There is a tremendous pleasure in using onomatopoeic words in speech. I think that even reading them in a book adds a little extra to the narrative.

Field of buttercups totally unrelated to this post.

For example, a horse clip-clop, clip-clops along a road.

Hissing just has to be a snake, or perhaps a water spray, but if it is the similar sound of frying food it a sizzle.

Splish-splash is the sound of small children stamping in puddles. In France, of course, those children would be going plouf-plouf. In Portuguese, pluft-pluft. German has the verbs platschen and planschen, although I have no idea how they decline. It would be plusk-plusk in Polish vsplesk-vsplesk in Russian. I’m sure you get the idea.

I like that quite a few birds seem to be named after the sounds they make. Thus we have the cuckoo, and the bulbul. In Ladakh, the pigeon is the po-ro, in Russia it is the golb, and pretty much the same in Poland. It is due in danish.

Which may or may not lead us quite conveniently back to last Wednesday’s post, about similar or identical words in different languages. All these similarities might again be the product of languages keeping some words the same after they have evolved and changed into new languages. Or they might arise naturally, since by their very nature they are likely to sound very similar anyway.

Of course, it’s probably a mixture of both these things, and far more complex in any case.