Visualizations

Via Language Log, a nice tutorial titled Interactive Visualization for Computational Linguistics [PDF, 13,1 Mb] by Christopher Collins, Gerald Penn, and Sheelagh Carpendale. Includes not only lots of wonderful visualizations, but also a lot of background information on Gestalt perception, visualizations as ‘external cognition’, preattentive processing, info on a case study (slide 196ff.), and ample examples of different kinds of visualization software. See also InfoVis:Wiki — Linguistic Visualization.

On playthings and tools

Let me draw your attention to the newly added quote at the top right of this page: “…they are playthings, not the tools of language.” The quote comes from Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (I’m citing the 1862 edition). I wrote a little about the historical context of that quote recently but let’s not worry about that right now.

The quote is nice because along with Müller’s healthy skepticism we get an observation thrown in for free: that there is a playful dimension to imitative use of speech sounds. Müller was here of course relying on his own intuitions. In recent work, Janis Nuckolls has noted that besides playfulness, sound-symbolism for SAE speakers is often associated with ‘qualities such as childishness, whimsy, and simplicity, that make it inappropriate for many discursive contexts.’

‘You have to pepper your speech’

Not so in Siwu, and in many other pervasively ideophonic languages. In Siwu, to stick to my own trade, use and knowledge of ideophones is a marker of eloquence, and a sign indeed that one ‘knows the language’. In fact, although my Siwu is less than fluent (to say the least), I have quite often received compliments because of the way I used ideophones — saying, for example, ɔ-bù kpɛtɛ̀ɛ̀ɛ̀ {3SG-be.wet IDPH.soaked} ‘She was drenched to the skin’ instead of the simpler, ideophone-less version.

For Siwu speakers, ideophones are not just embellishments. As one of my assistants said, ‘we could tell a story without ideophones, but we use them to let people’s mind go, or get more understanding’. Another succinct explanation came from an elder in the community: à-kparara ara {2SG-IDPH.illuminate things} ‘you illuminate things’ (and yes, kparara is an ideophone). There you have it: ideophones as tools.

Playful ones nonetheless — said the aforementioned assistant, ‘without these words, speech is buààà [bland]. You have to pepper it’. You guessed it. Buààà is another of those playthings.

References

1. Müller, Max. 1862. Lectures on the Science of Language. 3rd ed. London: Longman.
2. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1995. Quechua texts of perception. Semiotica 103, no. 1/2: 145-169.
3. Kunene, Daniel P. 2001. Speaking the Act: The Ideophone as a Linguistic Rebel. In Ideophones, ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 183-191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Wordle now does Extended Latin and diacritics

Great news for those who are into visual corpus linguistics but don’t work on SAE languages: since July, Wordle handles alphabets in the Extended Latin ranges; and today its maker, Jonathan Feinberg, added support for combining diacritics. That means that you can now feed Wordle texts from languages that use tone marks and other diacritics in their orthographies. Like Siwu.

Wordle based on some ten minutes of spontaneous conversation in Siwu.

The Wordle above displays the most common words in some ten minutes of spontaneous conversation in Siwu, one of the fruits of my last fieldtrip. The conversation has four participants. Nothing groundbreaking about this particular Wordle, it’s just a nice word cloud starring: Continue reading »

Confuse two aspects. I am.

Just a linguistic note here on Warren Buffett’s widely publicized advice to buy American stock. Buffett’s op-ed piece in the New York Times was graced by the headline “Buy American. I am.”

The quirky headline wasn’t picked up by the fellows over at Language Log, who are much too busy these days with the g-droppin’ or tactical g-lessness by a certain lady whose name ends in emphatic -in. It was, however, noticed by Fritinancy in a post titled ‘To “Am,” or Not to “Am”?.’ As she writes, ‘Trouble is, the two halves of the headline don’t match up.’

Why not? Friedman attributes it to the fact that “buy” is a ‘verb of activity’, requiring the declaration that follows to contain a similar verb such as “do”. But the be-verb is is not really incompatible with the ‘activity verb’ “buy”. It combines perfectly with the present progressive form ‘buying’, for example (as in the question mentioned over at Fritinancy: “Buying American?”). So the implied form must have been “I am [buying American]“.

That makes it an aspect issue — the truncated clause presupposes an imperative in the progressive aspect (’Be buying American’) but for some reason it ended up following a bare imperative. The effect is a slightly jarring, but still understandable headline, just like the self-referential title of today’s posting. Understand this. Am I?

Three misconceptions about ideophones

In a previous post I have outlined the history of the term ideophone. This post takes on three common misunderstandings about the nature of ideophones. As an added bonus, if you read all three, you get one for free (below the fold). The working definition I adopt for ‘ideophone’ is the following: A marked word vividly evoking a sensory event.

1. ‘Ideophone’ is just jargon for onomatopoeia. Not quite. Onomatopoeia is generally understood to be limited to words imitating sounds. Ideophones however evoke all sorts of sensory events — not just sounds, but also taste, gait, visual effects, texture, smell, and so on.
   Consider the following Siwu ideophones: vɛlɛvɛlɛ ‘a dizzy, giddy feeling in the body’; yuayua ‘a sensation of burning (the visual impression, the feeling, or both)’; kpotoro-kpotoro ‘moving jerkily like a tortoise’; ɣɛkpɛtɛɛ ‘delicately fragile, for example of autumn leaves’. These words do not imitate sounds, yet to a Siwu speaker they vividly depict sensory events in a way that is reminiscent of onomatopoeia. The German linguists had an excellent term for this: Lautmahlerei ‘painting with sound’, the result of which was a Lautbild ’sound picture’ (Westermann 1907, 1927, cf. also Bühler 1934).
2. Standard Average European (SAE) languages lack ideophones. Not quite. Given the definition of ideophone above, ideophony is probably a universal phenomenon. English, for example, has ideophonic words like glimmer, twiddle, tinkle which evoke certain sensory events.
   All the same it is true (and interesting) that languages differ in the extent to which they systematize and elaborate their ideophonic (expressive) resources. In that sense English is definitely a much less ideophonic language than, say, Semai (Central Aslian, Austroasiatic, Malaysia), where ideophones are a word class as big as the two other major word classes, nouns and verbs, or Gbeya (Adama-Eastern, Niger-Congo, Central African Republic), where over 5000 ideophones have been collected.
3. Ideophones are a feature of primitive languages. Not quite. This idea is at least as old as the first descriptions of ideophones in ‘exotic’ languages. It was made popular by anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl’s musings about ‘primitive mentality’, in which ideophones were adduced as evidence for the ‘irresistible tendency’ of the native to ‘imitate all one perceives’ (1926:142). One thing we have learned since then is that the notion of ‘primitive language’ makes no sense outside the highly problematic model of cultural evolutionism in which it was coined.
   I don’t even want to give counterexamples in the form of supposedly non-primitive languages which nonetheless are ideophonic; anyone interested can look up some relevant literature (start with Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001). For linguists, languages differ in interesting ways and along all sorts of dimensions; but the supposed dimension of primitivity is not one of them.

Continue reading »

Four Stone Hearth

The 51st installment of Four Stone Hearth is up at Clashing Culture, featuring an interesting mishmash of anthropological topics. For those of you who don’t know it, Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that brings together the four fields of anthropology (archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, bio-physical anthropology, and linguistic anthropology) — each of which is a stone in the hearth.

Early sources on African ideophones, part III: ‘Onomatopoeia as a formative principle in the Negro languages’, 1886

A steady influx of vocabularies of exotic languages during the nineteenth century caused a veritable flowering of comparative philology. It became en vogue to be looking at primitive languages, and the late nineteenth century especially was a time in which every respectable gent in academia had to have dabbled in African philology.

One such gent was the Harry Thurston Peck (1856-1914). A classicist who would later become known for such works as Latin Pronunciation (1890), an edition of the Suetonius (1889), and most importantly the Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, he apparently had access to some dictionaries of West African languages in the 1880’s and could not, of course, resist the temptation to do something with it. The results were published in the American Journal of Philology in 1886.

Peck’s article is both disappointing and interesting. Disappointing for its dubious methodology, interesting because of the sheer amount of ideophones it presents in a time when the pervasiveness of ideophony in African languages was not widely recognized. Continue reading »

More on bíaàà and other water ideophones

drizzle by +lyn (Flickr)

Without wanting to detract from the supreme rendering of bíààà in the previous post, here is some more linguistic information on the word (as rightly requested by Breffni), with a few other water ideophones added for good measure. Continue reading »

Bíààà

The card arrived in the mail today, so I can now call myself the lucky owner of this rendition of the beautiful Kisi ideophone bíààà — ‘rain softly falling’.

bíààà ‘rain softly falling’ — an ideophone from Kisi

Some time ago I wrote about Taro Gomi’s illustrations of Japanese ideophones, citing his warning that

“Linguists, who are always described by such orthodox adjectives as kashikoi (wise), tadashii (right), erai (great), or rippana (respected), cannot handle them” (1989:iii).

No matter how sympathetic I am to that provocative statement, I have to disagree, if only because the work of art above was made by someone with an academic background in linguistics. What it makes clear, though —and this is of course what Gomi means, and where I agree with him— is that ideophones deserve special treatment.

(See my previous post for background info on the artist and on Kisi.)

Le Ton Beau de Ta Hio

Reading about the two translations of the Confucian Ta Hio by Ezra Pound, the earlier one first published in 1928 and the later one created in 1945, I was reminded of Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot. Though Hofstadter’s book on the problem of translation is personal and impressive, I also found it annoyingly ignorant of the work of countless others in the same field.

Ezra Pound is an example of someone who was acutely aware of the intricacies of the art of translation. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his two versions of the Ta Hio, a careful comparison of which would bring home many of the points developed at greater length (and at the expense of clarity) in Le Ton Beau. This will be obvious to anyone who takes some time to compare the following passages: Continue reading »

The sound of rain falling, in your ears

More from the missed-while-I-was-in-the-field dept.: back in August, artisan jewelry shop My Word! featured a beautiful pair of earrings decorated with the Kisi ideophone bákàlà-bákàlà for ‘the sound of big, fat raindrops.’ I like the design, in which colour, shape and size work together to recreate the event evoked by the ideophone.

Earrings with the Kisi ideophone bákàlà-bákàlà, by My Word! jewelry

Kisi [kqs] is spoken by upwards of 250,000 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. It is a member of the Southern branch of Atlantic, fairly closely related to Temne, Gola, Sherbro, and Krim. Its ideophonic system is well-known through George T. Childs’ 1988 dissertation, The phonology and morphology of Kisi.

I decided to look up the ideophone written on the earrings, and sure enough, there it is on page 182: “bákàlà-bákàlà, sound of rain falling in single, heavy droplets”. It is one of those Kisi ideophones which always come in reduplicated form, which reinforces the happy match between the word and the product.

Behind My Word! is Joanna Taylor, a paper jewelry artist with an academic background in linguistics. I guess it figures that the linguistic data is accurate, right down to the tone marks (High-Low-Low). These earrings, along with two other Kisi pieces, are part of her Project Panglossia, in which she makes (at least) two pieces per week in a language other than English in celebration of 2008, the UN’s International Year of Languages. Lovely!

References

1. Childs, George Tucker. 1988. The phonology and morphology of Kisi. PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Somali ideophones revealed

I missed it back in March, probably because I was in the field: a delightful post on ideophones in Somali over at Beautiful Horn of Africa. An intriguing introduction…

In this fast moving 21st Century of information superhighway, you should feel obligated to expose youself to the rest of the world so that your presence in words and deeds can be felt by others.
(…)
Watch out what I’m about to reveal.

…is followed by a veritable explosion of ideophonic vocabulary: “Fuuq is to drink heavy drinks like milkshake or creamy liquid; bacaac is the cry of the lamb while baac is a fool; fadfad is the bubbling of sticky cornmeal on a cooking pot; xaax is to feel cold; xuux is to instill fear in children; yaq is something nasty in appearance; aq is uttered when smoke disturbs one’s visibility; yar is astonishment; uf is bad smell; bash is for any object that split into pieces when dropped while bush is when a jelly-like substance falls on the floor then splits in to bish; shabaax is sound from sea waves or meandering river water; dhibiq is for falling droplets; dhaw dhaw and qaw qaw is scrubbing of metals; hatishow is to sneeze; qabac qabac is when an object is blown by the wind; …”

The stream of consciousness quality of the prose calls to mind what Gérard Diffloth calls the ‘expressive mood’. In another form, I have witnessed this phenomenon in live conversations, where ideophones tend to erupt in chunks rather than being distributed evenly over the full length of the conversation. Continue reading »

Semantic cookies

Semantic cookies are sold in Akpafu-Mempeasem, central Volta Region, Ghana (among other places)

Fieldwork sessions on lexical semantics have become a lot easier since I found these cookies. I came across them in a small and dusty store in Akpafu-Mempeasem, my fieldwork hometown of all places.

Semantic cookies are made in Turkey by a company called BiFa Bisküvi. As BiFa they certainly have a knack (or failing that, a dictionary) for coining strange product names; other products of theirs are called Appeal, Effect, Talent, and Wisdom, to name just a few.

Out of comptrol

An ironic typographical error thwarts Hugh Kenner’s exposition of the Ching Ming ideograph in The Poetry of Ezra Pound:

The Ching Ming ideograph has levels of signification beginning with orthography and ending with the most intimate moral discriminations. ‘Call things by their right names.’ Don’t, for example, call a man Comptroller of the Currency unless he really controls it. (Kenner 1951:38)

Alas, the Comptroller of Typesetting (now of course deprived of his title) was not at his post to save Kenner from recursivity breaking loose, and that on the very page where a Pound quote reminds us that ‘orthography is a discipline of morale and of morals.’ A lovely strange loop it is.

Update: Helpful readers point out that the function of ‘Comptroller’ actually exists in the American system. This gives away two things: first, that I am currently writing posts offline (as I am in the field); second, that I am unforgivably ignorant of English typographic history. In my defense, I may note that the strange recursivity in Kenner’s passage still does hold; and that the title of my post tried to joke that not the noun (Comptroller) but the verb (control) is misspelled. I do admit guilt on the charge of trying to construct English puns as a non-native speaker.

References

• Kenner, Hugh. 1951. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions.

Early sources on African ideophones, part II: Vidal on Yoruba, 1852

Part two of our series on early sources (part one is here) is dedicated to Reverend O. E. Vidal, M.A. who as early as 1852 made a number of very insightful comments on ideophones in Yoruba in the preface to Samuel Crowther’s Yoruba dictionary:

There is another very striking feature in the Yoruba language, which I feel unwilling to pass over in this memoir, although, at the present stage of our knowledge on the subject of African philology, it will not afford any help in assigning to this language its proper position on the ethnological chart. The adverb is a part of speech in which we do not commonly recognise any characteristic sufficiently prominent to become a distinctive mark of any language, either generic or specific. But in the case of the Yoruba there is a most observable peculiarity in the use of this part of speech, which must, I think, eventually prove to be such a distinctive mark. Speaking in general terms, we may say, that each individual adverb of qualification possesses an idiosyncrasy of its own which altogether incapacitates it from supplying the place of another. It contains within itself the idea of the word which it is employed to qualify, although, as to form and derivation, totally unconnected with that word. In this way “almost every adjective and verb has its own peculiar adverb to express its quality” or rather its degree. This peculiarity must certainly greatly increase the expressiveness of the language. (Vidal, p. 15-16)

Vidal’s reserved tone shows just how little known the phenomenon of ideophony was at the time of his writing. Yet his comments are incisive and to the point; he sums up pretty much of what is significant about ideophones. He continues: Continue reading »

Now serving you from ideophone.org

The Ideophone has found a new home at http://ideophone.org/. Links to the old pages should still work, but I would like to ask readers and fellow bloggers to update their bookmarks and blogrolls.

The move was planned to take place in September but it had to be carried out prematurely because my provider itself was migrating their servers and I didn’t want to go with them. Being in the field for five more weeks I had no quick way of fixing it. The ever so helpful Lieuwe of ON2IT Security came to the rescue and carried out a swift and smooth migration. Lieuwe, you owe me!

Readers, thanks for understanding, and welcome back!

GTM Workshop 2008

In 1968 Bernd Heine published the first comparative study of the so-called Togorestsprachen. Around the same time Kevin Ford and Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu were involved in the linguistic documentation of some of the languages of the Ghana-Togo mountains; Ford was writing a dissertation on Avatime (Siya) and doing comparative work on several other GTM languages besides; and Kropp Dakubu was compiling several voluminous comparative wordlists in the Comparative African Wordlists series. Their activities in the late 1960s and the early 1970s marked an initial wave of research into the GTM languages.

A full forty years later, these three eminent linguists are with us to take part in the second international workshop on on the description and documentation of the GTM languages. A very special occassion indeed. I’ll be giving a talk on ideophones and the slippery slope of expressivity in Siwu.

References

1. Heine, Bernd. 1968. Die Verbreitung und Gliederung der Togorestsprachen. Berlin: Reimer.
2. Kropp Dakubu, Mary Esther, and Kevin C Ford. 1988. The Central Togo Languages. In The Languages of Ghana, ed. Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, 119-154. London: Kegan Paul.

Kanananana

There are several ideophones in Siwu that have to do with silence. Here are a few examples:

mì-lo kanananana!

2PL-be.silent IDPH

(y’all) be silent kanananana!

a-rɛ kpooo-o?

2SG-sleep IDPH-Q

did you have a sound sleep?

lò-to lò-karɛ ɔ itɔ̃me a-ɣɛ à-to à-nyɔ mɛ gbigbini-gbi

1SG-PROG 1SG-ask 2SG:O message 2SG-stand 2SG-PROG 2SG-look 1SG:O IDPH-REDUP1

I’m asking you a question and you are standing looking at me gbigbinigbi!

ɔ̀-si mùnùmùnù

3SG-sit IDPH

he just sits mùnùmùnù (sickly without talking)

The implications of these four ideophones are different. The first one is perhaps the most general; it is often heard in requests for silence (esp. in the plural), but I’ve also heard it used to talk about the tranquility of the town. The second one, kpoo, is most commonly heard in the reply to the morning greeting lò yá mì ‘I greet you (pl.)’. It has a positive connotation of nocturnal silence and sound sleep. The other two both carry negative connonations: gbigbinigbi evokes a sulking silence, mùnùmùnù is silence of a more dim-witted, sickly type.

All this by way of announcing a scheduled period of radio silence during my two-month fieldtrip to Ghana from July to September 15th. I’ll be giving talks at the 26th West African Languages Conference in Winneba and the 2nd International Workshop on the GTM languages. The rest of the time I will be in Kawu, transcribing beautiful and sparkling conversation full of ideophones. In between times I may be able to post some snippets, but don’t expect too much — everything will be pretty much kanananana here. See you in September!

Zotero Sync Preview

Exciting news for Zotero users: synchronization has arrived. After some months of closed beta-testing, a public Sync Preview version was released recently. This means that Zotero users can now automatically synchronize their libraries across computers and even across platforms.

Although there are still some minor wrinkles, the sync functionality works perfectly fine and there are some exciting new features, including the possibility to import thousands of Endnote styles. With the import functionality comes a handy style manager, another step towards an elegant, shared, and open source solution to citation styling. That’s two killer features in one release — impressive work by the Zotero folks.

Also note the following:

Before Zotero 1.5 ships, we will add functionality to allow users to synchronize attachments to their own servers or other storage space (and we’ll also provide a hosted storage solution for all Zotero users). [forum post by Sean Takats]

Do keep in mind that the current preview is a preliminary version intended for public testing; do not expect it to be bug-free. Always make a backup copy of your full Zotero folder and try the Sync Preview in a new profile (step-by-step instructions on the sync preview page). Easier yet, download Firefox 3 Portable and try out Zotero Sync Preview 1.5 on a copy of your library without risking data loss or profile mixups. If your workflow is fine without synchronization, my advice is to avoid the growing pains of the preview version and wait until the release of the official 1.5 version, which should follow within a few months.

Not sure what Zotero is? Check the website or read my review of it.

Kawu in January 1887

The earliest description of Kawu (Akpafu) I have found so far is quite special in that it was written by an African in an African language. A German translation of it appeared in 1889 and can be found below. The original is a report of a travel made in early 1887 by David Asante. David Asante (1834-1892) was the son of a christianized chief in Akropong, and one of the first Africans to be trained in Basel. Together with a few unnamed white missionaries, Asante travelled throughout what is today the central Volta Region of Ghana, visiting Nkonya, Boem, Akpafu, and Santrokofi (amongst other places). He wrote down his experiences in Twi and sent the report to Basel, where it was subsequently translated into German by J.G. Christaller, one of the founding fathers of West African linguistics. The translation was published in 1889 in the transactions of the Geographische Gesellschaft für Thüringen zu Jena.

Akpafu-Todzi in the late nineteenth century (the picture is from a later date than David Asante’s expedition)
Source: Staatsarchiv Bremen #7.1025-0077

According to the account itself, this was the first time that Europeans set foot in Kawu. I hope to be able to provide a full English translation later, but here are a few nice excerpts to start with:

We arrived in Akpafu somewhere around nine; the town is big, its main street wide. When we arrived, all of the townspeople flocked together to see us — even the smiths stopped their work — because there had never been a European there before. Had it depended just on them, we would have stayed for several days. They first led us to a place where we could refresh ourselves; from there we went to salute the king, an old, powerfully built man. (…) Their giant king was very amiable and wanted us to stay for several days; however, our schedule did not permit us to do so.
(…)
Of the people of Boem, these are the brightest. (…) Because of their ironwork, everything is well-organized; for people from all places come here to buy iron tools. (…) The diligence of these people, their hospitality, and their tranquil behaviour pleased us so much that we really came to love them.
David Asante, 1889.

Continue reading »