The sound roots of Umóⁿhoⁿ

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based study of lexemes denoting sounds in Umóⁿhoⁿ (oma), a Siouan language of North America. I take as a starting point a list of sound-denoting verbal roots (in short: “sound roots”), presented as onomatopoeia in a paper by Dorsey in 1892, that form a coherent set based on their semantic features – they denote sounds. I describe their morphological and syntactic features and their form-meaning mappings in order to assess (1) whether these features distinguish them from other verbal roots, and (2) how well they fit the cross-linguistic definition of ideophones proposed by Dingemanse in 2019. I show that several salient morphological and syntactic features are repeatedly attested with sound roots. However, the currently available corpus does not provide evidence that the sound roots form a homogeneous class on the morphological and syntactic level, due to the disparity of features attested from one root to the other. Hence I conclude that these roots cannot be considered ideophones in Dingemanse’s sense. Nonetheless, similarities between the sound roots of Umóⁿhoⁿ and ideophones in other languages can be observed. They can be grammatically integrated, by contrast with onomatopoeia, and their meaning extends from sound to other sensory domains.

Keywords

• onomatopoeias
• siouan languages
• ideophones
• parts of speech
• instrumental affixes