Re: Morphems

claudio wrote:
>
>  onomatopoeia are word which imitate the sound of the thing they
>  describe.
> sure, oink, meow, are.
> but what about words like "yummy" "eek" "ntch" ?
> you cant they that "yummy" imitates a real sound. they are interjections.
Yummy is a word.  "That cake looks yummy".  Granted, that sounds a bit
childish, but it's perfectly grammatical.  "Tsk" is an attempt to
imitate a non-linguistic click, thus "Tisk" *is* onomatopoeia, as it's
using sounds in the English language to imitate a sound that doesn't
exist in English, just like "oink" is an attempt using English sounds to
imitate a pig's sound.  Eek is simply an interjection.

> improvise funwords without common meaning, intended to express feelings,
> words which "sound" like the actual mood of the speaker e.g. funny, angry,
> pleasent, etc. no matter if they imitate a sound or not.
> so this is not the same as pure  onomatopoeia's.
> and it isnt nonsense, it got its sense. it just got no common meaning.
> how would you call something like this ?
> just fun-words ? feeling-words ?
Sounds like things in Japanese like _doki-doki_ "nervous, heart
pounding".  Japanse has tons of these words.  Linguists generally refer
to those as a class of onomatopoeia.  There's another word that's
sometimes used, but I forget what it is.

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