I looked at the wikis for sound_effects and onomatopoeia, and I cannot help but think that the distinction between the two is arbitrary and unnecessary. Is the difference between the two really great enough to warrant two different tags?

It's likely better to consider onomatopoeia as a subset of sound effects in that sound effects that are spelled out exactly translating the sound into letter wouldn't be onomatopoeia, which is actual words that resemble the sounds they're representing.

clawstripe said:
It's likely better to consider onomatopoeia as a subset of sound effects in that sound effects that are spelled out exactly translating the sound into letter wouldn't be onomatopoeia, which is actual words that resemble the sounds they're representing.

idk that still sounds like a pretty arbitrary and hard to remember distinction

dripen_arn said:
idk that still sounds like a pretty arbitrary and hard to remember distinction

this is what i'm trying to say. it makes it a bit of a hassle to check whether each sound effect is actually a word or not.

what about ambiguous sfx like "glorp" or "plap" which aren't actual words but still mimic the sound they describe? they are clearly meant to be onomatopoeia, but the wiki's definition doesn't allow them to be.

what about words like "grow" which may be used as sound effects but don't really sound like what they describe? it's an actual word, so it could be onomatopoeia, but it also can't be because it doesn't sound like growing.

what about posts like this one with sound effects like "ka-knot" which are created for the sake of humor? this one contains a word, "knot", but also has the intensifying sfx prefix "ka". does that make the entire thing a sound effect? do we separate it and make "knot" a sound effect but keep "ka" as onomatopoeia?

my point is that separating sound_effects and onomatopoeia leaves too much gray area when it comes to examples like these. that's why i think it makes more sense, for the sake of simplicity, to just alias one to another.

garfieldfromgarfield said:
this is what i'm trying to say. it makes it a bit of a hassle to check whether each sound effect is actually a word or not.

what about ambiguous sfx like "glorp" or "plap" which aren't actual words but still mimic the sound they describe? they are clearly meant to be onomatopoeia, but the wiki's definition doesn't allow them to be.

what about words like "grow" which may be used as sound effects but don't really sound like what they describe? it's an actual word, so it could be onomatopoeia, but it also can't be because it doesn't sound like growing.

what about posts like this one with sound effects like "ka-knot" which are created for the sake of humor? this one contains a word, "knot", but also has the intensifying sfx prefix "ka". does that make the entire thing a sound effect? do we separate it and make "knot" a sound effect but keep "ka" as onomatopoeia?

my point is that separating sound_effects and onomatopoeia leaves too much gray area when it comes to examples like these. that's why i think it makes more sense, for the sake of simplicity, to just alias one to another.

I second making onomatopoeia a sub tag or whatever it's called of sound_effects

Id say just make chalk it up to whether it's spelled out or an actual word, for most cases that should work.

Eg:

" *screaming* " vs "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"
"moan" vs "aah-"

And so on, then you just get get some edge cases, like, is describing the sound of lightning as "crash" spelling the sound or?