Warblish: Verbal Mimicry of Birdsong

Abstract

There are three principal methods humans use to evoke avian vocalizations. This paper explores the two that are constrained by human language: onomatopoeia and warblish. In onomatopoeia, new words are created to mimic sounds within the constraints of a language's phonology. Warblish, named and thoroughly described for the first time in this paper, is the imitation of avian vocalizations using existing words in human language. None of the conventionalized ways humans imitate birdsong has yet been studied rigorously, least of all warblish, for which a term has not even existed. Combing the ethno-ornithological literature for instances of warblish shows patterns in its functions and semantics across cultures, which range from friendly messages to ribald mocking. Warblish may evoke perceived ties between bird calls and other natural phenomena and can even offer clues to historical contact between human communities. Investigation of methods of birdsong imitation may expose alternative folk taxonomies based on vocalization type rather than morphology. As artifacts of human creativity in response to nature, warblish and the other methods of birdsong imitation described here merit interdisciplinary inquiry.

Winter, Woodin & Perlman - Defining iconicity for the cognitive sciences

“…For example, lexicalized signals that exhibit iconicity include spoken words such as onomatopoeias, ideophones, and the many depictive signs of signed languages. Examples of unlexicalized signals that exhibit iconicity include the 4 spontaneous depictive gestures that people produce with their hands during speech (McNeill 1992), such as bringing together the forefinger and thumb when saying 'a tiny number' (Woodin et al 2020), and the use of non-linguistic vocalizations to imitate various sounds (Lemaitre et al 2016;Sarvasy 2016), such as making a low growling noise to depict the sound of an unhealthy car engine (Clark 2016: 332).…”

“…These 2.4 "At least some aspect of its form and at least some aspect of its meaning" It is possible that the form of a signal exhibits iconicity in its entirety, such as when some speakers use "vocal mimicry" to imitate a sound "fully unfettered by linguistic constraints" (Sarvasy 2016: 765). In fact, anthropologists have observed that speakers of certain communities have learned to render animal sounds with such high fidelity that they are interpreted as conspecific calls, which has functional significance when these vocal imitations are used to lure prey in hunting (Lewis 2009;Sarvasy 2016;Willerslev 2004). However, short of such impressive achievements, iconicity in language is usually not a high-fidelity replica of the depicted referent, and in most cases, perfectly accurate imitation is an outright impossibility.…”

Aggressive Mimicry and the Evolution of the Human Cognitive Niche

“…Archaeological evidence of the use of decoys in hunting contexts dates back in the Western Hemisphere at least 2,000 years (Hitchcock et al, 2019 ) and in Micronesia for at least 3,000 years (Carson & Hung, 2021 ). The explicit copying of avian vocalizations by human hunters and speakers even has its own name: warblish (Sarvasy, 2016 :766), defined as “The phenomenon of vocal imitation of avian vocalizations by humans, using existing non-onomatopoeic word(s), as with English who cooks for you? (for the barred owl call) and Chicago!…”

Pushing the boundaries: Marginal phonemes and dialogic interaction

“…In Kisi, for example (Childs 1988: 172-173) the particular properties of ideophone phoneme inventories include allowing wordinitial labial-velar stops (/gb/), as in /gbólúng-gbólúng/ 'ringing, switching', a specially raised and lengthened nasal vowel /ã/, word-final voiceless vowels, and the presence of a schwa phoneme. And in Nungon (Sarvasy 2016) word-initial consonant clusters like kr and br only occur in 'warblish' -ideophonic imitations of birdsong. The case that interests us here, though, constitutes a third type, which to my knowledge has not been examined in the literature: 3 the existence of phonemes that are confined, either absolutely or in particular phonotactic environments, to interactional contexts.…”