phonology - Do onomatopoeic words lose their onomatopoeic character?


Wikipedia mentions that:



Some languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that it is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia.


One example is English "bleat" for the sheep noise: in medieval times it was pronounced approximately as "blairt" (but without an R-component), or "blet" with the vowel drawled, which is much more accurate as onomatopoeia than the modern pronunciation.




  • Did bleat really lose its onomatopoeic character?

  • Is "baa" used instead in all situations?



Furthermore from the book "A Grammar of Iconism" By Earl R. Anderson:


At the levels of morphology and phonolgy, peripherality may be phonotactic, structural, or grammatical, and words may vary in degrees of peripherality. Onomatopoeic *miaow*, for example is phonotactically peripheral: the cluster [mj-] ordinarily is not used in English unless [u] follows as in *music*. But *miaow* can be used as a verb and can be inflected (*miaows*, *miaowed*) and thus is more fully integrated into the language than *baa* or *baaa* with vowel-extension; for this, the corresponding verb is *bleat*. Again, representations of shivering or growling, *brrr* and [begin highlight]*grrr*[end highlight], with consonantal extensions, are phonotactically nonintegrated into the language.]


According to the passage above:



  • When onomatopoeic words are used as verbs, do they lose their onomatopoeic character? ( not all of them but some of them in time? or depends on the context?)

  • Can we still say that shiver, growl and bleat are onomatopoeic words? Or did they inherit their onomatopoeic label from their more mimetic versions: brr, grr and baa?



Answer



Once an onomatopoeia, always an onomatopoeia (usually).


Although the meaning of a particular onomatopoeia may develop from a mere verbal imitation of a sound to a fully fledged word with multiple detailed denotations, it remains an onomatopoeia so long as some semblance to the original imitated sound remains. According to Merriam-Webster, onomatopoeia is "the naming of a thing or action by vocal imitation of an associated sound". By this definition, an onomatopoeia need not merely represent the sound itself; verbs and other parts of speech can be onomatopoeic, provided they derive from a related sound (in nuce, words describing things or actions can still be onomatopoeic).


One typical instance of an evolving onomatopoeia is the history of the word hiccup, which incidentally is given as an example of onomatopoeia in the Merriam-Webster entry. Over time, hiccup evolved from a pure imitation of a sound (Hiccup!), eventually referring to an instance of making that sound (he made a hiccup) or the process of making that sound (he hiccuped), but it still maintained its essential imitative character.


Although speakers may eventually forget the imitative origins of words (especially as their meanings evolve), some words still accurately imitate their associated sounds, even after switching languages. Take cliché, for instance: cliché comes from the French word for a literal printer's stereotype, which in turn derives from the verb clicher, an imitation of machinery forging a stereotype (see Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia for etymology).


Even piss (which, according to Merriam-Webster, ultimately derives from the imitative Vulgar Latin verb *pissiare) is still essentially onomatopoeic. Although various vulgarisms with myriad meanings derive from piss, they all (at least historically) relate to urine; crucially, the word piss still sounds remarkably like the timeless act of urinating, all these centuries after the word's ancient Roman origin. (Similar arguments could be said of "choo-choo", "ring", and other historical onomatopoeia.)


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