象声词 Chinese onomatopoeias

Here's a stumper for you -- since Chinese doesn't have an alphabet, how do they do onomatopoeias? You know, words for sounds, like "pop" or "buzz." Do they write "balloon burst sound" or "bee flying sound"?

Nope.

What they do is take a character with a similar sound and add a "mouth" symbol ("口") to the front. For example, to get the character for the "Ha, ha!" laughing sound, you take "合" (the word for "shut"), tack a "口" to the front, and you get "哈." It doesn't have anything to do with "shut," but because they sound similar, it works.

How about that.