Ideophone

Common card · No. 425670

An ideophone (also known as a mimetic or expressive) is a member of the class of words that depict sensory imagery or sensations, evoking ideas of action, sound, movement, color, or shape. The class of ideophones is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically; it occurs mostly in African, Australian, and Amerindian languages, and sporadically elsewhere. Ideophones resemble interjections but are different owing to their special phonetic or derivational characteristics, and based on their syntactic function within the sentence. They may include sounds that deviate from the language's phonological system, imitating—often in a repetitive manner—sounds of movement, animal noises, bodily sounds, noises made by tools or machines, and the like. While English does have ideophonic or onomatopoetic expressions, it does not contain a proper class of ideophones because any English onomatopoeic word can be included in one of the classical categories. For example, la-di-da functions as an...

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