Are there any practices to use onomatopoeia in English for describing the degree of joyfulness / funniness by laughter and sorrow by crying?

The various terms for laughing in English are:

• to cackle - to laugh sharply in a high pitch like a crow
• to giggle - a suppressed laugh
• to guffaw - a deep belly laugh
• to chuckle - an understated laugh
• to snicker, snigger - to laugh through the noise (mouth closed) at something rude

There's quite a bit more nuance and presonality to these different words than the dictionary gives. Also, this isn't a comprehensive list.

They aren't strictly onomatopoeic but they are close, some more so than others. To twitter sounds like an old lady barely laughing, to guffaw like a big fat man letting it all out.

There is also a selection of ways of spelling 'tee hee' for 'titter', 'haw haw' for 'guffaw'. But these are not set in stone. Also, the sound-words like 'tee hee' are not actually the sound that people use (for example like how a sneeze doesn't actually sound like 'atchoo' which how it is normally presented in wwriting).

Some words sound very much like what they describe (like words for animal sounds). In the other extreme, for most words for noises, there is no connection with the sound of the word and the sound itself ('to bray' for a donkey sound).

There really are no words that -are- what they describe.

So in comparison to Japanese, English doesn't seem to have such a rich set of words for laughing, and what it has is not so closely onomatopoeic, but there is something of the same system.

I enjoyed your question. The answer is yes, we use onomatopoeia to indicate degrees of laughter and crying.

The list that users have supplied so far (with a couple of additions from me):

Degrees of regular laughter

• yuk yuk - head-tossing or belly-holding (after a really funny joke, for example)
• ho ho - jovial and deep
• Ha ha - hearty or mild (or sometimes mocking)
• heh heh - half-hearted
• hee hee or tee hee - a peep of laughter

Context specific laughter

• bwahaha or mwahaha - evil
• nyeh-nyeh-nyeh - cackling
• nyuck nyuck - imbecilic
• har-di-har-har or har har or haw haw - sarcastic or mocking

Degrees of crying

• wah - full force
• boo hoo - mild or medium
• sniff sniff - sniveling

I don't think anyone has offered an expression for weeping.

Your question opens up a can of worms, to be sure. While onomatopoeia is the use of words whose pronunciation imitates the sound the word describes, Anglophones have perhaps more words that bear no relationship (or very little relationship) to real-world sounds than they do to words that do.

Buzz (or bzzzzz) is a good example of the latter, and screech is a good example of the former. In other words, very often the connection between sound and pronunciation is sometimes rather a product of imagination, as Robert A. Harris points out in his "A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices." Furthermore, "Onomatopoeia can produce a lively sentence, adding a kind of flavoring by its sound effects, no matter the lack of a real-life "referent."

It would appear, then, Japanese has many more layers of meaning that can be communicated onomatopoeically than English, at least pertaining to humor and sadness. What Anglophones seem to lack in this regard they more than make up for, however, in nonverbal cues that liven their quasi-onomatopoeic words.

For example, when we say "boo-hoo" in a facetious or even sarcastic way, we might take our fists, put them up to our eyes, and in a circular motion with a "sad" look on our faces say "boo-hoo," thus communicating mock sadness, as if to say, "Grow up and quit acting like a baby!"

Another nonverbal cue with sarcastic overtones is the "smallest violin playing the saddest song" gesture, in which a person rubs his index finger and thumb together at the tips in a rocking motion to communicate mock sadness. The gesture, I assume, imitates (the heart of onomatopoeia) the see-saw motion of a violinist as s/he plays the violin!

The words cited by the commenters, above, are good examples, but again, they do not really imitate any real-life sounds. Combined with gestures, facial expressions, and general "body English," they do, however, communicate shades of meaning. What's more, you do not necessarily have to be a good actor to pull them off; people use them all the time quite naturally!

Assuming that you are referring to a literary context; a quick review of English-speaking authors such as Jane Austen returns very few, if any, results for this type of expression save for the rare, "Ah!" Revewing the text for instances where onomotapeia could be used (where a character is crying or laughing) the author generally prefers to explain the circumstances around the emotion, rather than how that character expressed the emotion: "She was awake the whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it."

There are some common expressions, as noted in the comments above, which are similar in written form and whose meaning is determined by the tone or inflections used when spoken. For example, "Ha ha" could be a hearty laugh, a mild laugh, or in the case of Nelson, the bully from the Simpsons, mockery of someone's fate. Written variants on that phrase exist ("Har, Har," "Haw, Haw", etc.), but other information usually accompanies it to explain the meaning.

Other exemples include: "Uh-huh," for agreement; "Nyuck, Nyuck" was an imbecilic laugh made famous by the Three Stooges; more recently, we say, "Meh" when we don't care; and "Gah!" when we are surprised.