Editing Ideophone (section)

==Characteristics==

The word ideophone was coined in 1935 by [[Clement Martyn Doke]], who defined it in his ''Bantu Linguistic Terminology'' as follows.<ref name=":1">Doke 1935 as cited in Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001</ref>
{{quote|A vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, color, sound, smell, action, state or intensity.}}

Ideophones evoke sensory events. A well known instance of ideophones are [[onomatopoeia|onomatopoeic]] words—words that imitate the sound (of the event) they refer to. Some ideophones may be derived from onomatopoeic notions. In many languages, however, ideophones do not solely represent sound.<ref name=":1" /> For instance, in [[Gbaya languages|Gbaya]], ''kpuk '''a rap on the door' may be onomatopoeic, but other ideophones depict motion and visual scenes: ''loɓoto-loɓoto'' 'large animals plodding through mud', ''kiláŋ-kiláŋ'' 'in a zigzagging motion', ''pɛɗɛŋ-pɛɗɛŋ'' 'razor sharp'.<ref name=":2" />

Ideophones are often characterized as [[Iconicity|iconic]] or [[Sound symbolism|sound-symbolic]] words, meaning that there can be a resemblance between their form and their meaning. For instance, in West-African languages, voiced consonants and low tone in ideophones are often connected to largeness and heaviness, whereas voiceless consonants and high tones tend to relate to smallness and lightness.<ref>Westermann 1927</ref> [[Reduplication]] figures quite prominently in ideophones, often conveying a sense of repetition or plurality present in the evoked event.<ref>Watson in Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001</ref> The iconicity of ideophones is shown by the fact that people can guess the meanings of ideophones from various languages at a level above chance.<ref>Iwasaki et al. 2007, Dingemanse et al. 2015</ref> However, the form of ideophones does not completely relate to their meaning; as conventionalized words, they contain arbitrary, language-specific phonemes just like other parts of the vocabulary.{{cn|date=January 2025}}

===Grammar===
The grammatical function of ideophones varies by language. In some languages (e.g. [[Welayta language|Welayta]], [[Yir-Yoront language|Yir-Yiront]], [[Semai language|Semai]], [[Korean language|Korean]]), they form a separate word class, while in others, they occur across a number of different word classes (e.g. [[Mundang]], [[Ewe language|Ewe]], [[Sotho language|Sotho]], [[Hausa language|Hausa]]).<ref>Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001</ref>

Despite this diversity, ideophones show a number of robust regularities across languages. One is that they are often marked in the same way as quoted speech and demonstrations.<ref name=":3">{{Cite journal|last=Samarin|first=William J.|year=1971|title=Survey of Bantu ideophones|journal=African Language Studies|volume=12|pages=130–168}}</ref> Sometimes ideophones can form a complete utterance on their own, as in English "ta-da!" or Japanese {{Nihongo||ジャーン|jaan|ta-da}}.<ref name=":0">Diffloth 1972</ref> However, in such cases the word ideophone is used as a synonym to interjection. Proper ideophones may occur within utterances, depicting a scene described by other elements of the utterance, as in Japanese ''Taro wa <u>sutasuta to</u> haya-aruki o shita'' "Taro walked hurriedly' (literally 'Taro did haste-walk ''sutasuta''<nowiki/>').<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Kita|first=Sotaro|year=1997|title=Two-dimensional semantic analysis of Japanese mimetics|url=http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/106489/9/WRAP-two-dimensional-semantic-analysis-Japanese-mimetics-Kita-2018.pdf|journal=Linguistics|volume=35|issue=2|pages=379–415|doi=10.1515/ling.1997.35.2.379|s2cid=144380452 }}</ref> Ideophones are more like illustrations ''of'' events than responses ''to'' events. An ideophone like Gbaya ''kiláŋ-kiláŋ'' 'in a zigzagging motion' displays a certain resemblance to the event (for instance, its irregular vowels and tones depicting the irregularity of the motion).{{cn|date=January 2025}}

===Registers===
Languages may differ in the context in which ideophones are used. In some languages, ideophones are primarily used in spoken language (e.g. [[narrative]] contexts) and are rarely encountered in written language.<ref name=":2">Noss in Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001</ref> In other languages (e.g. [[Ewe language|Ewe]], [[Japanese language|Japanese]]), ideophones can be freely used in all [[Register (sociolinguistics)|registers]]. In general, however, ideophones tend to occur more extensively in spoken language because of their expressive or dramaturgic function.<ref name="ReferenceA">Kunene in Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001</ref>