In the conversation you just heard, Anna responds to Jonathan by saying "Don't shhhh me." In this case, Anna is using shhhh as a verb. When you tell someone shhhh, you are saying the situation requires quiet. Suddenly, the people next to you start to have an argument. Onomatopoetic words are not only nouns, though. These words help the reader imagine sounds in the story. In comic books, we often see these sound effects written in the pictures. Do you remember closing your jacket to protect yourself? The zipper is the object that connects the front parts of a jacket by joining the sets of metal teeth along the edges. Some sounds even define the objects that make them. These words are all nouns that express the sound effect you are hearing. You close the front of your jacket to protect yourself. As the car passes you, it drives through some water. Imagine you are walking down a street on a rainy day. The noises animals make are not the only examples of onomatopoetic words. These sounds are expressed differently in different languages because every language uses sound in different ways. A native Korean-speaker would say mung mung. They would say dogs make the sound gav gav.
But, a native Russian-speaker would not agree. When a native English-speaker says the word woof, the pronunciation is somewhat similar to the sound the dog makes. When a person says an onomatopoetic word, the sound of the word copies the natural sound the word is identifying. But how do we explain in words what a sound is? For example, how do you describe the sound a dog makes? Also, does everyone hear that sound the same way?Įvery language in the world has words that express sounds. Other sounds hurt your ears, like a loud machine. Some sounds are pleasing to hear, like a bird's voice.