The requests for treatment of various topics are still coming in much faster than I can deal with them. So here's one that goes back almost a year. Roxana wrote to say:
I teach English in Italy, and the books we use come from the UK. The other day I was a bit surprised to read a sentence in "English Files" that went like this: "Do you hoot if the driver in front of you is slow?" (not "toot") I would have said "honk".
Have you come across this?
Yes, cars in the UK
hoot (among other sounds) and in the US they
honk (among other sounds), and those are but a couple of examples of the arbitrariness of onomatopoeia (words whose sounds imitate what they refer to). "The arbitrariness of onomatopoeia?" I hear some of you thinking. "Surely not!" But I reply "Surely, surely."
Onomatopoeia is always raised by some student when I teach the notion of 'the arbitrariness of the sign'--i.e. the notion that there is no causal connection between the form of a sign (e.g. a word) and its meaning. For example, it's just a social convention that the word for that thing in the middle of your face is
nose. You had to learn to associate that combination of sounds with that body part because there's no other way to know that those sounds symboli{s/z}e that thing. And people who speak Zulu had to learn to match a different set of sounds to that thing because there's nothing in nature forcing us to use those sounds for that thing.
But surely, my student reasons, onomatopoeia does involve a natural relation between meaning and form (sound). We call the sound of a gun
bang because guns go
bang and so forth. Except, of course, that they don't. That's the way that the sound is represented in English, but in French it's
pan (with the 'n' pronounced as nasali{s/z}ation on the vowel). And in Icelandic,
apparently, it's
búmm. While onomatopoeia is iconic, it still relies on the particular sounds that belong to one's language and it relies on some conventionali{s/z}ation. In English, our guns go
bang and our bombs go
boom because that's what we've learned from other English speakers, not just because that's what guns and bombs sound like. So there's some room for variation among languages, and even within languages, on onomatopoetic matters.
So it is with car horns. In both BrE and AmE, one might imitate the sound as
beep, but (especially as verbs for making the sound) BrE likes
hoot, which Americans reserve for owls, and
toot too, and AmE likes
honk (which can also be used for goose noises--OED marks this as 'orig. N. Amer.').
Here I must mention an absolutely charming website,
bzzzpeek, on which children from around the world say the sounds of animals and vehicles. If you don't believe me on UK/US differences in onomatopoeia, check with the children. (The UK is the first country on each page, the US is the last--so it takes some clicking to get to.)
Here is a selection of onomatopoeia that I've come across in day-to-day existence. It's mostly come to the fore as Better Half and I clash in our sound effects for the song "Grover Murphy had a farm" (also "Grover Murphy had a bath", "Grover Murphy had some lunch" and anything else I can think to do sound effects for--but of course we use her real first and second name, which, as luck--or possibly careful onomastic planning--would have it, is metrically identical to "Grover Murphy" and "Old MacDonald").
donkeys: in AmE they say
hee-haw, but in BrE
eeyore--which is basically pronounced like
hee-haw without the
aitches (the penny drops for many Pooh fans--see the comments
here)
frogs: the verb is
to croak in both dialects, but in AmE (originally and chiefly, says OED) they say
ribbit. This may have made it across the ocean now--Better Half was surprised to learn it's originally AmE, but the British bzzzpeek child has frogs saying
croak croak.emergency vehicles: in BrE children (or adults talking to children) sometimes call these
nee-naws after the sound they make, which (traditionally) in Britain is a two-tone sound that's different from the sirens of the US (which are sometimes represented as
woo-woo--but I've never heard that used as a noun to represent the vehicles, like
nee-naw is). This one is not a case of the dialects representing the same sounds differently, but of having different sounds to represent. One might make the argument that
hoot and
honk are the same sort of thing--the British drive little cars that go
hoot and Americans drive big ones that go
honk. Except that the OED has BrE
hoots and AmE
honks back in the early 20th century, when the size of the cars would have been about the same in the two countries.
trains: we've
already discussed the AmE origin of
choo-choo and the BrE alternative
puff-puff, which seems to be a bit old-fashioned now. BH doesn't use
puff-puff, but does use (BrE)
puffer train as an equivalent to (AmE)
choo-choo train. Grover and I take the train to work/
crèche, and as we wait for it, I find myself saying "Here comes the choo-choo train" then feeling ridiculous for doing so, since the train makes a kind of electric hum rather than anything 'puffy' or 'choo-choo-y'.
The thing that's struck me in thinking and talking to BrE speakers about these onomatopoetic items is that the American ones are mostly well-known here, but few people seem to reali{s/z}e that they were originally AmE. Considering how much disdain is felt for some AmE words in BrE, it's interesting that this section of the vocabulary seems somewhat resistant to that kind of prejudice. Or have I just missed it? And have I missed more onomatopoetic differences?