Yes, the origin of those onomatopoeia is pretty unclear. There must be some kind of reason behind it. 
Edit: oh, hey じっと indeed came first, written in kanji as 凝と.
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Have you ever walked up to someone and just said “jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii”? I’m sure it would go over well. You should try it. 
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ok real question now that I’m home…I figured out the first question on my own but this one is still sort of a mess…
Page 21 / p21
dialect - 顔もどごがしらにでるようなきがするっとも
non dialect (maybe) - 顔もどこかしらに出るような気がするけど。
顔も - face also/too
どこかしらに = somehow/somewhere seems like
出る = to appear (can’t think of a good way to explain this in English - doesn’t feel like leave)
ような気がする = expression (I have a feeling)
けど。= but
I ended up with “somehow I feel like I’ve seen (your) face before too, but…”
I get the impression Gene feels like it’s deja vu, but not sure if I’m interpreting that correctly and heaven knows I’ve been wrong before… 
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hehehe one of my Japanese friends did that at dinner… when they wanted to share something 
so yeah it’s happened… was amusing…
There just isn’t anything in English that equates to it per say… it’s just a neato onomatopoeia
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Not sure how you got from に to い (typo I assume?), but your interpretation looks reasonable.
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what typo…no typo… was らし＋に for 出る must just have been not showing up on the screen hehe
seriously thanks for the correction
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You still have an extra い for some reason. 
I assume the word is どこかしら since that has a dictionary entry.
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this is gonna be the longest book ever
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Hmmm… when reading that sentence I took it more to be
顔もどこかしら似てるような気がするけど。
Also the face is somehow similar, is my feeling.
I feel this verb goes better with the topic of the sentence, 顔.
What do the others think?
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Offtopic
This is a good example of what I was trying to explain at the end of the reading Sunday and why I struggle sometimes…I can’t always tell what’s the “best” or most correct way to understand something…and here are two ways of understanding but in reality only one is the authors intention… need more kanji!
That’s why I tend to “translate” to make sure I actually understand what I’m reading, not to actually translate to English for the sake of translating And honestly the shorter sentences I hardly have to do this…(though for girls last tour I actually did this for the whole book - but it helped tremendously with learning) now the shorter sentences I can usually read with very little effort if I have the vocab and grammar…it’s when they are so long and what’s modifying what and who … so confounding sometimes 
(hoping that by the end of this book I’ll be much better at larger blocks of text 
)
Will be interesting to see how other interpret this… I have the English which is why I asked … because based on how I parsed it things made sense but - hint… your translation is closer to the English one… so thought it would be interesting to see what the group consensus was…
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Well it doesn’t help that we can’t know for sure whether it’s にでる or にてる…
But @NicoleIsEnough’s parsing makes a lot of sense.
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More...
I totally understand that, and I still do that myself (on a rather coarse-grained level though). What I was trying to address on Sunday was that sometimes phrases pop up here that go something like “how do I turn this rough English translation into a good English sentence” (maybe not from you, though) and I’m not sure what benefit that would bring…
As an example, take my translation “Also the face is somehow similar, is my feeling.” from above. Now I am not a native speaker, but this sentence doesn’t sound very polished to me… Maybe a better version would be “I have a hunch that your face also somehow resembles his.” or something. But I believe this is much harder to relate to the Japanese because of the changed word order and because I pulled “his” from the implicit context and made it explicit. So I’m really wondering why people would want to take that extra step after the general understanding has been established. That’s basically what I wanted to get across in the discussion
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Summary
We are on the same page … as long as the sentence makes sense in my head im ok … definitely not looking to write an English book… (probably partly because I’m an engineer and I have to know how things work - which is most definitely one of my challenges)…
that sentence that I asked about could have two different tones and I’m not sure how I know which is the right answer…one is feeling gives me a more sense of mystery in the air and suspenseful (thinking mystery novel with music putting you on the edge of your seat)…the other is more nostalgic and light hearted…two very different interpretations…hence my question…
as long as I know what’s being said and how the mechanics of the grammar work I’m pretty good… if I don’t then im usually stuck and can’t move forward until I solve the puzzle… oh the joys of being an engineer…
fixed link: https://youtu.be/g8vHhgh6oM0
have to take the whole sentence apart then I can make new more fun sentences haha
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I also read it as 似てる. It especially makes sense considering who the person might be.
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I think you are both right… @NicoleIsEnough and @Naphthalene just couldn’t figure out how to parse it to get there… thanks for the help!
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ok more questions… this one feels like a dumb question but maybe it’s not…
"Page 22 / p22
ゲンじいさんはにっこりして、
また土ぼこりをまいあげて、
たんぽの中すすんでいた。
Overall this makes sense (literally):
Gene smiled sweetly and
again raised up dust and
advanced through the rice fields
But…what the heck is the まい doing there in the second line… I’m missing something
(sorry if I made any typos…didn’t mean to but I’m really good a making them)
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I think it’s まう (to dance, to flutter), in the continuative い form. But I look forward to anyone correcting me if I’m wrong, as I had trouble with this one, too!
Edit: I’ve never taken into consideration before if the first verb is intransitive and the second is transitive (as would be the case of まう + あげる).
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so fluttering+raise up… feels weird to me but maybe that’s just the Japanese way of saying kicked up dust…
I just found this =D
Edit: a Google image search for 舞い上げる shows photos of people tossing snow up into the air, and other photos of people tossing fallen leaves into the air. A search for 土ぼこり 舞い上げる shows dust clouds =)
Edit 2: Because I like visuals:
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this is perfect I’m putting this: 土ぼこりを舞い上げる (as cloud of dust - kicked up dust) in my notes
how do you guys find all this stuff…when I search I come up empty haha…the other day I was trying to describe the cultivator and remembered someone posted up just a search and when I went to look, nada, zip zilch hahaha ultimlatey had to come back to the forum