Re: J.Cowan's reference to Tamil onomatopoeia

At 00:34 21.4.2000 -0400, Jonathan Chang wrote:
>     I am peculiarly intrigued with "neologistic" patterns in sound-mimicking
>onomatopoeia (i.e. is/if there are certain electronic sounds
>infiltrating certain languages' onomatopoeia & how are they formed
>(what is their Romanized interpretation spelled)? etc., hehe)
>
>lingua-mangler-@-large,
In Swedish [ziN] or [dzing] is common to suggest an "electric" sound, and
by extension anything suddenly changing/appearing in a magic- or scifi-like
fashion.  I think it entered the language back when I was a fourth-grader
and the first StarWars movie was all the rage (oops, I dated myself there!
:-)  If spelled (as in comics) it is usually "zzing".
         Linguistically interesting: Swedish has no /z/ phoneme, which is
probably why the [dz-] version exists, a voiced/lenis affricate being
easier for most Swedish speakers to produce; there are non-initial,
bi-phonemic sequences in words like _vidsynt_, where /s/ is probably more
lenis than usual.

ObConlang: at age 15 I perpetrated an Esperanto-clone, which had _c_=/ts/,
_z_=/ds/, as well as _ch_=/tj/, _j_=/dj/, _ç_=/sj/=[S], but no /z/.  Very
Suetocentric indeed! :-)

o Glottomaniakes,



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson
mailto:bpj@netg.se
mailto:melroch@my-deja.com
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