Reduplicative Onomatopoeia: The Most Ancient Form of Language

This article is a tentative theory related with "Reduplicative Onomatopoeia".

Terms

Reduplicative Onomatopoeia is one of the forms of onomatopoeia that has a syllable repetition such as "woof-woof", "bow-wow" and "beep-beep". 

In this article, Reduplicative Onomatopoeia is simply abbreviated as RO.

Main Idea

RO is totally different from a monosyllabic word as regards the potentiality of coining words. I try to illustrate this idea with a sample.

I propose RO /pɑːʃ.pɑːʃ/ (*pas-pas) as a representative sample. It is a repetition form of a monosyllabic onomatopoeia /pɑːʃ/(*pas).

The sound sources or the background situation of RO *pas-pas would be something like as below: 
  ✔ boiling water scattering or spouting sporadically from hot spring or a geyser. 
  ✔ flaring fire with wood-burning sounds.

The figure below illustrates how RO *pas-pas had been decomposed to its variants. It is presumed that the pronunciation of *pas-pas produced its variants by often occurring an elision of the initial sound or the last sound.

As shown above inspection, 8 patterns of variants(v1-v8) are decomposed from RO *pas-pas . On the other hand, it is plain as day that a monosyllabic onomatopoeia *pas can only produce 2 patterns of variants: "pa" and "as".  

Considering above,  RO must have been essential to produce many patterns of vocal sounds at the early stage of originating languages.

Summary

✔ Vocal sounds must have preceded ideas, meanings and words. In other words, vocal sounds were the premise for a meaning. If preceding vocal sounds did not exist, we could not produce a meaning or a word.

✔ It is not that RO is produced by repeating a monosyllabic onomatopoeia or an already existing word but that almost all words are decomposed or abbreviated from RO with a lapse of many years.

It is very important to have an attention with so-called "reversed etymology"(a kind of "reverse causality").

Supplementary Note

✔ The table below shows some candidates for derivatives or descendants of RO *pas-pas. 

 (※)blank column : This variant of sound seems to be unused or vanished.

✔ The hypothesis described in this article is named as "LETRO"(Language Evolution Theory by Reduplicative Onomatopoeia). 

✔ Regarding RO, *wak-wak / *wad-wad are also available in another article 『the story of "water"』.

Revisions

2021 1125 Initial Rev.

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