Talk:Ideophone

Cited

The lead of the december 2004 version of this article was cited in the academic journal Oceanic Linguistics. The author suggests that 'one indication that the term "ideophone" has come of age is that it has recently (December 2004) been added to Wikipedia' (Bradshaw 2006:53). Full ref:

Bradshaw, Joel. 2006. Grammatically Marked Ideophones in Numbami and Jabêm, Oceanic Linguistics, 45, 1, 53-63.

Tones of Ideophones

Perhaps mention should be made of the fact that ideophones are often phonetically different from ordinary words. Among other things, for example, they have tones, e.g. whoops! (rising tone), boing! (level tone), aha! (high-low fall on the second syllable), and so on. Kanjuzi (talk) 18:27, 7 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Onomatopoeia vs Ideophones

How is this different from onomatopoeia? This article does reference onomatopoeia, but it doesn't distinguish itself from onomatopoeia. There should not exist a separate English article for every language's word for onomatopoeia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.71.211.71 (talk) 01:10, 12 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It does distinguish ideophones from onomatopoeia. As it says, ideophones representing sounds (like "splash!") are only one type; but there are other types too, such as Chichewa dzandi-dzandi, representing the wobbly way someone walks when drunk, or D'oh!, representing the idea that someone has done something unusually stupid. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:12, 12 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Non-(less?)-onomatopoeic English ideophones

I suspect English has at least a few ideophones that are not onomatopoeic. Potential examples that come to mind are words like zigzag, which uses its sound and possibly even the shape of the letter Z to suggest back and forth motion, even though zigzagging things don't make a similar sound. Others are lickety-split and hoity-toity, in which the sounds evoke a sense of quickness and pompousness, respectively, though don't seem to be imitations of any sounds made by what they describe. Rriegs (talk) 21:34, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Good examples. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:04, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]