To Sneer, Scoff, Scorn, and Cluck: An Onomatopoetic Verbal Complex in R1-n-ṣ?

A brief parable: in 1992, I attended a lecture given by the biologist Richard Ellis at the New York Explorers Club on the subject of the giant squid. One of Ellis’ main points was to introduce the audience to a research paradox which bedevilled his field: no one who was properly qualified to identify a giant squid (e. g., a wildlife biologist, teuthologist, zoologist, etc.) had ever seen a live one, while the many people (mainly deep-sea fishermen) who had reported ocean sightings of giant squid alive were not properly trained to know what they had seen.^[1] Ellis was almost as fascinated by the intellectual problem of how to deal with observations made by less-than-qualified observers as he was by the giant squid itself. This is the case here, where I will report some observations as well as a possible explanation which must all remain for now suggestions rather than proofs.

Recently trying to read a broken passage in an Akkadian text (unrelated to the present note), I turned to one of my favorite reference books, Karl Hecker’s Rücklaufiges Wörterbuch des Akkadischen (1990). I could identify the last two radicals of a broken word but the first was missing: R1-n-ṣ. Hecker offered three possibilities for a root with the last two radicals in this order: g-n-ṣ, ḫ-n-ṣ, and š-n-ṣ. Unfamiliar with these verbs, I turned to the dictionaries, learning that ganāṣu means “to wrinkle one’s nose,” ḫanāṣu can mean “to curl one’s lip,” and šanāṣu means “to sneer.” That the roots afforded by R1-n-ṣ should produce such closely aligned meanings seems impossible to be an accident. The essential equivalence of the terms is underscored by their co-occurrence in the word list Sag Bil 117–120, where kiri₃ ur₅ = ga-na-ṣu, ḫa-na-ṣu, ša-na-ṣu, na-ḫa-ru. To give more detail:

ganāṣu = CAD: “to sniff, wrinkle (one’s nose); AHw.: “(Nase, Lippen) hochziehen; Dt, die Nase rümpfen” (bi-ir ud, bi-ri-ig).^[2] Cf. gaṣāṣu, “to gnash the teeth, to rage.”

ḫanāṣu = AHw.: “Lippen hochziehen, Zähne zeigen,” “seine Nase hochziehen” (D).^[3] Cf. CAD “to rub (a body part).”^[4]

šanāṣu = “to sneer, scoff, turn up one’s nose”, with direct reference to the nose. ePSD gives “to flare the nostrils,” but the semantics of ur₅ suggest valences of smelling, suffering/despair/dejection, and noises (ur₅-ar₃, “a sound (onomatopoetic)”; ur₅-ar₃ za, “to make noise”) more than “flaring.” On that basis, a haughty “snorting” or “sniffing”^[5] might make better sense of the term.^[6]

Additionally, two other verbs seem to relate to the R1-n-ṣ complex. First, lexical lists provide, via Sumerian equivalents, the verb kalāṣu (*ḫalāṣu) = “to shrivel, wrinkle, roll up,” including wrinkling the nose (A III/3: 74f: bi-ir ud = kalāṣu, ganāṣu). Next, we may also connect the phonically similar nâṣu (naʾāṣu): CAD: “to scorn” (Sum. igi.tur, lit. “to make the eyes small”);^[7] if this is rightly associated, we could understand that forms R1-n-ṣ might derive from a base of Ø-n-ṣ, though this is uncertain.

The verbal complex altogether semantically enjoins the curling of the lip, baring of the teeth, wrinkling of the nose, narrowing of the eyes, sniffing/snorting, and—through the onomatopoesis of the l/n+ṣ sound—the clucking of the tongue in a disapproving “tsk”-like sound.^[8] In some cases, the verbs are grounded in a literal meaning (e. g., šanāṣu often takes appu, “nose,” as its direct object). In others, they only elliptically invoke sneering or disdain, as with “wrinkling” by itself (e. g., BWL 148, although in that case it is modified by šalṭiš, “arrogantly”]).^[9]

The verbal complex thus not only lexically but also paralinguistically communicates concepts of contempt, disgust, and disdain. This is a complex set of expressions whose sense is encapsulated (though not well defined) by the English word “grimace.” In Akkadian, I argue that the complex is lexicalized via its only audible element, the clucking “nṣ” at the core of all these verbs. We might say further that onomatopoesis is not even quite the right idea here: a clustering of similar sounds for related concepts such as these might better be termed a phonestheme (from Greek phone-, “sound” + -aisthema, “perception”), similar to cl- in “clunk, clink, clank,” sl- in “slippery, slimy, sludge,” etc.^[10]

From the point of view of the disdained person, the sentiment of disgust was communicated both aurally and visually: one could hear and see that one was being sneered at. From the point of view of the person doing the sneering, the facial and verbal acts were a physicalized response to something or someone, with an awareness of the movement of the facial muscles (kinesthesia). Thus, we find semantically connected feelings of aggression experienced and embodied in the narrowing of the eyes (focused suspicion),^[11] looking down the nose (status comparison),^[12] and the wrinkling of the nose and curling of the lip (revulsion). These were reactions translating moral and social judgements into sensorial reactions. As Anne-Caroline Rendu Loisel has argued, a range of spoken and embodied communications thus belong not only to lexified language, but also to the sensorium as “speech perception,” the sensory experience of speech which encodes cognitive elements.^[13] Rendu Loisel, teasing out the absence of any “hierarchy of the senses” in Akkadian descriptions of synesthestic experience (visual, aural, tangible, etc.), concludes that this kind of multivalent linguistic complex comports with “the findings of neuroscience [because] perception never privileges a single sense, and is always multisensory.”^[14]

Elsewhere, Rendu Loisel has noted the potential onomatopoesis of verbs of the /n/-additive (e. g., nabāḫu, “to bark,” lit. “to make the buḫ-sound”?) and PaSāSu forms (e. g., damāmu, “to moan,” and gaṣāṣu, “to gnash the teeth,” with probable connection to the l/n+ṣ complex here discussed).^[15] This follows on from patterns of these and other primae nun and doubled (i. e., mediae geminatae) verbs producing onomatopoetic force, as identified and proposed by von Soden.^[16] Onomatopoesis in Akkadian is hardly in superabundance, but examples include other likely /n/-forms^[17] as well as renderings of bird calls^[18] and certain vocalic interjections.^[19] It is possible that an R1-n-ṣ form would be consistent with that sort of transcription of interjections.

An alternative explanation was offered by one reviewer of this note, who pointed out that ḫ/ganāṣu and kalāṣu might simply be derivations of each other by virtue of sound changes between /ḫ/, /g/, and /k/, reducing the actual range of lexemes. This is certainly possible, but I do not see that it reduces the basic argument that the sound cluster was verbally productivity—rather, it seems to argue just for a different sort of production. A related objection is that while /š/ as a first root might imply causative force, the use of gutturals seems “a bit random” in terms of meaning/semantics. While I agree with this, I find at the same time significant that the proposed cluster was not artificially developed from first roots we might expect, especially /n/^[20] and /m/; to that extent, the initial /ḫ-g-k/ verbs seem more organically derived.

Still, before we attach too much linguistic significance to this particular verbal complex as some deep-structure realization of Volkssprache, it must be noted that all these verbs mostly appear in wisdom literature, omens, lexical lists, and other scientific texts. That is, if one were looking to find this paralinguistic usage confirmed as an everyday social convention, one would be disappointed to find that they have little presence in, for instance, letters. The verbs are altogether absent from Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian letters—just one instance of šanāṣu appears in the Amarna letters (EA 162 rev. 75) as “sneering, mocking”^[21] —and most have a similarly low profile in expressive literature, although again šanāṣu shows some slightly greater range, precipitating into wisdom literature and royal inscriptions as well.^[22]

It is hardly clear, therefore, that the R1-n-ṣ verbs either emerged from or were widely used in written Akkadian. This does not mean, of course, that those forms might not have gone on to become embedded in other Semitic languages at a later point, and a few examples suggest these may have survived to a modest degree.^[23] But I am not sure we need to find correlates in Semitic languages generally (and few can be identified) to identify the pertinence of the form in Akkadian: a phenomenon in one language does not necessarily need to be grounded in parallels from its entire language family to define or justify its existence. Looking to correct the low status that onomatopoeia has had in linguistics ever since Plato and Socrates dismissed it as a low form of mimicry, Anatoly Liberman wrote: “Our task is not to reject the existence of onomatopoeia (this would be counterproductive) or minimize its role (this would be incautious), but to show its place in etymological pursuits.”^[24] Given the restricted usage of the verbs, my guess is that scribes composing ominous and scientific texts were creatively lexicalizing everyday interjections of the “nṣ” sound—a process visible in the formal productivity of the several verbs in the complex—while losing much of the kinesthetic and paralinguistic sense of the vocal and expressive gestures that lay behind them.