Onomatopoeia? Bullshit!
Kritik zum Thema Sprache/ Sprachen
von Roger-Bôtan
1. Exordium.
Onomatopoeia, literally ‘noun-making’, is among the most ubiquitous, pervasive and pandemic pre-conceptions, purblindly and thoughtlessly accepted and shared by every living and speaking inhabitant of this world, be it a backwoods hillbillie, a white-collar yuppie, or a renowned linguist, a revered university professor, even a genius, author of thick monographs and dictionaries—etymological ones in the first place. Why etymological? This is quite clear. Onomatopoeia provides a useful tool, which enables the brainy highbrow to paste a seemingly reasonable etymological label under any word of obscure provenience.
A cuckoo is called thus, because it cries “coo-coo”, isn’t it? What a cuckoo idea! It is simply a loan from French: coucou. Well, the French word is not quite French, rather Provençal, in the long run related to Latin cucūlus, cucculus. If the English cuckoo does cry “coo-coo”, like a dove, it does so because it is called cuckoo.
Another cuckoo idea, widespread in the linguistic milieu, pretends that onomatopoeia is capable of bypassing sound laws. This is, among other things, the case of German Kuckuck, to which Grimm’s law allegedly does not apply, because each time whenever this law undertook an attempt to change the k into a h, the word was remanufactured anew with its original k, simply because this velar stop was better suited to imitating the voice of the bird in question. Well, dear linguistic whiz-kids, the German ‘cuckoo’-word is not German, it is Slavic, West-Slavic, to be more precise. Check out Czech kukuk ‘cuckoo’ and kuk ‘voice of the cuckoo’, and their cognates in other Slavic languages: Russian dial. kuk ‘bird of prey’, Slovenian kȗk ‘kind of frog’ and so forth. Kuckuck substituted itself for Old High German gauh, like cuckoo did for Old English gēac; it is as simple as that. There is no need to talk about breaking the sacred sound laws.
Or else, French grenouille ‘frog’ with its mysterious initial g, which should not be here, taking into account Old French renoille: < Lat. *ranucula (Cl. Lat. ranuncul), diminutive of Lat. rāna. No one will ever be able to make me clear, how this initial velar contributes to render the meaning of grenouille more frog-like, as far as croaking is concerned. In view of the fact that Old Fr. grenoille is as old as renoille (both attested since the 13th c.), one may assume a relation between the initial g of grenouille and the k of *ranucula. Here, we have to deal either with the simple assimilation—*ranucula > *cranucula—or, perhaps, with a broken reduplication, resulting from the repetition: *ranucula-*ranucula > *ranucla-ranucla > *ranuc-ranucla > *cranucla or *granucla—with g due to the dissimilation or rather to the voicing in intervocalic position. Note that such voicing is not an unusual phonetic aberrancy; compare, for instance, Sp. gridar to Fr. crier, and Fr. gonfler to Lat. conflāre.
To debunk the onomatopoeia as a whole, one should proceed by unmasking every single word supposed to be of imitative nature, in order either to bring to light its real origin, or to make clear that its origin remains unclear. This is a task for a giant. A humble eyebrow-raiser can only attempt to kick off this praiseworthy campaign. That’s what I’m gonna do right now with the means at my disposal.
2. ཆ༹༌ཆ༹.
Aren’t they beautiful, these two Tibetan characters? They sound like tsʰatsʰa and denote a ‘small cone of clay or dough for sacrificial use’ (H. A. Jaeschke, Romanized Tibetan and English Dictionary, 1866, p. 138.). Just don’t you even think it is a reduplication! It is—as shown by other spellings: sā-tstsʰa, tsʰwa-tsʰwa (https://www.academia.edu/4386311/Tibetan_Tsha-Tsha Daniel Berounský and Lubomír Sklenka, Tibetan tshatsha, in Annals of the Nápstek Museum, 26, Prague, 2005, p. 60)—a borrowing from Sanskrit सच्छाय sacchāya ‘having the same colour as; shady; glittering’. Tuvan saska ‘heap of flat stones forming a human figure, usually on top of a hill; stone sarcophagus’ (M. Räsänen, Versuch eines etymologischen Wörterbuchs der Turksprachen, Helsinki, 1969, p. 405) marks the way of migration of the Tibetan word across Eurasia, so does Kalmyk tsatsᶛ ‘Grabmal, Grabtempel, Gedächtniskapelle auf dem Grabe’ (G. J. Ramstedt, Kalmückisches Wörterbuch, Helsinki 1935, S. 423).
The resemblance with Russian цáца ‘Kinderspielzeug’, ‘artiges Kind’ (M. Vasmer, Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1958, Bd. 4, S. 284) is striking, and yet it is stamped as a word of the children’s language. To support this genial idea, reference is made to Old Polish czacz ‘award’, Sloven. and Czech čača ‘toy’ and other such examples from Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages (e. g. Hungarian csécs ‘rattle, toy’),— notwithstanding all this stuff is recognizable as German Schatz!
As one can see, both цáца and czacz are quite normal loans, but from different sources, not in the least onomatopoeic, not even reduplicated “expressive” forms.
3. The Spanish ‘shoe’-enigma.
The Sp. ‘shoe’-word zapato (documented since the 10th c.: çapato), as well as its cognate Port. sapata ‘chinela de coiro’ (first attested in 1145), and the borrowings from the Iberian Peninsula, like Fr. savate, Picard chavatte ‘worn shoe or slipper’ (since the 12th c.), and It. ciabatta ‘old shoe, slipper’, are somehow connected to Arabic sabbāṭ, ṣabbāṭ, ṣabbāt ‘shoe’. As the etymology of the Arabic word is not quite clear,—the relation to sibt ‘leather’ being, as it seems, phonetically impossible, although the plural sabābīṭ means ‘leather belt’ in One Thousand and One Nights (V. J. Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid, 1991, v. 6, p. 833; R. P. A. Dozy, Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, Leyden, 1881, v. 1, p. 626a)—, it has been supposed that it was borrowed from Ibero-Romance. If this is true, the Sp. and Port. words remain a mystery, and such mysteries never fail to bring about speculations like, of course, an alleged onomatopoeic origin: from a *¡sap! or *¡tsap!, describing the sound made by an animal falling into water (V. J. Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid, 1991, v. 6, p. 834).
The plural sabābīṭ, documented on the Iberian Peninsula since the 11th c.: çapát, çapápit ‘calçado’ (F. Corriente, El léxico árabe andalusí según el “Vocabulista in arabico”, Madrid, 1989, p. 143 ; F. Corriente, El léxico árabe andalusí según P. de Alcalá, Madrid 1988, p. 92), was, most probably, the real source of the Ibero-Romance words. Ar. sabābīṭ or rather ṣabābīṭ (pronounced ṣbābǝṭ in Marocco) is phonetically more suitable to account for the voiceless t of Sp. zapato and Port. sapata, which presupposes a geminate tt. The old Romance form must have been something like a masc. noun *tsapatto, or a feminine *tsapatta (or both), containing a double tt from pt (cf. Sp. rato ‘instant’ < Lat. raptum), that is to say *tsapatto, *tsapatta developed from an earlier *tsapapto, *tsapapta and eventually from an initial *tsapápito, *tsapápita—an obvious borrowing from Ar. ṣabābīṭ.
As shown by Fr. savate, the intervocalic labial stop was voiced in Gallo-Romance: *tsapápita > *tsabátta > savate, chavatte, whence It. ciabatta. The second p was in some dialects vocalized: *tsabápta > *tsabáuta (cf. Prov. rautar ‘wegreißen’ < Lat. raptare ‘rauben’)—hence Fr. chabotte ‘masse de fonte qui soutient les grosses enclumes d’un marteau-pilon’ (since 1789, s. Trésor de la langue française, 1977, v. 5, p. 442b), also Occitan sabota ‘sabot’ and sǫbǫto ‘galoche, semelle en bois’ (FEW 15,2 , p. 43b). The masculine *tsabápto underwent similar phonetic transformations: > *tsabáuto > Fr. sabot.
There is another group of words that is undoubtedly related to *tsapápito, *tsapápita. These are Fr. patte and Prov. pauta ‘paw’ (English paw comes from French, so does German Pfote), Fr. botte ‘boot’ and their numerous cognates. This is a clear case of backformation, keeping in mind that *tsa- (Sp. za-, ça-) could be mistaken for the prefix going back to Lat. sub-: cf. Sp. zabordar ‘varar el barco en tierra’. Thus *tsapápita contracts to *tsapátta, shortens to *pátta, and ends up in Sp. pata (since 982 Mozar. bâṭa-lûbu ‘pata de león’, i. e. Leontopetalum, s. V. J. Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid 1980, v. 4, p. 423) and Fr. patte (borrowed from Sp.).
Likewise:
*tsapápita > *tsapáuta > *pauta > Prov. pauta, Cat. pota (since 1371, s. V. J. Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid, 1986, v. 6, p. 753b), Galic. pouta, Old Fr. poe, poue.
And:
*tsapápita > *tsapáuta > *tsabáuta > *bauta > Fr. botte.
By the by, the etymological dictionaries give us an ingenious clue as to where to search for the source of pata and pauta—In the pre-Celtic times! They mean the Neanderthal dialects, perhaps. Brilliant.
4. French môme and marmaille.
Both of these words belong together and go back to Lat. anima ‘soul’, in spite of the learned folks who unanimously declare them onomatopoeic.
The first one—môme ‘child’—is attested for the first time in a dictionary from the year 1821 (J.-C.-L.-P. Desgranges, Petit dictionnaire du peuple à l’usage des quatre cinquièmes de la France, Paris, 1821), but is obviously much older. The spelling is misleading, one should spell it *maume, that is *ma aume—literally ‘my soul’. The form *aume ‘soul’, corresponding to Sp. Port. alma which goes back to Lat. anima with dissimilation, is not quite hypothetic, it can be detected in Mod. Fr. aumaille ‘gros bétail’ (v. FEW 1, 97).
In Old Fr. we find another reflex of anima with a slightly different dissimilation: arme. This one, too, has a derivative comparable to aumaille: armaille ‘gros bétail’ (Savoie). Moreover, like *maume < *ma aume, it formed marme ‘par mon âme’ (Poitou), that is *ma arme ‘my soul’, and even narmo id. (Puy-de-Dôme): < *mon arme with elision of the first syllable, or < marme with dissimilation of the nasals. Cf. furthermore pourmâme ‘peut-être’, attested In Stavelot, where we can easily detect *m’âme < *ma âme, the standard form âme ‘soul’ being an early borrowing of Lat. anima.
There is no doubt whatsoever that marmaille ‘group of children’ derives from marme, like armaille from arme and aumaille from *aume. Fr. marmot ‘little child’ is a simple diminutive for marme used as a term of affection when speaking to kids: ‘my dear soul’ or something like that. Further derivatives are marmonner and marmotter ‘speak unintelligibly’.
5. French jargon.
This word is spread all over the world, and its origin causes no headache to any linguist. They all agree on its purely imitative nature, connecting it to the hypothetical onomatopoeic root *garg-, supposed to represent properly the sound made by the throat while something is being swallowed: Sp. garganta ‘throat’, Fr. gargouille ‘gargoyle’ etc.
Let us take a closer look at the semantics. Fr. jargon, as well as its cognate Sp. jerga, mean, first of all, ‘a secret language of some group of individuals, that cannot be understood by people who do not belong to that group’. In the Middle Ages, such a group of people was represented by the clergy, and they not only spoke unintelligibly, but also wore special clothes. Is it a simple coincidence that Sp. has a homonymous jerga meaning ‘tela gruesa y tosca’? This meaning, along with the meaning ‘vestido de luto’, attested in Sp. and in Port. (xerga, enxerga, s. V. J. Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, Madrid, 1984, v. 3, p. 507), point to the same source—Lat. (vestis) clerica, (lingua) clerica: clerica > jerga, xerga. As for the derivative jerigonza, chances are, there had been a Vulg. Lat. *clericundia, formed scornfully after verecundia, whence Sp. verguenza and Fr. vergogne ‘shame’.
The radical vowel of Fr. jargon must be secondary. As a matter of fact, a form with an e is also attested—Old. Occ. gergon (cf. also It. gergo borrowed from Occ.): < *gerga < *glerga < clerica—with loss of l like in Fr. cheville < Lat. clavicula.
The initial g- in forms like Fr. gargouille ‘gargoyle’, Old. Fr. gargonner ‘babble, speak in jargon’, if it does not result from hypercorrection, that is by substituting g for ž of the northern dialects (Langue d’oïl), requires special attention. We should, perhaps, remember that jerga did not derive directly from clerica, but from lingua clerica, so that this word combination was grasped as a single lexical entity—*lingua-g(l)erica—and subsequently shortened by haplology to a *(lin)gu(g)erga or even *(lin)gu(g)arga with a-vocalism like in Fr. marché as compared to, say, It. mercato and Lat. merx. Haplology could even have eliminated the initial velar of *g(l)erica- completely and have yielded a root *(g)arg-, preserved by Fr. argot.
6. Break time.
In this short draft paper we have just successfully exterminated quite a great deal of alleged onomatopoeias. But the battle is far from being over. I shall now take a coffee break, but I shall not rest until the entire imitative rubbish is unmasked and done over and nailed a lie, and every linguist believing in the existence of this flapdoodle is proved wrong and laughed at and publicly ridiculed and booed off the stage.
