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Ideophone vs Onomatopoiea: The Civil War

July 23, 2018 at 2:20 pm, No comments

Ideophone was born as prince of Glottaland. He was the son of Onomatopoeia who was a very good and successful queen. However, she applied very strict rules to govern the kingdom. Her success laid in her strictness. She decided to teach Ideophone the principles of creating words in the way she practised them. Actually as a child, Ideophone was very similar to his mother:  he could imitate the sounds and create words from their sounds.

However, as he grew up, he started showing interest in other things beyond the sounds. He liked the colors of the grass and the sky, he liked how flowers smell, so he liked nature very much. One day, he discovered how to imitate these properties of nature and from that moment, he learned how to create words from colors and smells.  Every day he learned something new, every day he created new words. But he did all his activities in secret because he feared his mother’s reaction.

Once Ideophone went to the city to visit his people and see how they lived. As he was walking, he saw people moving. He couldn’t resist: he created words from the movements he saw. After that he saw a girl laughing. He immediately created a new word. Then he saw a man crying. A new word arose again. He became  capable of making words which resembled movements and emotions. Ideophone’s talents went very far beyond Onomatopoiea’s.  

The queen learned about Ideophone’s talent and his disobedience to the rules, because some languages came to the queen to complain. The Korean language complained because Ideophone created a new separate word class in the Korean structure. The Mundang language complained because the prince infected several of her word classes. The Japanese language complained because Ideophone’s creations occur within her utterances and they are inseparable from the other elements of the utterance.  

Onomatopoiea got very angry because she couldn’t allow him to create new words in different ways. She couldn’t allow to develop new abilities. She wanted him to follow the queen’s way of creation. She got so angry that she decided to punish him by forbidding from using his talents.

However, Ideophone had already created so many new words which showed a high degree of grammatical independence, that he could initiate a civil war against his mother. He got stronger and stronger because he never stopped the creation. In the end, Ideophone usurped the queen and became the king of Glottaland. However, there were other pretenders to the crown too…


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