Onomatopoeia in Korean

Abstract

Although onomatopoeia are sometimes regarded as simple imitations of sounds occurring in nature, it is obvious that different languages produce different onomatopoeia for identical sounds which as a consequence leads to the assumption that onomatopoeia only represent a relative affinity of natural phenomena. Sometimes the distinction is made between genuine and paraphrasing onomatopoeia. Whereas genuine onomatopoeia possess no semantic content of their own, paraphrasing onomatopoeia are often employed to describe a process or an activity. Since onomatopoeia have an elliptic function they are often used in narrations, advertisements or comics. Korean as well as Japanese can be described as languages particularly rich in onomatopoeia. This richness seems to be a characteristic trait of the agglutinating languages in the Ural-Altaic language family. In the article some typical Korean onomatopoeia are presented and listed according the Korean Hangul Alphabet. Subsequently the presented onomatopoeia are classified according certain parameters (e.g. realization of animal sounds, denotation of non-linguistic sounds, atmospheric sounds etc.) and listed in their quantitative order.