Name: Talal Alghizzi Applied Linguistics

University College Cork 25/09/2011

Every language has at least three techniques for forming new vocabulary. The first technique is to take an obsolete word and use it to describe something. For example, although the English word motor - a word synonymous with car- was Arabized years ago and has become a native word in the Arabic language, the Academy of Arabic Language has translated the word to Sayarah which means moving planets or moving cattle or camels. The correlation between the original archaic meaning of the word sayarah in Arabic and the machine it describes is that both of them are of a moving nature. Nowadays, however, only Arabic lexicographers would know the original meaning. The second technique is to describe, for instance, the operation of a machine as in the case of the noun computer, which is a derivative from the verb to compute. The last technique is to apply some changes such as: affixation, blending, clippingetc. to the roots of old words to produce new forms and functions. However, all of the above mentioned techniques are dependent on the existence of old words which leads to a question revived every now and then: how did our ancestors invent words to mean something or to refer to silent objects. It is a fact that some words have arbitrary relationships with their meanings, and that is probably why a pen in the English language is a totally different word in Arabic: Qalam. Nevertheless, can the scarcity of research studies investigating this specific area be a factor in making some linguists believe so? A lot of linguists who are not supportive of that theory have discussed sound symbolism: onomatopoeia, associated with some words where pronunciation suggests the meaning (Fromkin, et. al., 2007), to prove that the association between words and their meanings may not be arbitrary. The discussion here will address onomatopoeia from a translators point of view. In translation, it is very common to have some words in the source language which do not have equivalent meanings in the target language. Therefore, one of the techniques used by translators to solve this problem is transliteration. Transliteration indicates that the word in the source language is phonetically modified and transferred to the target language. For instance, the word computer in English is transferred to Arabic as [Kambju:tar]. Clearly, the changes in the phonetic transcript of the above-mentioned word are for the sake of accommodating the pronunciation for Arabic speakers. That is likely why it became an Arabic word, regardless of the effort of The Academy of Arabic language to replace it with its translation: Hasoup/[hasu:b] . Surprisingly, Arabic translators often encounter onomatopoeic words which have an equivalent in their native languages. Although both English and Arabic have a different word to indicate the sound of running water: ripple [Khari:r] , both of them also have similar onomatopoeic words to describe the sound made when something penetrates the surface of water: splash, [tish] . Upon consideration, it is my belief that the relationship between words and their meanings is not arbitrary, or at least not for the onomatopoeic words. I also believe that it is a feature of the human brain. If linguists argue the opposite, then how would they explain the agreement between English and Arabic when it comes to having words which were formed by imitating their sounds? Can that be mere coincidence? 1