Onomatopoeia and Poetry Translation
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Constraints of the Semiotic System
Onomatopoeia, Expressive Sound Patterns and Poetry Translation
Submitted to the volume:
Uta Klein, Katja Mellmann, Stefanie Metzger (eds.)
Anthropology and social history
Heuristics in the study of literature
Figure 2 Hand-painted spectrograms of the syllables ba, da, ga.
The ba--da--ga pitch continuum of F2 is divided into 14 steps instead of three.
The two parallel regions of black indicate regions of energy concentration, F1 and F2.
Notice that the onset frequency of F2 of da is higher than that of ba;
and the onset frequency of F2 of ga is higher than that of da.
ba, da, ga |
Let us isolate the second formant transition, that piece of sound which differs across the series, and listen to just those sounds alone.
Glides and whistles |
Figure 3 Sonograms of [S] and [s], representing the first and second formant,
and indicating why [s] is somehow "higher".
(S represents the initial consonant of shoe; s the initial consonant of sue)
kuku | i-a-u |
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Figure 4 The upper window presents the the first and second formant of the cuckoo's song
and of the phonetic vowels i-a-u; the lower window presents their waveform.
The upper windows present the pitch contours
of the cuckoo's song
Figure 5
and of the phonetic vowels i-a-u
spoken by a male;
the lower windows present their
waveform.
![]()
Figure 6 Spectrograms of the syllables ba, da, ga, in natural speech.
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