The story of "water"

This article is trying to show :
 - how an onomatopoeia worked in ancient times.
 - how  primal syllables and words were born.
 - how the word "water" was produced.

Terms

Reduplicative Onomatopoeia is one of the forms of onomatopoeia that has a syllable repetition such as "woof-woof".
In this article,
- "reduplicative onomatopoeia" is simply abbreviated as "RO".
- the verb "fetch" is nearly equivalent to "pull out" or "pick up".

Main Idea 

Main idea is illustrated in the chart below.
(etymological derivation chart)

Reference Sound

Each pronunciation/sounds are  available in the video below.

the story of water(Youtube)

Summary

✔ Homo sapiens associated natural objects with their imitative voice by sensing ambient sounds.
✔ They formed 
    -  (i) RO from imitative voices 
    - (ii) primal words from RO 
    by fetching a chunk of partial sound.
✔ They formed a lot of onomatopoeia versions to increase their vocal patterns.
✔ The act of repeating above steps is one of the reasons that Homo sapiens finally acquired common words.
✔ RO played an important role at the early stage of originating languages.
✔ RO is totally different from a monosyllabic onomatopoeia as regards the potentiality of coining words.

Supplementary Note

・The act of fetching a new chunk of partial sound is like creating a new abbreviation. (It was very useful for verbal communication.)
・A great mass of ROs in modern Japanese and Korean language
- seem to retain their ancient form.
- might be descended from Jomon Common Language.
・Considerable amount of syllables of Japanese ROs seems to have phonetic and semantic similarities with Proto-Indo-European language.

Revisions

2021 1024 Initial Rev.

(end of article)