A-choo is in a different category than the rest. That’s a traditional “spelling” of an instinctive or otherwise non-cultural, human sound. The actual sound is the same in all cultures but the written representation would be different (like animal noises). Other examples would be for burps, farts, knuckles cracking, puking, smacking, babies and children crying, spontaneous laughter, finger snaps…
The rest are like semi-words (or something), sounds we would make voluntarily to express a feeling or emotion. The sounds themselves could differ from culture to culture. Even if the sounds are the same the “spelling” might differ.
I’m still curious how one represents the raspberry (if at all) in other languages. “pbbbt” doesn’t really convey it, but I don’t know what would. Is it used to indicate derision in other languages? If not, what is an equivalent?
When I speak, I have the unfortunate habit of inserting “um” all over the place. In high school, I had to give an oration of some sort for a Latin class, and the teacher couldn’t break me of the habit. So he told me to use “eu” instead, that being the Latin equivalent of “um”.
I was talking about comics written originally in Spanish and in Spain; I’m less familiar with LAR material (outside of Mafalda, an Argentinian comic strip which is an enormous part of Hispanic popular culture).
I can tell you that in comics translated from English, the noises are usually treated as part of the drawing and therefore left unchanged; dirty language, which in the Spanish-from-Spain tradition is represented using drawings inside the balloon (lightning bolts, donkeys, pigs, geometric figures…), in translated comics uses the same resources as in its original language, substituting letters. I have seen Mortadelo y Filemón and other Escobar comics in the US translated to English, but it was 25 years ago: I’m at work so I can’t really explore and find their US name but see if these guys look familiar.
This has in turn led to some onomatopeias entering Spanish, but still: people see an off-scene BARF in a translated comic and know that someone is throwing up, but Spanish-from-Spain artists would instead draw someone looking into the bathroom where someone else’s bum can be seen in the position required to worship the porcelain god, no noises added. I’ve also seen it done by showing someone run to the bathroom with his hand over his mouth and eyes bulging, then coming back a couple of panels later wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Like for any other word, some onomatopoeias will enter the language faster than others and some will enter it faster in some locations (the Spanish of Northern Mexico and Costa Rica shows a lot more influence from English than others do, in my limited experience); there is a Mafalda (Argentina, c. 1970) about the replacement of “¡pum!” with “bang!”, but 40 years later you still hear “pum”: you will never see it in a translated comic, because it’s part of the artwork, and you’re likely to see “bang” in a drawn-in-Spanish comic, but children still say “pum”. Take into account that the way we would read that “bang” is not the way an English-speaker would, when people try to pronounce that “ng” as two distinct sounds like we’re wont to do it’s just real difficult. So, we may write bang (as part of background artwork) but we pronounce pum.
Peanuts (“Carlitos” in Spain, Peanuts in (some?) LAR) and Garfield have both been syndicated to Spanish for ages. The first movie I watched was “Snoopy come home” in Spain in the early 70s, and Carlitos was already popular by that time.
Chinese people go AH-Chieh, for ah Choo
Ai-yah! (Oh Noes!)
Waaah, in a whispery awed way for Wow!
Ey- youh! - sarcastically high pitched and drawn out for when someone gets too big for their boots; just high pitched and drawn out for squee; abruptly for surprise.
Ka-chah!-quickly said to emulate something brittle that has been broken.
Mexican Spanish is more onomatapoeia-oriented than Iberian Spanish, at least in its less formal registers. For example, “huaquear” (“wahck-ay-ar”) is an informal (but common and far from vulgar) way to say “puke” – the derivative phrase “¡huácala!”, meaning, “yuck!”, is vey common.
Then, there are the even less formal, jocularly vulgar ways to say “puke” which are equally onomatapoetic, such as “cantar Oaxaca” (“sing Oaxaca” – Oaxaca is a state in Mexico, pronounced very much like a tossing of the tacos).
(Interestingly, women tend to get less exposure than men to phrases like this (at least in rural and more conservative parts of Mexico) – in Mexican Spanish, there is more of a tendency to “not say certain things when women are present” than there is in, say, US English. Maybe that’s why Nava would not have heard these phrases if/when she visited Mexico.)
I don’t think it is. I don’t think that the sneezing sound is a “non-cultural, human sound”. People sneeze in all kinds of different ways, and a lot of them use the vocal chords. I sneeze in an American accent. I’ve heard people from other regions sneeze in their accent. My father, for instance, intentionally vocalizes the sound into words. He “speaks” his sneezes. It stands to reason that non-English speakers would use entirely different words, even if they’re similar.
FYI, this is the convention in American comics, too, though it’s more likely to be characters from the top row of the keyboard, or other simple shapes, than barnyard animals.
The word for such symbols, incidentally, is “grawlix”.
This use of “resp.” or “respectively” is something I often see in English written by German-speakers. It seems to be a rendering of German “bzw”. Unfortunately it’s a mistranslation as the correct English usage is “X or Y, respectively”, not “X respectively Y”.
I’m sorry if it seems like I’m picking on you - it’s just something I’ve been curious about for years: is it something you learn in English class at school? Or does it simply come from looking up “beziehungsweise” in a dictionary and slotting it into the same place in the sentence?
My Japanese teacher used to call those “hesitation noises”, the sound you use to indicate, “I’m thinking of what to say next.” The ones I heard most in Japanese were pronounced like “eh-toe” and “ah-no”, drawing out the last vowel sound as long as you needed.
Okay, I have a related but slightly…erm…off-color question here. Recently, I happened across, in my internet searches, porn in what sounds like Spanish or Portuguese. I’m not terribly familiar with either language, but it sounds like the woman in the video “pronounces” the super-fake female orgasm sounds of porn as “Oy! Oy! Oy! Oy! (etc.)” Is this just an idiosyncrasy of that “actress” or is this the cultural idea of what a female orgasm sounds like?
Fair enough, though you are not the only one, so the mystery remains. Sorry for picking up on this one small infelicity in your otherwise perfect written English.
On the subject of sneezes, has anyone noticed that a lot of the words you say after a sneeze sound sort of like a sneeze themselves? Bless you, gesundheit, à tes souhaits, jesús, and so forth. The sound and sense compatibility is so strong that when I was a little kid I thought that “à tes souhaits” was actually the verb for “to sneeze” (j’atessoue, tu atessoues,…)
Fair enough, though you are not the only one, so the mystery remains. Sorry for picking up on this one small infelicity in your otherwise perfect written English.