Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia are words that exhibit sound symbolism by imitating a range of sensory perceptions, including sounds, movements, and images. Within the English‐speaking world the term “onomatopoeia” has undergone fluctuations in its valorization over time, which have had an effect on current research today. It enjoyed a prestigious rhetorical status during the Renaissance and was part of early pedagogical texts' representations of language, the senses, and nature, where it was construed as a simple transfer from natural to human‐made sounds. During nineteenth‐century debates about the origins of language, however, onomatopoeia lost its status as a legitimate subject for scientific linguistics. Recently, onomatopoeia has begun to emerge from its previously downgraded status as contemporary anthropological linguistic researchers who have studied ideophones, mimetics, and expressives in languages throughout the world have challenged linguistic science's limited conceptions of language, particularly with regard to the Saussurian principle of the arbitrariness of the sign.