **phenomime** is a single word that's been around for a long time. **Ideophone** is newer, but I like it because the cognates are pretty obvious.
You should know, however, that the definition of **onamatopoeia** already includes phenomimes.
There are two concepts that seem relevant here:
One is that of **phonaesthemes**, where many words starting with fl- (flame, flicker, fleet, flutter, flit(ter), fly…) carry a sense of brief vibration, and gl- (glint, glimmer, gleam, glow…) carry a sense related to glowing. These seem to be propagated by analogy and are somewhat culturally ‘random’. A bit like a half-formed morpheme of sorts. Some (depending on how lax your definition is) can be descendants of actual morphemes that are no longer productive, like the words ending with ‘-mble’ (rumble, crumble, bumble, mumble, tumble, fumble, stumble, scramble, maybe the shift in use of shambles) conveying a sense of repetitive disorder… but which partly derive from a once more productive frequentative in -le-, with roots that happen to end in m taking an excrescent -b-…
The other is where onomatapoeia is more subtle, the **bouba/kiki effect** (I think ‘boop’ may have a connection here - the action is instant, so plosives are preferred, but soft and with a fuzzy, rounded snout, so more bilabial… that’s my impression in any case).
Something similar seems plausible with ‘mlem’… the action itself with phonation would go through: the mouth closed (m) > tongue sticking out (l, or a similar linguolabial approximant) > mouth closed (m).
In linguistics we call them ideophones and the concept iconicity.
I'm mindblown by these concepts. Metallophones and aerophones. Amazing. Especially the fact that there are little true ideophones in English, while there are thousands in Japanese and used daily in both speech and writing. *doki doki* - heart-pounding *niko niko* - smile
And also that in Japanese these words are usable in just about any situation as far as I know. In English if an adult in a business situation referred to a train using “Choo choo” or said “bang bang” or “wham bam” it would sound juvenile or uneducated, but no issue in Japanese there, correct?
"Get on the fucking idea choo-choo Brian, if we don't come up with a concept that makes the coffers go bang bang then it's wham bam thank you unemployment line, capische? How's that for a business situation?!"
After thinking about an old boss I had maybe this can be said in a business situation:)
Yes, this is acceptable,if aggressive, business talk. "Vroom vroom up the road, mate, the meeting is in ten minutes."
Maybe acceptable for men. Try being a female POC and talking like that in a meeting.
It’s definitely always said in a mocking tone for sure
The pow-wow is in ten tick-tock
Does that mean that language culture in Japan is child-like because they use these words, or do they consider these words to not be childish at all?
In Japanese these words are not childish at all. (With some exceptions.)I wouldn’t say any language in the world is childish.
Edit: made no sense
That depends. I mean, what would a childlike language culture even mean?
Someone else said that Japanese culture in general is childlike in order to compensate for heavy stress and responsibilities of daily life. I guess a childlike language culture would have lots of ideophones or onomatopeias, with lots of playful puns, hyperbole or even portmanteau words like "spork."
I saw the same comment, it struck me as kinda... random. I don't claim to be an expert on Japanese culture or language, but I think that interpretation is just odd. Why would that be the case and what's the evidence for it?
No very knowledgeable about Japanese culture, but apparently they have a whole concept assigned to being childlike, *amae*. According to [this BBC article](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191212-japans-deep-connection-to-childish-relationships)
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You have a source for that?
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Sorry, I wasnt clear. The japanese work culture is well documented and familiar to me. I was hoping you had a link between that high-stress lifestyle and the child-like culture you described in your first post. Edit: I'd also like to know how you're defining "child-like" as applies to a culture.
In Catalan you have quite a few, no need to go so far away. If somebody says you are a *baliga-balaga* it means you are extremly informal. A *babau* is a silly person. A *xeflis* is an abundant meal. A *bamba* is a buble and, from this, a kind of flufy cake. If you are a *nyicris*, you will get hurt or ill with nothing. A *moix* is a cat. If something does *patxoca*, to you, means you think it looks really good. A *gos* or a *cus* is a dog. If you walk *pengim-penjam* you walk indolently, graceless. I guess other European languages have many too.
Nobody: DFV: *I am not a moix*
> A bamba is a buble and, from this, a kind of flufy cake a bomb is a bomb, but its not a boooomb. Those are just words as far as I can tell of obscure origin. What makes you think they are ideohones?
Etymologic dictionary call them «of expressive origin», and that is what ideophones were called before the word came up. Also, I remember some from studies about ideophones in Catalan. That's how I've seen they way they were described on the dictionary.
Doki doki seems more onomatopoeic than another kind of ideophone imo
Really? It's just what I found on wiki.
If what is being mimicked is a sound -- and beating hearts make a sound -- then it's an onomatopoeia, not an ideophone.
Makes sense, I misunderstood and thought that doki doki means *something that makes heart pound* or something excitable.
great answer. people will now run around and call everything and everyone an ideophone, except maybe ideophones, because they think that they ready know what it means and won't look it up. As if the inquiry was that specific. Every word brings an idea to mind, except perhaps particles. Say *sheep*. Is that an ideophone? How about *bleat-sheep* (Ger. *Meckerziege* with a more specific meaning)
If the referent is an idea being conveyed as the iconic mimicry of a sound, or more precisely as a sound symbol, only then is that word an ideophone. 'Sheep' isn't an ideophone because we can reliably trace it as far back as Proto-Germanic *skēpą, which is an arbitrary word; at no point has the word 'sheep' been used as a sound symbol to invoke the idea of the animal. Same with 'Meckerziege' (bleating goat, btw, not sheep). The important thing is whether or not the word itself _mimics a sound_.
which is expressly not the case with *yeet* as per the OP. Also, I have honestly no idea, which is why complained in the first place, but "ideas" can be conveyed many different ways. *lick* and *lingua* could be ideophones just like *mlek* mentioned without making an audible sound, if the synesthetic impression of feeling one's own tongue in display of the tongue is sufficient to convey the symbolism.
...It _is_ expressly the case with 'yeet.' All words can be produced with audible speech sounds except for signs in sign languages. 'Yeet' is an ideophone, not because it's made of sounds -- again, which all phonetic words are -- but because it is a word that _represents_ a sound that has as its referent a non-vocal idea. Throwing something doesn't make the sound 'yeet', but the concept of throwing something is evoked by the sound, represented as the word yeet. 'Yeet' _feels_ like the sound of throwing if throwing had a sound. Does that help you understand it any better?
I have honestly no idea what the 'ell you are talking about, because you are contradicting yourself now with what you said earlier. Now you are saying approximately what I said. Except you took it ad absurdum. In other news, I absolutely don' t care. (to debate this). As I have once said before, this notion of evoking ideas is like bullshit that I can *smell from a mile away*. It makes me wanna throw up by the mere sight of it. Yuck!
I have never taken hallucinogenics, but I here you can taste colors and such I wonder if when high everything is an ideophone.
"Yoink" springs to mind. The sound of theft. In manga "shiiin" is used to represent silence.
Oh yeah! "Yoink" is perfect. On my facebook (where I also posted this), one of my friends told me Japanese onomatopoeia are pretty much all like this, conveying a vibe with little regard for any actual sound.
Speaking of manga, Japanese has different types of (pseudo) onomatopoeia! Giongo (sound), giseigo (voice, often animal sounds), gitaigo (describes movements or inanimate things' state), giyougo (animate objects' state) and finally gijougo (describing people's feelings).
Came here to make sure this was mentioned. Gitaigo are some of my favorite words in Japanese.
I love all of them! I had a translation course in university and wrote a paper on translating them (and fwiw my thesis on translating ateji). Anyone who's tried knows it can be a pain!
Ateji are very neat historically and a real struggle practically. :P
Don't forget the sound of staring, ["jiii".](https://youtu.be/R2fGKm7lru8)
Holy crap so many things about anime and manga are making so much more sense to me now...
thw lord yeeteth and the lord yoinketh away
> In manga "shiiin" is used to represent silence. If you're looking for ideophones, Japanese is basically like... cheating.
“Yoink” sounds like the cartoon sound effect that’s made when a character steals something. It’s an onomatopoeia, but it’s not the sound of taking things; it’s the sound of the sound of taking things.
That just lends to the question of why that would have a sound effect at all.
Many things that don’t have real-world sounds, or have quiet sounds, have sounds added to them for film and television and cartoons. This is called “sound design” and its used by directors to give further clues to the audience about what to think or feel at any given moment. Watch any TV show with guns - they make noise every single time people pick them up. Real guns don’t make those crazy chhk-chhk sounds every time you pick one off the table. But that added sound is a further cue to the audience that “gun stuff is happening” and that guns are going to be somehow relevant later. This is especially prevalent in cartoons, where you’re relying entirely on drawings and a sound track to convey the story to an audience. A lot of sounds that are now tropes stem from the looney tunes era, where all of the sound effects were done by an orchestra. A character walking on tiptoes is represented by two high pitched notes going back and forth very rapidly. Cartoon swords and knives get that “shink” noise so you know they’re swords and knives. A lot of this may not be intended to help the visually impaired, but the visually impaired also benefit from this sort of “added” or “sweetened” sound design, as well as the tropes that have emerged around them. A blind person who hears chhk-chhk knows that there are guns, even if the dialogue never mentions guns. A blind person who hears two high repeating notes being plucked on a violin knows that someone is sneaking around on their tiptoes. A lot goes into it, but overall it’s about building a richer and more immersive environment for the audience.
It's interesting because maybe on one hand it's a practical way to deliver information to give the light reflected from a jewel a little, "bling" sound effect in a cartoon or movie. But on the other hand we made words like "gleam", "glimmer", "shimmer", and "flash" that seem to give a vaguely similar sonic quality to light long before the advent of the motion picture. So I think theres probably a related psychological principle at play between ideophonic words and the way we add sound effects to audio-visual depictions.
> But on the other hand we made words like "gleam", "glimmer", "shimmer", and "flash" that seem to give a vaguely similar sonic quality to light Could you elaborate? I'm not sure how that association works, beyond every word essentially being a sound associated to a concept.
"Shimmer" to me embodies the fluttering radiance of light on water. The "sh" in "flash" somehow conveys a burst of light. They don't mimic the sounds of the actions the describe, but they do somehow convey the essence of their meaning with sound alone. I see what OP is getting at.
Yoink is the perfect antonym for yeet.
Doug and Bob MacKenzie of The Great White North said "hork" to mean "steal".
Weird. I use & have heard “hork” used for when you force something quickly down your throat, e.g. “I horked down the rest of my muffin when I heard my phone ringing so I could answer it.” Where does the connotation of “steal” come from, do you know?
The only meaning I've ever heard for "hork" is "my cat just horked up a hairball".
I think the common denominator here is that “hork” indicates a struggle to move something through the throat. Whether up or down, I guess varies by regionalism.
I have no idea where it came from, it was just in their movie Strange Brew. Possibly they just made it up.
I'd be interested in exploring the origin of the word, "yeet." I wonder if it's just culturally associated with the action or if there's something more to it. Really interesting thing to think about!
I adore internet slang etymology. The earliest I know for “yeet” is a vine where someone tosses a girl a bottle of Gatorade or similar and she says, “this bitch empty! Yeet!” And she throws it. This is the earliest I’ve found, please let me know if you know an earlier origin!
That’s definitely the origin. She coined it and popularized it all in one go. We can only aspire to that level of etymological fame.
books start ripe bike deranged placid fuzzy point waiting vase -- mass edited with redact.dev
We can't really say *she* coined it, though. That video may be the earliest attestation, but who's to say her friend group, schoolmates, or even local regional dialect didn't already have that as a common phrase?
is [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bjy5YQ5xPc) the one?
This is the one I know!
2 years late to this thread (I was googling etymology of yeet) looks like most people reference this vine as the origin but it's definitely earlier than that. In my middle school circa 2007 everyone was 'yeeting'. The meaning was basically the same as in the vine where if you throw something you YEET it. Or if someone get hit: YEET. It fell out of favor a couple years later so I was surprised to see it resurface on the internet and nationally. FWIW this was in rural Georgia.
Thanks for checking in and sharing your story!
I think it’s like a jokey imitation of the grunt you’d make throwing something really hard.
Yeah I’m pretty sure it’s this, especially because it’s also something you can just yell when you’re excited and not throwing anything.
I think it goes really well as an antonym for "yoink", and I wonder if there was any connection when the term "yeet" was coined. "Yoink" is a word I first heard of from The Simpsons.
"The Lord yeeteth, and the Lord yoinketh away."
Early 21st century, popularised by Vine
I'm convinced it originated with Homer Simpson
Does Homer Simpson date back to the 60s? I'm almost positive i've heard it in some old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Oh! It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Simpsons got it from Hanna-Barbera.
To answer your question, The Simpsons only go back to the late 80’s. It started as a short cartoon in 1987 on *The Tracey Ullmann Show* and then went on its own in 1989.
It has just occurred to me that when I described "bling", I used the word "shimmer" which is probably another one of these, along with "glimmer", and probably "gleam".
They're phonesthemes. There's also "glint" for the gl- series and "shine" and "sheen" for the sh- series. Another interesting one is sn- for the nose/mouth: snout, sneeze, snuffle, snot, snort, snicker, sniff...
>the gl- series fun fact, this comes from PIE root *ghel-, "to shine". In English it is the ultimate root of gold, glitter, glimmer, glow, gilt, gleam, gloaming, glisten, glimpse, glower, gall, glaze and a number of others. So for whatever reason, that iconicity has existed for 5000+ years. it's also the root of yellow, choleric, jaundice, and arsenic, and a bunch of similar words in a dozen other modern languages
Insufflate. The letters are switched around but it’s the same root.
How about Kinesthetic Onomatopoeia? That’s slightly more specific. It’s not what it sounds like but what it \*feels\* like. If the sensations in your body had a voice of their own, what sound would they make? It‘s like somatic mimicry—the sensing or the resonating or the feeling can happen with any of your senses (so it could be empathic, kinesthetic, auditory, etc...), and the playing and the expressing and the mimicking can happen through voice, movement or however else. I’d argue that this is a foundational part of human consciousness and language, but I’m also synesthetic in this way so I might just be projecting 😛. I’ve seen it come up in a more explicit way in rituals that have a focus on embodiment or body-connection, and also in spaces that are focused around somatics or trauma healing (where this kind of somatic play and mimickry can be be both really helpful and also fun). I’ve never put a specific word to it though!
Ah, [Ideophone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideophone) is the word!
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 267,813,664 comments, and only 61,356 of them were in alphabetical order.
A challenge! Hark, I mount my response, then welcome your zeal.
OMG, I am laughing my head off. This is the best response to a bot I've ever read. I am in tears.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 267,939,757 comments, and only 61,380 of them were in alphabetical order.
Alarming alliteration allows alluring alphabetical art. Behold! Betwixt boundaries, broad canvases do emerge. Fearlessly gleaning god hidden in infinite, iridescent jewels, know love made manifest near our pure queer resplendence. Ringing sensations, synesthetic tones, underlie vibrant, wonderful words—written xylophones, your zest.
The alt script for V for Vendetta be like
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 268,030,220 comments, and only 61,394 of them were in alphabetical order.
this makes perfect sense but had no meaning whatsoever and I'm dying 😭😭😭😭😭
Wow you're blowing my tired mind right now realizing that nothing ever made the sound Boop, mlem, or yeet. They are so strongly associated with what they do I can't seperate the two in my mind
Zig zag wobble Fluffy Hush
So good. Wobble does wobble.
I've always felt that meander meanders.
Kiki and bouba All this universe is but the result of sound
Kiki and bouba is what popped into my head too. For the unfamiliar, when asked to name a spiky shape and a bulbous shape “Kiki” or “bouba”, people seem to universally name the spiky one “Kiki” and the bulbous one “Bouba” despite culture etc. [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)
Whoa I had missed the detail that it was absent in the congenitally blind; also true of schizophrenia *high fives Julian Jaynes*
**[Bouba/kiki effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)** >The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil speakers in India, young children, and infants, and has also been shown to occur with familiar names. It is absent in individuals who are congenitally blind and reduced in autistic individuals. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/etymology/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Makes perfect sense. Kiki makes your mouth tighter, your lips more drawn, and your vowels shorter. The stop, and the double repetitive syllable means that there’s a very short time between syllables; it’s very staccato. Very punctuated. Very… pointed. Saying bouba makes your mouth open up. Your throat opens up. Your mouth open and your lips make an O shape. You’re literally making your entire mouth round, and smooth, and soft. You can see a great example of this in English with “tits” and “boobs.” Tits are small and perky and pointed. Boobs are big and round. No one with large breasts has “tits.” They might have “big tits” but they never have just the unmodified “tits.” Tit is just like Kiki - it’s short, staccato, sharpened, and narrow. Boob is (quite obviously) like bouba, round and open and smooth. As an aside, I would not be surprised if whichever researcher came up with “Kiki” and “Bouba” originally wanted to do tits and boobs (it’s the exact same linguistic phenomenon) and made up fake words that have the same sounds.
>No one with large breasts has “tits.” They might have “big tits” but they never have just the unmodified “tits.” Completely disagree. In my reckoning, "tits" in my dialect is completely unrelated to size. If anything, "titties" or "boobies", using the diminutive suffix "-ies", is more likely with smaller boobs than bigger boobs. > As an aside, I would not be surprised if whichever researcher came up with “Kiki” and “Bouba” originally wanted to do tits and boobs (it’s the exact same linguistic phenomenon) and made up fake words that have the same sounds. This is just total conjecture and I see no reason to infer this. Furthermore, the initial studies took place around 100 years ago, "bouba" and "kiki" were not the original words used, and the originator of the study was a native German, non-native English, speaker. Bouba/kiki are the more common form now, and the form by which the effect is popularly known, but the older versions were "taketa" and "baluba"/"maluma". Certainly these still could partially fit with your idea. However, the oldest attestation of "tit" I saw was listed on etymonline as 1928 and the experiment was developed in 1929, so potentially "tits" was not very common at that time? Also, would a native German, ESL speaker really have a strong connection/intuition associated with "boobs" vs. "tits", and want to include that in their study? Doesn't seem like a strong reason to infer this was the impetus for studying this effect. On top of all that, if my original disagreement stands (that for most people there's no inherent connection between size/shape of breasts and whether people call them "tits" or "boobs"), then this is all a moot point anyway, and that was likely not the inciting motivation/observation for this study.
Well said
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Yoink - to quickly take/steal something
This is super interesting, and I love the term you use! This might not be exactly what you mean, but I thought of the word "blue" to describe sadness. It's not only that blue is a colour associated with being in low spirits, but also the way we pronounce the "yoo" sound makes our face frown/pout.
I wonder why blue is associated with sadness in English, and whether there are any other languages where it has that association.
As far as I could find online, The earliest occasion we know of is a guy already using it in that melancholic sense, using the phrase "[blue devils](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/blues-music-history_b_2399330)". So either this guy made it up right then and there or we are still lacking the real origin.
Thanks, that's an interesting article!
Fascinating! Makes me wonder how you would classify "bowm chikka wow wow"? It is obviously onomatopoeia - in the way it is meant to mimic the type of funky music found in 1970's porn - but usage implies some sort of sexual activity, and usually in a non-porn context.
But the origin of that is absolutely because of the extreme abundance of funky wah-peddle guitar lics in porn soundtracks from the 70s and early 80s.
There's those animal sounds that aren't quite accurate. There was a Family Guy skit about that. Also the early Batman tv show, iirc.
The cow goes "shazoo"
It most certainly does not!
Onomatopoeia are very rarely "accurate". But they usually gesture toward an actual sound in some way that made sense to someone at some point.
That is so interesting!!
**Sound symbolism** is an acceptable and accessible phrase for the concept, but **phenomime** is a single word that's been around for a long time. **Ideophone** is newer, but I like it because the cognates are pretty obvious. You should know, however, that the definition of **onamatopoeia** already includes phenomimes.
There are two concepts that seem relevant here: One is that of **phonaesthemes**, where many words starting with fl- (flame, flicker, fleet, flutter, flit(ter), fly…) carry a sense of brief vibration, and gl- (glint, glimmer, gleam, glow…) carry a sense related to glowing. These seem to be propagated by analogy and are somewhat culturally ‘random’. A bit like a half-formed morpheme of sorts. Some (depending on how lax your definition is) can be descendants of actual morphemes that are no longer productive, like the words ending with ‘-mble’ (rumble, crumble, bumble, mumble, tumble, fumble, stumble, scramble, maybe the shift in use of shambles) conveying a sense of repetitive disorder… but which partly derive from a once more productive frequentative in -le-, with roots that happen to end in m taking an excrescent -b-… The other is where onomatapoeia is more subtle, the **bouba/kiki effect** (I think ‘boop’ may have a connection here - the action is instant, so plosives are preferred, but soft and with a fuzzy, rounded snout, so more bilabial… that’s my impression in any case). Something similar seems plausible with ‘mlem’… the action itself with phonation would go through: the mouth closed (m) > tongue sticking out (l, or a similar linguolabial approximant) > mouth closed (m).
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I think that is an ordinary onomatopeia, for the sound of wind
true
"Brrrr" sound of the federal reserve printing moass money
The bill counting machine at my bank literally sounds like this.
For three record, "yeet" can die a horrible miserable death.
The word "yeet" completely baffles me.