Such an extremely interesting phenomenon, like onomatopoeic words or onomatopoeia, is found in almost all languages of the world, but when studying both native and foreign languages, for some reason this topic is often ignored. In Russian language lessons, these words are mentioned in passing, only when studying interjections. These two groups really have common features, for example, problems with word formation.
It is very easy to distinguish interjections from onomatopoeia: the former express feelings without naming them - “oh”, “ah” and so on. And onomatopoeic words imitate some kind of sound, for example, “clap”, “click”, “meow”, etc. Of course, such an imitation is not perfect, but it can usually be understood by native speakers without further explanation. It is also interesting that, not being, in fact, a full-fledged part of speech, onomatopoeia carries some kind of semantics, that is, this “set of sounds” is not without a certain meaning. In addition, the onomatopoeic semantics do not change depending on the context, while the value of interjection can be precisely determined only depending on the intonation and language situation.
Nevertheless, onomatopoeic words are very important, both in Russian and in other languages. It is with onomatopoeia that speech and a comparison of objects, phenomena, living beings with the words that designate them begin to form. For example, the fall of many young children will designate as "bang", and the car - "BBC". In addition, sometimes such words become independent parts of speech, this is especially clearly seen in the English language.
It is curious that almost all the variety of world sounds can be put into onomatopoeic words. Examples are extremely simple - any child will depict a buzzing bee or the rustle of grass, a dog barking and a sheep bleating. True, in different languages it will sound completely different, which seems to be an interesting feature of this phenomenon.
The equivalent of Russian "crow" in French is "cocorico", and in English - "cock-a-doodle-doo". In addition, Japanese cats meow quite differently than Italian cats. The reason for this is believed to be the complex nature of the formation of original sounds. Since the human speech apparatus cannot perfectly convey the whole variety of rustling, creaking, rustling and buzzing, the only way out is to imitate them approximately, taking as a basis only some characteristic part of the sound. In addition, there is also a subjective perception of the same sound by different people, which is why
onomatopoeic words in different languages differ from each other, but at the same time they have some common basis.
English in the sense of using onomatopoeia is extremely interesting, because in it they are widely used. The buzzing sound - buzz - turned into a noun and a verb with a similar meaning, the same thing happened with the hissing sound - hiss. And such English words, descended from onomatopoeia, - a large number. By the way, in the Russian language there are also such cases when onomatopoeic words turn into independent parts of speech, however, most of them relate to Internet slang.