Noncompositional

For any learner of Japanese, probably the one class of words that presents the most difficulty is that of mimetics. In Japanese, these are generally classed into two groups, gion-go (擬音語) ‘imitate-sound-word,’ which denote (surprise!) sounds in the world, and gitai-go (擬態語) ‘imitate-state-word,’ which denote states and manners of actions. There is another class, called gisee-go, which sometimes is just classed under gion-go; these words imitate vocalizations, of animals usually. And it is this final class that I experienced first-hand this morning, in my bathroom…

…while at the sink. I was gargling some water, trying to get the right configuration in my throat so that the water went as far down as possible. I was also vocalizing so that I could hear which “vowel” sound and pitch got the right configuration. And as I’m gargling, what do I hear but a mimetic! It was unmistakeable - the gargling actually seemed to produce kero-kero (けろけろ), which (as recorded here and here) is the Japanese rendition of the frog’s ribbit. That was pretty amazing to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t reproduce the sound later, and since no one else was there, I’m not sure what it sounded like from an outside perspective.

Those who’ve ever ventured inside a Sanrio store or who have been exposed to Japanese children’s characters are probably familiar to some degree with the frog Keroppi, whose name of course comes from けろけろ, with a diminutive (I think) -ppi on the end. What’s interesting is that all of his family also have kero- in their names, like kero-ma (’mother’), kero-bah (’grandmother’), kero-reen(u) (imitating the name “Caroline,” I guess), and kero-ppa (’father’). The last is interesting, since it has the geminate -pp-, which normally only occurs in mimetics and some few native words, as well as western loans like toppu ‘top (of a web page).’ It doesn’t usually occur in words meaning ‘father.’ I guess it was either for a parallel with keroppi, or the relative unnaturalness of an intervocalic singleton [p], or a combination of the two that led the creators to geminate the father’s name.

Now, if you look up けろけろ in a regular Japanese dictionary like the Daijirin, you won’t find the “sound a frog makes” sense, just the state-of-affairs-denoting sense(s), which mean generally “relaxed, cool,” as in even though she lost the game, she stayed cool about it. It’s unclear if these are related. Even more confusingly, けろけろ (for frogs) is often associated with kyoro-kyoro (きょろきょろ), which means ‘to look around restlessly (for something).’ I’m not sure what cultural models exist for frogs in Japan - maybe they’re always cool, relaxed, unworried. Or maybe they’re always looking around for stuff. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the two forms are only coincidentally identical.