Topic summary
Ideophones
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Ideophone.
Characteristics
Ideophones evoke sensory events. A well known instance of ideophones are onomatopoeic words—words that imitate the sound (of the event) they refer to. Some ideophones may be derived from onomatopoeic notions. In many languages, however, ideophones do not solely represent sound. For instance, in Gbaya, kpuk 'a rap on the door' may be onomatopoeic, but other ideophones depict motion and visual scenes: loɓoto-loɓoto 'large animals plodding through mud', kiláŋ-kiláŋ 'in a zigzagging motion', pɛɗɛŋ-pɛɗɛŋ 'razor sharp'.