I was just looking at this list of onomatopoeias, which are of course words that sound like the sound they describe. It occurred to me that different languages must have their own varying lists of onomatopoeias. In fact I've seen accounts of different languages having different words for the noises made by, say, roosters. (They apparently don't say cock-a-doodle-do everywhere). So that would be a kind of language barrier, but if you have a little patience it would be a fun one to get over.
Makes sense that "murmur" is on the list. I've heard that REM chose it as an album title because it's the easiest word in the English language to speak.
1 comment:
The list of onomatopoeias is much more substantial than I would have guessed. Whether other languages have something similar would be worth exploring - okay, I just did by means of a google search for 'onomatopoeias in other languages'. Apparently they're quite common in languages other than English - Japanese boasts of more than a thousand onomatopoeias, far more than in English. A rooster crow in Japanese is 'kokekokko'. Pretty neat, huh?
It looks like they had a habit of language trickery by naming
the band REM in the first place.
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