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Re: USAGE: onomatopoeia and spelling alternates

From:R A Brown <ray@...>
Date:Friday, April 20, 2007, 10:06
Mark J. Reed wrote:
[snip]

> Second, /Vmf/ is universally -umph rather than -umf. > > "Helen paused. With an audible `wumph,' Muffy's familiar yipping had > ended..." (from a Far Side cartoon). > > "He left it dead / And with its head / He went gallumphing back."
But the verb 'gallumph' is a portmanteau word coined by Lewis Carrol from 'gallop' + 'triumph', so the spelling is surely exactly as one would expect.
> Are modern textual foley artists emulating Carroll, or was Carroll > just an early example of the same tendency?
See above.
> I don't know what role the vowel plays in this phenomenon, but > Nightcrawler's BAMF! is a good example of /mf/ not preceded by /V/.
Pronounced like Banff in Scotland, I assume :)
> I imagine the use of PH may come from parallelism with the common > sequence -ump.
I think so, reinforced by the actual occurrence of the word 'triumph'. But there are no non-onomatopoeic English words AFAIK ending in --nf. /umf/ is usually <oomph>, too. But without the -m-,
> <f> reappears: <whuff>, <oof>, etc.
True - but then there are many English ending in -ff. I suppose an alternative, based on traditional spelling, would be *whough - but that its pronunciation would be a tad ambiguous :-) -- Ray ================================== ray@carolandray.plus.com http://www.carolandray.plus.com ================================== TRADUTTORE TRADITORE