User:Tropylium/Finnish ideophones

Finnish ideophones are words built on monosyllabic roots that indicate a sound or a type of action. Most cases are onomatopoeia, though certain forms may indicate a type of action

Root structure
Regular lexical roots in Finnish are bisyllabic — e.g., , — and follow the principle of arbitraryness of the sign: that is, there is e.g. nothing especially "k-like" about hands, nor nothing especially "j-like" about feet. Ideophones stray from this pattern. They are firstly built on monosyllabic roots: while a typical lexical root word can normally be used all on its own, an ideophonic root can at most occur by itself as an interjection. To form a content word (verb, noun, adjective…), an additional derivational suffix has to be added. Often these also involve slightly different suffixes. Secondly, their approximate meaning is often inferrable from the root's constituents through principles of sound symbolism.

Vowels
A common feature of ideophones is that roots that differ only in their vowel indicate similar sounds or phenomena that differ in their intensity or __. Typical associations are: The root vowel e is found in ideophones only very rarely.
 * The vowel a indicates a "neutral" grade.
 * The vowel i indicates high-pitched sounds or actions associated with them.
 * The vowels o, u and more rarely y indicate deeper-pitched sounds or larger-scale actions.
 * The vowel ö indicates muddy or unclear sounds, and may carry a negative connotation.

Due to this fact, the tables of words below are not sorted in alphabetical order, but instead according to their consonant skeleton, with related ideophones grouped together by their vowels.

Continuous roots
These roots tend to indicate continuous actions, often oscillation of some kind. They normally have the simple structure (C)VC. Base verbs are regularly derived by the suffix (stem ); action nouns, typically referring to a sound, by the suffix. (The -i- in these may be considered a linking vowel, found in almost all words derived from these roots.)

Since the base verbs are e-stems, frequentatives are not formed by the common, but often by a separate suffix.

Roots ending in a stop consonant (p, t, k) are unaffected by consonant gradation, even though many forms would call for a weak grade ( : rather than expected ** :  or  : **).

Punctual roots
These roots typically end in two or more consonants, usually including one stop consonant (p, t or k).