Who will write a lightweight duplicate detection plugin for Zotero?

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Duplicate detection is one of the things any serious reference manager should offer. Zotero users have been clamouring for it since the early days. There are basically two ways to implement it: as a preflight check, warning the user when they are about to add a potential duplicate; and as an after the fact scan, which enables users to weed duplicate items from their library.

The most recent version of Zotero takes the second route: a posthoc duplicate detection mechanism. Though definitely better than nothing, and with an elegant merging solution, the interface is still far from perfect and yields a lot of false positives, making it somewhat difficult to use. Besides, it is slow, because it tries to compare everything with everything, which amounts to a huge amount of operations even in moderately sized libraries. Although it is good to have at least something, what seems to me have been overlooked is that prevention is better than cure, and that a quick check before adding new items to the library would help users a lot.  Continue reading →

An ideophone poem by Stacey Tran

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Last week the Portland Review published a beautiful ideophone poem by Stacey Tran, titled From the World Encyclopedia of Ideophones. It consists of ideophones from Navajo, Japanese, Vietnamese, Yoruba and Siwu juxtaposed with poetry lines that evoke the rich and textured meanings of these words. Read the piece here. I’m not sure I can quote it in full here but I have to quote the Siwu ideophone and the lines that it inspired:

mukumuku  — (Siwu) mumbling mouth movements

A woman at the grocery store choosing an orange, one after the other tumbling onto the ground in front of her, for all that is known they might have been the ones she would have wanted to bring home to her daughter, her back rounds as she picks each one up off the confetti linoleum.

— Stacey Tran, From the World Encyclopedia of Ideophones (source)

The title is brilliant too. You will look in vain for a traditional printed book titled The World Encyclopedia of Ideophones. Yet it is true that the ideophone inventories of languages across the globe form an impressive compendium of everyday poetry. Thank you, Stacey Tran, for creating this wonderful work of art and for reminding us that ideophones are, as Evans-Pritchard wrote, poetry in ordinary language.

Phonosemantics, Chinese characters, and coerced iconicity

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The light descending (from the sun, moon and stars.) To be watched as component in ideograms indicating spirits, rites, ceremonies.The linguistic blogosphere featured some posts recently on the topic of phonosymbolism, phonosemantics, and Chinese characters. It started with a post by Victor Mair over at Language Log, outlining several approaches to “etymologizing” Chinese characters. A follow-up by David Branner highlighted some of the problems with simplistic notions of phonosymbolism. Here I add some texture to the conversation by discussing the views of Ezra Pound, making a comparison to form-meaning mappings in ideophones, and introducing the notion of coerced iconicity. Continue reading →

Robertson’s Report on the geology of Western Togoland (1921)

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One of the earliest English sources on the geology of what is today the Volta Region in eastern Ghana is a survey report by Thomas Robertson. It was published in 1921 by the Gold Coast Geological Survey in Accra. The economical goals of the survey are clear from Robertson’s repeated examination of rivers for gold (“River X gave black sand but no gold on panning”). Download the report here (20Mb). Continue reading →

A visit to Akpafu by Nicolas Clerk, 1889

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Travel journals provide some of the first written sources on Akpafu. I have previously posted an excerpt from a 1887 journal by David Asante. This here is an excerpt from a similar journey two years later. The whole journey took three months, but this excerpt relates only a trip to two Akpafu towns on 17-18 December 1889. Nicolas Clerk, an indigenous missionary born in Aburi, was alone during the first part of the journey and accompanied by his colleague Hall from Dec. 30 onwards. Continue reading →

Now available: The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu

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Yesterday I successfully defended my PhD thesis at the Radboud University Nijmegen. I was promoted to doctor cum laude.

This means that I can now make the thesis officially available to anyone interested. You can find it at thesis.ideophone.org, where you can also inspect the online supplementary materials, listen to audio clips, and check out photos. Or just download the PDF directly. Enjoy!

Also check out these press releases related to the thesis and the defense:

Daniel Tammet invents his own Siwu ideophone

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I loved Daniel Tammet’s second book Embracing The Wide Sky (2009). In his own words, Embracing The Wide Sky is “a personal and scientific exploration of how the brain works and the differences and similarities between savant and non-savant minds”. It surveys work from psychology and linguistics and even indirectly (okay, very indirectly) features my work on Siwu ideophones. Continue reading →

Zotero for Chrome and Safari

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Here’s a quick tip for Zotero users who like to do their browsing in Chrome or Safari: you can install “Zotero Connectors” that will make Zotero recognize references in Chrome and Safari just like in Firefox. The Zotero developers are working on a standalone version, but these connectors can already talk to your Zotero library in Firefox. So if you, say, find yourself going to Chrome for its speed and nice interface, you can simply connect it with Zotero and use Firefox to host your local Zotero library until Zotero Standalone comes along. Continue reading →