![]() ![]() I have lots of vocal sounds for instruments, but I can't spell any of them! Frank Zappa did say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. ![]() Yes, "widdley-widdley" or "weedly-deedly" or "meedly-meedly" or things along those lines (perhaps someone with more free time could search the corpus for the most popular variant). I think you’ll find adequate extant documentation that refers to heavy metal guitar solos as going “widdley-widdley” and their self-indulgent perpetrators are often derogatorily passed off as “widdley-widdley merchants” or some such silliness. ![]() I'm pretty sure house and/or techno records go "unn-tss unn-tss" or "unce unce" and rock bands don't. Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and culture.It is the German horn that is erroneously referred to in the English language (and more commonly in the United States and Canada) as the French horn. When valves were invented the French made smaller horns with piston valves and the Germans made larger horns with rotary valves. Īs for those French and their horns, Wikipedia explains that " 'Ho ho ho', she laughed in a refined feminine way", " Hot features", " Unh, Ka-BOOM, BZZURKK", " Phonics", " Ask Language Log: Sounds and Meanings", " Waza waza", " Japanese (and Chinese) onomatopeia", " Unce", " Wait Till You Hear a Weak Pyridaben Carbazole Sound". (I don't think that we've covered this topic before - though there have been some discussions of differences across languages in onomatopeia and ideophones, e.g. I'll leave it to commenters to tell us about the situation in other languages. Still, I think that Ryan is right, the English inventory of instrument-imitation words is a bit sparse, and rarely includes ways of imitating ensembles. We can also find less obvious things like "Bum-bum-bum went the guitars and tambourine in unison". Certain kinds of rock bands go "unn-tss unn-tss" or "unce unce". A web search for "went the fiddlers" reveals that fiddlers have often been considered to go "fiddle fiddle dee fiddle dee", or perhaps "tweedle dum, tweedle dee", or maybe "twee tweedle dee tweedle dee", Similar searches reveal that harpers go "twingle twangle", pipers go "ha-diddle, how-diddle" or perhaps "tootle tootle too", flutes go "toodle-oodle-oo", or maybe "Too-too, too-tum-too, tooty-tum", or just plain "toot toot".Īs for guitars, they go "twang", don't they? And theremins go "woo" (perhaps the origin of the term as used for dubious science). It seems to me that the situation in English instrumental onomatopeia is a bit more diffuse than Ryan suggests. Is there a compelling explanation as to why we have words for the sounds of bells, trombones, and tubas, but not guitars? Why do we lack words for the sounds of groups of instruments? Do, say, Italians have a word for the sound a violin makes? Do the French have a word for the sound of a French Horn? What sound does a violin make? A flute? For that matter, what sound does an orchestra make? A rock group? There are gaps even for the standard high school band/orchestra instruments. He points out that in English, "Drums go 'rat-a-tat' and 'bang,' bells go 'ding dong,' and sad trombones go 'wah wah'", but he notes that there are some gaps that he finds surprising:įew instruments are as popular in the US as the guitar, but I have no idea what sound a guitar makes. wrote to ask about words for "the sounds instruments make". ![]() (Elsevier/Butterworth-Heineman, Amsterdam/Boston, 2005), pp.Ryan Y. Batchelor, Engineering Tribology, 3rd edn. Rumford, An inquiry concerning the source of the heat which is excited by friction. Rosenthal, The theory of moving sources of the heat and its application to metal treatments. Joule, On the mechanical equivalent of heat. Jaeger, Moving sources of heat and the temperature of sliding contacts. Boussinesq, Calcul des températures successives d'un milieu homogène et athermane indéfini, que sillonne une source de chaleur. Blok, Theoretical study of temperature rise at surfaces of actual contact under oiliness lubricating conditions. Archard, The temperature of rubbing surfaces. Dong, On the thermal aspects of ductile regime micro-scratching of single crystal silicon for NEMS/MEMS applications. Abdel-Aal, On the influence of tribo-induced super-heating on protective layer formation in sliding metallic pairs. Abdel-Aal, On the connection of thermal dilatation to protective layer formation in fretting tribo-specimens. Abdel-Aal, The correlation between thermal property variation and high temperature wear transition of rubbing metals. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |