Iconicity and etymology

Liberman, Anatoly

doi:10.1075/ill.9.15lib

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Malapropism is the ludicrous misuse of words, especially in mistaking a word for another resembling it. 4 The poet, essayist, and critic Leigh Hunt first used the word in 1830, basing it on the character of Mrs Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals (1775). Sheridan derived her name from the French phrase mal à propos, inappropriate.…”

Section: Malapropismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When I use a word . . . Medical eggcorns

Aronson

2024

BMJ

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There are many different types of verbal errors that people make from time to time. They include folk etymology, mondegreens, and malapropisms. Eggcorns are verbal errors in which a word is replaced by another that sounds like it and typically shares with it some semantic connotation. Old-timer’s disease for Alzheimer’s is a good example. In this week’s column I list and discuss some medical examples of eggcorns.

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Section: Malapropismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2003 Mark Liberman posted a brief note on the Language Log, relating the case of a woman who had written "egg corns" for "acorns." 4 He thought that this error could not be explained as one of the standard errors, such as folk etymology, malapropisms, or mondegreens. What should it be called?…”

Section: Eggcornsmentioning

confidence: 99%

When I use a word . . . Medical eggcorns

Aronson

2024

BMJ

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“…Imitative words have always been a challenge to etymologists as they are notorious for 'disobeying' regular sound changes, hypervariation, and ambiguous form similarity (which can be interpreted both as genetic relation and independent semblance), nevertheless, successfully tracing down their history has been proven possible (see e.g. -Joseph 1997: 1-26;Koleva-Zlateva 2008;Levitsky 2000;Liberman 2010;Malkiel 1990), and their phonetic 'irregularity' has been described and accounted for (Brodovich 2008: 485-489;Durkin 2009: 127;Flaksman 2015: 157;Hock 1986: 50).…”

Section: Imitative Words In Indo-european Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

From ie *u̯e to English window: on the age and number of imitative words in English

Flaksman¹

2019

IELCP

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The article is devoted to the study of imitative (iconic, onomatopoeic, sound symbolic) words from the diachronic perspective. The main questions discussed are the number of imitated words in the lexicon and their age. The material for the study includes 1500 Modern English and 300 Old English onomatopoeic and sound symbolic words selected by continuous sampling from relevant etymological dictionaries. Examples are drawn from other languages of the Indo-European family-Gothic, Old Norse, Icelandic, German, Russian and other. The main conclusion of the article is that imitative words existing in modern languages are not likely to be old coinages, which suggests that the historical-comparative reconstruction of onomatopoeic and sound symbolic roots should be conducted with great caution.

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“…Despite the continuous appearance of books and articles on onomatopoeia in various languages (see the paragraph above), most of these works deal with the synchronous level of language, rarely taking into account diachronic problems of onomatopoeia (outstanding exceptions to this tendency see -Brodovich, 2008;Joseph, 1997;Liberman, 2010;Malkiel, 1990). Yet diachronic approach gives a new insight into the nature of onomatopoeia.…”

Section: Problem Statementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Onomatopoeia and Regular Sound Changes

Flaksman¹

2018

J. Sib. Fed. Univ., Humanit. soc. sci.

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The article deals with the problem of diachronic development of onomatopoeic lexicon and discusses how regular sound changes affect imitative words. The classification according to the degrees of the impact of regular sound changes is devised and applied to the bulk of English sound-imitative words. The aim of the article is to establish which regular sound changes of the English language had the most detrimental effect. In order to achieve this aim, all major English regular sound changes are classified into phonosemantically significant and phonosemantically insignificant. This classification is based on the use of methods of historical-comparative linguistics and etymological analysis. The main result is the revelation of the fact that not all regular sound changes are equally detrimental to the iconic lexicon of a language. They are only so if: 1) touch upon salient, meaning-bearing phonemes of an iconic word; 2) change the original phonotype of a phoneme; and 3) take place when the word still retains its original sound-meaning coherence. The devised classification is potentially universal and applicable to the onomatopoeic lexicons of related and unrelated languages.

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Iconicity and etymology

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

When I use a word . . . Medical eggcorns

When I use a word . . . Medical eggcorns

From ie *u̯e to English window: on the age and number of imitative words in English

Onomatopoeia and Regular Sound Changes

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