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interestingly, in Korea the laugh is keke / kek / kkkk / etc., while in Japan the laugh is w / www / etc. Kind of like how animal sounds are very different acr
by hkmurakami 12y ago
interestingly, in Korea the laugh is keke / kek / kkkk / etc., while in Japan the laugh is w / www / etc.
Kind of like how animal sounds are very different across countries and cultures.
- pandaman 12y ago"w" in Japanese is not an onomatopoeia but an abbreviation (for 笑い "warai" laugh) as same as in English "lol". There is an actual laughter onomatopoeia in Japanese too, it's "fu(fu)" or "a(ha)".
- yongjik 12y agoKorean actually has a generous share of onomatopoeic words: for laugh, there's at least haha, hehe, hoho, heoheo, huhu, and kkalkkal, and that's just counting more or less standardized words that would probably appear in most dictionaries and have well-understood connotations. Interestingly, Korean internet somehow settled on ㅋㅋ (literally, "k k"): the closest word I can think of is 크크 (keukeu), which is... well, the kind of laugh a villain might make after explaining to a captured hero how he will be thrown into an elaborate death trap. (And don't believe some internet sources that say Koreans laugh "kekeke". It's simply because the sound I wrote as "eu" ("Close central unrounded vowel", or /ɨ/) has no English counterpart, so people wasn't sure how to write that in English. Besides, nobody's gonna pronounce "keukeukeu" correctly anyway, so why bother.)
- k__ 12y agoI always had the impression kek was a joke-version of lol lol -> lolz -> lulz -> lel -> kek