A Contrastive Analysis of Japanese and Chinese ‘Laughter’ Onomatopoeia and Mimetic Words

Abstract

In the Japanese language, onomatopoeic words occupy an indispensable part of the lexicon. In particular, mimetic words used for laughing are the most iconic words. Some scholars point out that the alternation of phoneme type or manners of articulation are the expression of emotional overtones (Tamori 2002). For instance, the simple vowel /a/ conveys ‘cheerful, nice and pleasant laughs,’ while the constriction vowel /o/ signifies ‘more feminine and graceful.’ However, only a few studies focus on the symbolism of Chinese sounds in mimetic expressions. Therefore, further exploring the sound symbolism of Chinese mimetic words becomes essential. The principal purposes of this thesis are: 1) To explore the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia for laughing, which may help identify the differences between vowels; 2) to examine the relationship between the characteristics of onomatopoeia and the elements of culture in regard to the morphological and grammatical aspects of Japanese and Chinese. The sentences were collected from the corpus for Sino-Japanese translation. Consequently, it was found that 401 Japanese texts consisted of 155 onomatopoeias and 246 mimetic words; 281 Chinese texts consisted of 251 onomatopoeias and 30 mimetic words. Established from the collected corpus data, the sound and meaning of the words containing /a/ and /ei / in Chinese onomatopoeia and mimetic words were alike to those of the Japanese /a/ and /e/. Notably, Japanese texts containing the vowel /u/ are incredibly similar to Chinese texts that contain the vowel /i/. Although most Japanese onomatopoeia and mimetic expressions function as adverbs, this trend is not maintained in Chinese translations, and the use of verbs and adjectives is more frequent.