pauraque_bk | om nom nom

This is a post about the phrase "om nom nom" and its derived forms such as "nom" meaning "to eat", "noms" meaning "food", "nomlicious" meaning "delicious", etc.

I believe that this is an onomatopoeia, imitating the sound of eating. As I recall, it predates internet-related usages and lolcats-related derivations, but I don't know by how much. (Wiktionary suggests usage in baby talk, which sounds right to me.)

The other day

idlerat suggested a different etymology on Twitter: "I think I have learned the etymology of "nom nom." Jamaican Creole "nyam" = "eat" (from Ewe, a West African language)." I replied that I found this very doubtful, and tried to explain why in 140-character bits, which was hard, so here we are.

First of all, let me talk about the general misconception that when you find two words with similar phonetics and semantics, it's a good indication that there's a relationship of some kind. When the languages are not genetically related and there is no historical attestation of the word being borrowed, this is not an idea that works at all.

I offered this article, which goes into some detail about how likely it is to find random "matches" of this kind between languages. When you're dealing with two languages that have hundreds of thousands of words each, what would actually be surprising is if you found NO words that seemed to be nearly the same.

Additionally, when you go looking for words that are similar, you have to define what you mean by similar first. Semantically similar? "Nyam" means eat. "Nom" can mean eat... but it's not the normal word for eat, it's a slang term that has a lot of layers of connotation besides just "it means eat". (This one is actually not so bad -- often people try to claim words are related that have a much more tenuous semantic connection.)

Phonetically similar? "Nyam" and "nom" have two consonants in common. They have no vowels in common, orthographically, though to be fair I don't know how the vowel in "nyam" is pronounced. They're also very short words; coming up with "matches" of this type for short words is easier, especially if you just ignore the vowels, as many people tend to do.

So anyway, I think it's onomatopoeia. Why? How do linguists know what words are and aren't onomatopoeia? They don't, always, but there are ways to take educated guesses.

1) Ask native speakers. Doesn't always work, as we see -- native speakers can disagree and be mistaken.

2) Eliminate other possibilities. Linguists are actually pretty good at figuring out the etymologies of words that are borrowed, derived, or genetically descended, using the comparative method, not to mention written records for historically newer stuff. English loves to borrow words from all over, so the idea of a Jamaican Creole borrowing is perfectly plausible. But there should be written attestations to demonstrate it. The burden of proof is on the one who proposes the borrowing to show when and where it happened.

3) Look at formal characteristics. Onomatopoeic words can be (or become) extraordinarily stylized, but sometimes really do sound like what they're supposed to mimic. But it's subjective. To me, "om nom nom" sounds like eating; to Ratty it doesn't. They can also be given away by containing odd sounds that aren't normally phonemes in the language. "Om nom nom" doesn't fit that one.

But there is one that certainly fits: Reduplication is very typical of onomatopoeia, cross-linguistically. Ratty pointed out already that reduplication can serve other functions, which it certainly can, but this is a major one, and the only one that's common in English. (I replied that English doesn't use reduplication as derivational morphology, which I remembered later isn't true, when I heard Hannelore say "I'm not going OUT-out" -- meaning she wasn't going really out, out per se. But this isn't related; that's not the kind of reduplication we see in "om nom nom".)

4) Look at distribution. Some of the derivatives of "om nom nom" can be used as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but "om nom nom" itself normally can't. It's an interjection that stands on its own, meaning something like "that's yummy", "I want to eat that", etc. depending on the context. This is also typical of sound-symbolic words, though they can always develop extended uses over time.

Some of the above I learned from Thomas Payne's published stuff on investigating underdocumented languages, though I can't think of citations for all of it.

Ratty also raised another great question: Why *should* eating sound like "om nom nom"? Why not something else? Why do English roosters go cock-a-doodle-do, but Spanish (or is it French?) roosters go cocorico?

Unfortunately this isn't really possible to answer. Phonologists can identify trends and likelihoods in how languages acquire and use their phonemes, but, you know, why does Latin have centum and Sanskrit have satem? Why didn't they both change the Proto-Indo-European word the same way? Nobody has a good answer yet, and I think for the same reason, we can't really ask "why" a given language invents sound symbolism in the way that it does. Again, there are trends, but no rules that can be used to successfully predict what the language will do.