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Yuck, zip, gurgle, quack… The surprising history of onomatopoeia

Personally, I love onomatopoeia, these funny terms whose ambition is “to suggest by phonetic imitation the thing called”, according to the definition of Petit Robert. Moreover, according to a very serious survey carried out with a representative sample of ten people whom I have met since this morning, I am not the only one. Areu areu, cric-crac, glagla, pschitt, prout, pouf… around me, this particular lexicon inevitably triggers smiles, brings back to childhood and gives a furious desire to play with the language.

Onomatopoeias are no less of a serious matter, as evidenced by reading the fascinating and aptly named Dictionary of onomatopoeias, signed Pierre Enckell and Pierre Rézeau (PUF). Did you know, for example, that Plato himself wondered about them by asking himself this serious question: do words imitate things by nature or are they the fruit of a cultural convention? Well, with reverence for the great philosopher, the answer is obvious: the choice is cultural, of course! The proof: equivalent sounds lead to different onomatopoeia depending on the country. It’s still happening that the moo of our Normandy cows becomes engineer in German-speaking Switzerland. But how to explain that coin-coin can give blind blind in Turkish and bat’bat in Algerian Arabic? Or that our cocorico becomes cockadoodledo in Italy, kikeriki in German and cock-a-doodledo in English ? I know well what these pesky British love to do nothing like everyone else, but anyway! Obviously, we are dealing with an interpretation of sounds and not a simple imitation. Moreover, there are even onomatopoeia specific to the French spoken in Belgium (where without replaces yuck) and in Quebec (where we say apitchou and not atchoum, bed bug and not badaboum).

When the horses did not do tagada but parata

I also learned in this same book that onomatopoeia should not be confused with certain related concepts. Hue, to command a horse, or pch, to drive a dog away, are not onomatopoeias, as I foolishly thought, but, nuance, “huchees”, terms reserved for orders given to animals. As for the interjection, it is only used for an expression conveying an attitude, whether it is disappointment (zut), disgust (pouah), pain (ouch), and this without trying to imitate a pre-existing sound. We learn every day!

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