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.
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)