Diachronic-dialectological aspects of imitative words

Abstract

In linguistic literature, imitative words have been named with various terms as imitations, mimems, vocatives and etc. Sounds uttered by people living in various environment conditions, as well as unique sounds of animals and natural events have always been referred by humans and it is more proper to name words referring to such sounds, including sensitive-emotional words describing appearance and motion, as imitative words. Imitative words emerge as a result of cognition and expression of the mentioned sounds by human central neural system and hearing and vision organs. So, national-ethnic identities and features are also reflected on imitative words. Such words bear a high level of figurativeness. Imitative words are viewed as the utmost vocabulary units from the aspect of creation of new words. Some imitative words can be seen as equivalents of words used in literary languages. It should be noted that words imitating motion and appearance also can be included in imitative words. Lexical-semantic colorfulness of verbs in languages enables it.

Imitative words gathered from M. Kashgari’s “Diwan” prove the assumption mentioned above. The author explains imitative words after presenting their meanings. For example: char-char – the sound of downpour,ik – the sound of hiccup (which itself is an imitative word in English), kak-kuk (kagh-kugh) – sounds of geese, badar-badar – walking with tapping, buldur-buldur – fill-figured appearance, chek-chuk – the most worthless commodity, pat – a sound of something that fell, taku-taku – a word referring to a sound, takir-takir/tikir-tikir – the sound of horseshoes, tring – a sound similar to jingling, chingil-chingil – tinkling, chur-chur – the sound of milking and etc.

In conclusion, let’s view the following diachronic-dialectological aspects of types of imitative words on the basis of Mahmud Kashgari’s “Diwan”: 1) imitations of sounds; 2) imitations of appearance and feature; 3) imitations of motion.