Exploring Onomatopoeic Rhyme Patterns in English

My old man said follow the van…

What do a 1933 film featuring a giant gorilla, a children’s word for pyjamas, and an informal group of British notables and aristos in the early eighteenth century have in common?  

Semantically, very little. In terms of sound, a lot.

King Kong, jim-jams and the Kit Cat Club all three illustrate a mostly unwritten rule of English about the order in which we put vowel sounds when we repeat consonant elements to make rhyming words or phrases. It is known as the rule of ablaut reduplication.

The rule states that when the first vowel in a reduplicated word or phrase is /i/, the second will be an /a/ or an /ɒ/.

That explains my first three examples: King Kong, jim-jams and the Kit Cat Club.

And when there are three vowels, the order will always be /i/ /a/ /ɒ/.

Which explains the ‘bish, bash, bosh’ approach often associated with Boris Johnson, not to mention the onomatopoeic ding-dang-dong.

The variants ding-dang and ding-dong confirm the first part of the rule, which also seems to apply to phrases – in dribs and drabs – and to words with only partial consonance such as think tank. It also explain why Liberal and Labour coalitions were Lib-Lab and not *Lab-Lib.

It also explains why, when you go to a jumble sale or rummage sale, you might hope to choose a choice knick-knick from among all the bric-a-brac.

And it helps explain why KitKat is such a strong brand name for that well-known chocolate-finger bar.

And the rule seems to apply also to phrases with three elements where the /i/ is repeated:

Hickory, dickory dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.

*Hickory, dockory, dick just sounds anomalous.

Similarly, it’s been claimed that this rule accounts for the ‘big bad wolf’ in the Little Red Riding Hood story.

How so?

According to the normal order of English adjectives, ‘opinion’ comes before ‘size’, so it should be ‘the bad big wolf’. But that contravenes the /i/-/a/ rule.

How many phrases of this kind?

I knew about  this rule but, being the obsessive I am, wanted to find out how extensive it is and if there are any exceptions. So I trawled the OED using various combinations of wildcards. I can’t guarantee I’ve found all relevant items, but I’ve amassed well over a hundred. At first, I had a sinking feeling of biting off more than I can chew, and they’ve certainly given me plenty of food for thought.** In what follows I give the OED date, where relevant, for the word or phrase

At the outset it’s worth noting that this is an historic tendency, not a feature of modern slang: the earliest examples, mishmash and riff-raff, date to before 1475.

Many a man was mortheryde and kylde in that conflycte, I wot not what name hyt for the multytude of ryffe raffe.

(Many a man was murdered and killed in that conflict; I don’t know what name I should call the multitude of riff-raff.)

Sound symbolism

There’s sound symbolism going on in the many words which are obviously onomatopoeic, from pit-a-pat (before 1533) to whizz-bang (1881). It’s the different consonants that convey the kind of sound denoted. The shs of splish-splash convey liquid and squelching, as in Swift’s 1735 translation from the Irish:

The Floor is all wet,… While the Water and Sweat, Splish, splash in their Pumps.

J. Swift, translation of H. MacGauran, Irish-Feast in Works vol. II. 296

The voiceless stops – /k/ /p/ /t/ – of clip-clop and tick-tock convey – to me, anyway – a hollow, echoing sound and a metallic one, respectively.

I leave it to you to decide what kind of sound is conveyed by bingo-bango (1883), ting-tang (1863) or thwick-thwack (1575).

flip-flapping and flip-flopping

But many other words I’ve identified share semantic features, some of which I will  cover in future posts.

The common idea of movement accounts for several. For instance, one meaning of flip-flap as a noun is a somersault:

He danc’d a Saraband with Flip flaps, and Sommersets. (1676)

From that meaning of literal motion develops the idea of mental motion, a change of mind, as the actor David Garrick noted in a letter of 11 April 1764:

Flip flaps, & great changes without meaning may distil from the head, whose Eyes are half asleep.

Flip-flop has undergone a similar development.

Swing-swang (before 1703) can refer to the motion of a pendulum or to the mental motion of toing and froing in opinion. Wig-wagging (1886 in this meaning) refers to sending signals by moving flags or lights in a prearranged code.

Rabbie Burns rides a nag

And the one most visibly to do with motion is zig-zag, first encountered in English as a noun in 1712 and then as a verb in 1787, as noted in a letter by Robert Burns in a letter of 7 July 1787:

His horse…zigzagged across before my old spavin’d hunter.

Unlike the others mentioned so far, though, which were formed ‘within English’ as the OED tends to phrase it, this a is loanword from the French zigzag, which goes back at least to 1680.

Whether the same sound rules apply to French, I cannot say, but it’s interesting that riff-raff too is probably either a direct borrowing from Old French and Anglo-Norman rifraf, or a shortening of riff and raff, meaning ‘one and all’, from Old French rif et raf. Similarly, English bric-a-brac comes from French bric-à-brac, ‘miscellaneous, unordered objects of little value’. The application of the rule in other languages is something I’ll come back to anecdotally in a future post.

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** ‘Food for thought’ answers to the widespread conceptual metaphor IDEAS ARE FOOD. If you find that a hard notion to swallow, you’ve proved my point.