Posted by Victor Mair

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'Tis the season of sneezing, and I'm doing a lot of it these days.  At 5 AM this morning, I was awakened by my own sneezing.   It was completely unpremeditated and unexpected.  The sounds that came out were aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Low level / high rising.  

The conventional representation of this sound in writing is "achoo".  Other variations include "kerchoo" and "hachao", etc.  In German, I think that the sound of a sneeze is represented as "hatschee" and in Japanese it is "hakushon".

This morning, the sound that I explosively emitted was aaah-HOOOOO!!!!!  Twice.

Since I have a large, Alpine schnoz that acts as an echo chamber, causing the sound to reverberate in my nasal passages, it is extremely loud and ends shrilly.  It can be heard a block away, or all the way down the turn of the corridor from my office to the departmental office about 40 paces distant.

As the day wore on, the beginning of the second syllable took on more the characteristics of wheezing, and later became a hushing sibilant, then a hissing sibilant.  By late afternoon, it was a "ch-" sound (voiceless postalveolar affricate /ʧ/).  The incipit of the second syllable was not constant throughout the day, but I have to say I was surprised when I heard my own sneeze in the morning and realized that its second syllable began quite differently from the conventional onomatopoeic representations of the word.  

I must add that sometimes the first syllable began with an "h-" and sometimes with a "k[h]-".  The second syllable often ended with a melodic flourish, sometimes quite elaborate, like the cadenzas I used to play when I was a serious French hornist.  None of this was intentional.  These "sneezes and variations" just happened; they took their own course; I did not consciously control them.

"Sneeze" is an intransitive verb meaning "to involuntarily and with great rapidity expel air as a reflex induced by an irritation in the nose" (adapted from Wiktionary); "to make a sudden violent spasmodic audible expiration of breath through the nose and mouth especially as a reflex act" (Merriam-Webster).  As a noun, "sneeze" indicates the act of sneezing.

Everyone who is a native / fluent speaker of English knows the meaning of "sneeze", both as a verb and as a noun.  "Sneeze" is not a hard word to spell, so virtually anyone who knows this common word for such a natural human reflexive physiological response to an allergenic irritant will be able to record the word in written form, whether the spelling is "correct" or not.

Similarly, everyone who is a native / fluent speaker of Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) will know the word for "sneeze" and how to pronounce it:  pēntì 噴嚏.  But there the similarity ends. In all my decades if teaching and interacting with hundreds of native speakers of MSM, I only met two who could write both sinographs for pēntì 噴嚏, and only a handful who could write one of the two sinographs (the first one, of course).  All the rest were stumped and had to leave a blank space or resort to pinyin (like this).

Selected readings

• "Sneeze, hiccup, cough" (12/19/14)
• "Spelling bees and character amnesia"
• "Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters"
• "Character amnesia revisited"
• "Character Amnesia"
• "French Horn Church" (9/13/24)
• "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", by David Moser, in Pīnyīn.info, from Victor H. Mair, ed., Schriftfestschrift: Essays in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday, 27 (August, 1991), ix, 245 pp.

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