They don’t jump 36 feet into the fucking sky do you know how terrifying that would be the human race wouldn’t have survived because we’d have all had heart attacks while still in Africa
This is one of those legendary posts that’s been around since I first made a Tumblr. When I didn’t have access to my Tumblr for a few years I would sometimes reference this post. Iconic lol
Ideophones are a word class (part of speech) that occur independently in some languages, mostly in Africa and in Asia. They can be quite extensive, like nouns and verbs, or they can be a small class. Ideophones are words which exhibit sound symbolism, are iconic, can involve onomatopoeias, and are frequently used in narrations, frequentely reduplicated, and show moods, states, forms, colours, movements, etc. They differ from interjection by the sound symbolism and non-isolate distribution (unlike interjections, which can stand alone like “ouch”).
Japanese is a good example: doki doki (ドキドキ) — heartbeat: excitement kira kira (キラキラ) — glitter shiin (シーン) — silence niko niko (ニコニコ) — smile Jiii (じ-) — stare
If you know more languages that use ideophones, please let me know, because there’s relatively few literature about this. Be aware that not all onomatopoeias are ideophones, though.
![Sydney Opera House [prints available]fred postles](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b7b2f79a2a073989899e95116534718c/tumblr_okz7zyI0Uy1qciq2wo1_1280.jpg "Sydney Opera House [prints available]fred postles")
