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.

The posts by Mair and Branner address a popular but quite mistaken notion: the idea that Chinese characters are like little pictures whose meaning can be “read off” from the strokes. The academic best known for debunking this popular misconception was John DeFrancis in his (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. He showed that the bulk of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds in which one element indicates (at most) a general category of meaning and the other suggests the pronunciation.

The pictorial view

The roots of the “pictorial” view of Chinese characters in the Western world no doubt go far back. One of the driving forces behind it in the first half of the 20th century was the poet Ezra Pound. Pound is a fascinating figure, famed for his influence as a Modernist, Imagist poet and literary critic (and controversial for some of his political views). I have recently described Pound’s ideas about Chinese ideograms:

Over the years, Pound developed a fascination with the poetic affordances of logographic writing systems, especially Chinese. This fascination originated with his discovery of a theory of the Chinese character by Ernest Fenollosa [published in an edition by Pound in 1920], who argued that Chinese writing reflects etymology (‘true sense’) in a way that phonetic writing does not. In Pound’s idealist view of etymology (Li 1986), this rendered the Chinese character vastly superior to Western phonetic script in terms of picture-making. Soon enough however, scholarly studies of logographic writing systems showed that Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds rather than transparent pictures, and Pound’s idyllic conception of Chinese characters as evocative ideograms was severely and justly criticized (Kennedy 1958; cf. DeFrancis 1984).

(Dingemanse 2011:44-45)

In my paper (titled Ezra Pound among the Mawu and published in Semblance and Signification), Pound’s ideas serve as a cautionary tale. I argue that there is a parallel between Pound’s overeager “iconicization” of Chinese characters and the tendency of many linguists to ascribe iconicity to ideophones. One important point of the paper is to note that there are limits to the iconic representational powers of speech, and there is reason to be careful in ascribing iconicity to ideophones (p. 45-6).

Ideophones are not the unproblematically imitative words that many people have made them out to be. There is something about them that makes us want to believe this, no doubt — just like there is something about Chinese characters that makes us want to believe the pictorial story. In my analysis of ideophones, this something is not iconicity, but first and foremost their depictive nature — the fact that they are presented as, or to use a more apt metaphor, framed as depictions.

Three types of form-meaning mappings

It may be useful to describe the development of my own thinking about these matters. Back in 2007 my reading of the ideophone literature suggested that ideophones are simply sound-symbolic words. Over time, with my inventory of Siwu ideophones steadily growing and my grasp of the semiotics of depiction in speech slowly evolving, I came to question simplistic notions of sound symbolism and iconicity in ideophones.

It became clear to me, for instance, that in a language with thousands of ideophones, it would be very difficult for all ideophones to be iconic to the same degree or in the same way. So there had to be different types of iconicity — different ways in which ideophones could evoke sensory imagery. My paper addressed this matter empirically by surveying the Siwu ideophone inventory. The result of this survey was a description of three basic, non-exclusive types of form-meaning mappings in ideophones.

Coerced iconicity

While working on this I also realized that even if we allow for different types of iconic mappings, certain ideophones do not actually seem to be that transparently iconic. How does one iconically map colours, internal sensations, or cognitive states? Is iconicity really the point of ideophones like Siwu fùrùfùrù ‘seeing things in a blur’ or Japanese iya iya ‘with a heavy heart’? It seems unlikely. Have ideophone enthusiasts (native speakers as well as linguists) simply been over-eager in iconicizing ideophones? Doing an Ezra Pound in the domain of sound? If so, it is important to figure why the form of ideophones is so often identified with their meaning. I argue that it is their depictive nature:

Depiction, rather than iconicity, is what invites people to treat the ideophone as a performance of sensory imagery. An analogy may help to explain this point. Consider the category of objects called paintings. Paintings vary quite widely in the degree to which they are iconic (i.e. show a perceived resemblance to what they depict). And yet there is a distinct interpretive frame we bring to all of them: we tend to view them as depictions rather than read them as texts (Gombrich 2002[1960]; Walton 1973). In a similar way, we may think of ideophones as setting up a depictive interpretive frame, inviting the listener onto the scene and invoking images of being there.
(…)
If we want to invoke iconicity here at all, we should call it COERCED ICONICITY. The depictive nature of the ideophone coerces us into treating the word as an adequate rendition of the depicted event.

(Dingemanse 2011:51)

Coerced iconicity may be a useful concept in discussions of supposed iconicity because it describes a mechanism familiar to us all and realistically locates it in the eye of the beholder. In Peircean terms, it locates iconicity in the interpretants of eager observers rather than solely in properties of the sign-object relationship. Why was it difficult for Pound to resist associating meaning with the shape of Chinese characters? Why does the pictorial view of Chinese characters, thoroughly debunked as it is, keep coming back? One reason may be that there is some amount of truly pictorial characters that feed the imagination and that makes all Chinese characters look like pictures, especially to the untrained eye. This coerces people into treating all characters as pictorial renditions. Why do speakers treat all ideophones as perfectly adequate depictions of sensory imagery? Perhaps all that is needed is a critical mass of transparently iconic ideophones (using the three principles I described), and for the remainder, the framing devices of performative prosody and expressive morphology may be enough to coerce people into treating them as good depictions.

Explanatory leakage

Sapir famously said that all grammars leak. Much the same holds for any grand theory of how linguistic signs —spoken as well written words— are motivated. (This is the source of my unease with the “big picture” theory of Chinese phonosymbolism by Howell that Mair outlines in his post.) All linguistic systems are the messy, fuzzy products of a long term interaction of human communicative needs, intersubjective language use, modality-specific features, and the mindless opportunism of evolution (among other factors). In the case of the form and meaning of ideophones, there are many forces tugging at them and shaping them. Although many people like to think of ideophones as prototypically “iconic” words, on reflection, it is clear that the story leaks. Yes, there are clearly iconic structures in ideophones that help guide the imagination, perhaps somewhat like the lines and shading in a naturalistic painting. But some ideophones (many in some languages?) may be more like abstract paintings: depictions that are invested with meaning by eager observers, not necessarily on the basis of information contained within their form.

Often a certain amount of explanatory leakage is more exciting than a neat account. Seeking regularity all the way leads to oversimplification. In some possible world, all Chinese characters are neat pictograms, the Chinese language is phonosemantic in nature, and all ideophones are nice imitative words. This world is not ours however; and isn’t it is far more interesting to investigate the manifold ways in which humans can do cross-modal mappings of form to meaning, and to describe the different processes by which they discern motivation in what to the analyst may look like arbitrary gibberish? Gibberish. Hmm, let me frame that word for you so that you can experience some coerced iconicity on the way out. Gibberish.

References

  1. DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  2. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. ‘Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and Iconicity in Siwu’. In Semblance and Signification, edited by Pascal Michelucci, Olga Fischer, and Christina Ljungberg, 39-54. Iconicity in Language and Literature 10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (download here)
  3. Dingemanse, Mark. (in press) “Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones.” Language and Linguistics Compass.
  4. Fenollosa, Ernest. 1920. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Edited by Ezra Pound. London: Stanley Nott.
  5. Kennedy, G. 1958. ‘Fenollosa, Pound, and the Chinese Character’. Yale Literary Magazine 126, no. 5: 24–36.
  6. Li, Victor P. H. 1986. ‘Philology and Power: Ezra Pound and the Regulation of Language’. boundary 2 15, no. 1/2: 187-210.
  7. Pound, Ezra. 1947. The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest. New York: New Directions.

Ideophones around the web: ideophones and product naming

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This long overdue instalment of Ideophones around the web features ideophones in the names of snappy new mobile apps from an Indian software startup.

I’d noticed long ago that the domain “ideophone.com” was registered by a domain name squatter, and I wondered whom they thought would be interested. A videophone company perhaps? Anyway that particular domain has been lying dormant for years now with one of those useless “what you need when you need it” templates on it.

Recently however a real company called “ideophone” has entered the scene: Ideophone.in. The people at Ideophone.in make mobile apps for commuting people — “redefining commute”, as they say themselves, with mobile apps that are journey- and location-aware. Some cool things about this company are the multilingual people behind it — they speak Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, English and Hindi — and the fact that their product names are inspired by ideophones.

Ideophonic apps

One of the products of this company is a digital metering app which shows time and distance travelled during rikshaw and taxi rides. Here’s what Sundar writes about the name of this app:

It sounded like a neat idea to name the app with an ideophone. It’ll evoke the same impression in people speaking different languages, right?

Given that the bulk of the Bangalore population speaks some Dravidian language or other, the choice fell on Suruk, which connoted diligence, speed, sharpness etc. signifying what Suruk does. And, it helped that www.suruk.com was available.

Product naming isn’t exactly my expertise (for that, I look to Fritinancy), but it is certainly not a bad idea to use ideophones to name your products. In fact the use of sound-symbolism in product names is quite a thing nowadays, with researchers from marketing and (psycho)linguistics weighing in on the issue (Klink 2001, Lowrey et al. 2007, Yorkston & Menon 2004). And with the linguistic sophistication displayed by the people behind Suruk, Pyka, and other apps, Ideophone is certainly a nice name for the company itself.

The good people at Ideophone.in credit this blog for inspiration. Folks, I’m surely happy to be of help, and I salute you! I’m looking forward to your new products. Meanwhile, if you want some ideophones, check out my thesis!

References

  1. Klink, R.R. 2001. “Creating meaningful new brand names: A study of semantics and sound symbolism.”
  2. Lowrey, T.M., and LJ Shrum. 2007. “Phonetic symbolism and brand name preference.” Journal of Consumer Research 34 (3): 406.
  3. Yorkston, E., and G. Menon. 2004. “A sound idea: Phonetic effects of brand names on consumer judgments.” Journal of Consumer Research: 43–51.

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).

For anyone interested in early sources on Akpafu and Santrokofi, the document contains some interesting notes. The early 1900s was the time when several of the mountain-dwelling peoples in the central Volta Region started building villages in the valleys, and Robertson has the following to say about this:

In the Akpafu hills, however, there seems to be something similar to what we have in the Avatime highlands, a small group which has kept fairly distinct from the peoples of the low country round about. It is noteworthy, however, that in both districts there is of recent years a very strong tendency for the hill-peoples to desert their old villages and make new ones in the valleys below. Borada and Santrokofi are examples of this in the Buem country, and Akpafu threatens to do likewise.

Historical note: the people of Akpafu indeed made new villages in the valley — Akpafu-Mempeasem, established in the 1920s, and later Adɔkɔ in the east valley — but they did not desert their old village and Akpafu-Todzi is still inhabited.

There is also a description of three iron ore mines in Akpafu on pages 41-43. The fairly specific description of their location enables us to identify at least two of Robertson’s sites as still extant today (one of them can be visited under the guidance of the Akpafu Tourist Council). Sadly, the iron industry of Akpafu was already a thing of the past at the time of Robertson’s survey, as witnessed in the following quote:

Very near the second occurrence [of an iron mine, MD] is an old bank of furnaces which have been used at some time for smelting the ore. They were built of earth from ant-hills, according to the guide, who was an old man, and said he remembered their being used when he was young. There is very little left of them now. Six furnaces are to be seen in a row, and a good deal of slag is lying about, but no ore.

I have highlighted here only some things related to the area where I do field research myself, but the survey covers a wide area and should be of interest to anyone from the Volta Region interested in geology and recent history. This is is why I make it available for download here:

Robertson (1921) Report on the Geology of Western Togoland.

  1. Robertson, Thomas. 1921. Report on the geology of Western Togoland. Accra: Gold Coast Geological Survey. — download the report (20Mb)

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.

The account was originally written and published in German. This excerpt was translated by Mark Dingemanse in 2011.

Out of Bowiri I went 2 hours southwards to visited the town Odome with about 300 inhabitants. The town is beautifully situated on a hill and has a street in the middle. The whole town was startled when we got there, so during my sermon I had to call out several times, “Do not be afraid, I bring no evil tidings.” I asked them after my sermon whether they would accept the doctrine, to which they replied that their head chief was in another town which we were planning to visit. If he told them to accept it [the doctrine] they would do it.

Since it was already quite late, we slept there [in Odome] and we arrived the next day (18 December) after a one and half hour hike in the town of Apafo (Akpafu). This town has a charmingly beautiful location on a high mountain. The view is very beautiful. The town has well over 500 residents and is built in terraces on the slopes of two mountains, with a road in the middle where the mountains collide. So one who stands on the street can see all corners of the town.

After we had rested a little, we went to the house of the chief to greet him and to report the reason for our visit. To our surprise, he offered us Schnaps, which we of course rejected. We invited him to come out on the street with his people. (It is unfortunate that so much Schnaps and gunpowder is being imported from Bagida, so that one can get these goods cheaper in the interior than in Accra. Far inland, where we were, people often asked for Schnaps and they did not want to believe that we do not drink liquor. In fact many probably never knew of the drink before, much less tasted it, but they have an unquenchable thirst for it.)

Our hand bell summoned the people and in a moment we had a large number of listeners before us, whom I told of their God and Saviour. Then I asked them if they would accept it if we would come live with them. There was a consultantion, and immediately they declared themselves willing to accept us. I put before them the other points as I had done in Bowiri, and they promised to build a house for the teacher, to provide students for the school, and to give Christians all rights. When asked how many students they would give for a start, they said, “As many as there are; we all want to worship the true God”. I was received very friendly here, and they also wanted us to go to another nearby town to bring the good news, but because I was a little feverish, I found it advisable to return to Bowiri.

The main business of the Apafo people is that they melt iron. The blocks of iron ore are dug in the mountain and melted in large furnaces made for this purpose. The Apafo’s have the bad habit to boil tobacco and to take the water drawn from it in the mouth after getting up in the morning; whether they swallow it I do not know. They keep it in their mouth for a while, during which they express themselves only with signs and with unclear sounds if they want to speak. Before they go to sleep they take this poison in their mouths again. Cleanliness of the teeth is not practised here as elsewhere.

  1. Clerk, Rev. N. J. 1892. “Neue reise in den Hinterlandern von Togo nach Nkonya, Buem, Obooso, Slaga, Krakye von 2 Dec. 1889 bis 5 Feb. 1890” Mitteilungen aus den Geographische Gesellschaft zu Jena 9: 77-98.

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 Born On A Blue Day, in which he tells of his life with autistic savant syndrome. His second book, Embracing The Wide Sky (2009), is just as enthralling. 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”. To my great delight, I discovered that it even indirectly (okay, very indirectly) features my work on Siwu ideophones!

One of the chapters of the book is on language, covering topics from Greenberg’s universals to psycholinguistic research on language acquisition and from aphasia to sound symbolism. The section on sound symbolism, onomatopoeia and phonestesia contains a survey “to test your own intuitive sense for word meanings”. That little survey is proving quite popular online: copies have appeared on dozens of websites (just search for siwu pambalaa and you’ll see what I mean). Here’s how it starts:

Test your own intuitive sense for word meanings from a range of languages with the following multiple-choice questions:

1. Does the adjective ‘pambalaa’ in the Siwu language of Africa describe (a) a round, fat person or (b) an angular, thin person?

That’s right! The first question features “the Siwu language of Africa” — the Ghanaian language that I have been studying —and writing about— as a field linguist since 2007. The question was probably inspired by my online writings; this website has featured a lot of Siwu examples through the years. (This post may be the source.)

No pambalaa in Siwu…

Now here’s the funny thing: there is no Siwu word pambalaa. The word just doesn’t exist. But rather than taking Daniel to task for spreading misinformation about Siwu, I want to argue that his ‘misremembering’ illustrates exactly what is so interesting about this kind of words, known in linguistics as ideophones.

First things first though. How do I know that this word is not actually an existing word in Siwu? The answer is that I checked. I have a list of hundreds of ideophones in Siwu, and it isn’t on there. It’s also in none of my publications so far, on or offline. Additionally, I asked several speakers of Siwu, and they tell me that the word doesn’t exist, though there are some words that are like it (that were indeed on my list, and in my publications): pimbilii, pɔmbɔlɔɔ, and pumbuluu.

Now pimbilii, pɔmbɔlɔɔ, and pumbuluu all have to do with something round and protruding, though varying in magnitude. This kind of pattern is familiar to ideophone aficionado’s. In my thesis, I have called it “relative iconicity”; it has also been referred to as “vowel symbolism” or “magnitude symbolism”.

What about the non-existent pambalaa? Daniel Tammett proposes the meaning “someone round and fat” (as opposed to someone angular and thin). His form is clearly a variation on a theme. And it is a sensible one. I’m pretty sure almost anyone would answer (a) to the quiz question above. Heck, even Siwu speakers say it’s (a) and not (b). That is, they can make sense of the word even though it doesn’t exist — just like us.

…whereby Tammet proves his own point

Daniel’s point in the section on sound-symbolism is that we have an intuitive sense for the meaning of some words. By misremembering this Siwu word, he inadvertently proves his point in a powerful way. For he got the sound-symbolic pattern right. Many of the world’s languages feature words like these, in which the vowel quality is used in a meaningful way (more on that in this recent post on lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu, and an old post on some Japanese ideophones). Cross-linguistically, the vowel a tends to be used for things of greater magnitude; or more precisely, the relation between that vowel and other vowels is often used iconically to map onto a relation between bigger and smaller things. This is why we go for choice (a) in Daniel’s quiz.

So Daniel, if you read this, thanks for the demonstration that sound-symbolism makes sense, and that memory is not just about storing hard and dry facts, but also (perhaps even moreso) about storing relational structures that allow us to creatively reconstruct stuff when needed. To me, this is one of the things that make human language and the human mind so endlessly fascinating.

Rembrandt and Van Gogh

Some interesting features of ideophone systems can be illustrated using this case. For one thing, we can often at least partly make sense of ideophones even if they’re not our own language. This is because they often tap into the general depictive potential of speech sounds and articulatory gestures. But that is not the whole story. Notice how Daniel’s quiz focuses on only one dimension of the ideophone’s meaning: size. Notice, too, that we use only one cue to decide on our answer: vowel quality. But pambalaa and more precisely the existing forms pimbilii and pumbuluu are not just about magnitude; they depict something quite specific, namely the bulging roundness of a belly. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t have predicted that part. Here we are moving beyond generic, possibly universal cues; we are getting into the realm of convention.

Ideophone systems always show this interesting combination of iconicity and convention. This is why they don’t always look the same across languages. We can tell Siwu ideophones from Semai ideophones just like we can tell a Rembrandt from a Van Gogh. Different languages represent slightly different depictive traditions, and this is what gives ideophone systems their language-specific signature.

Siwu speakers can tell whether some form is an existing word or not. Pimbilii is, pambalaa is not. Ideophones tend to be actual words — existing items in a language, not just expressive outcries or spontaneous sound-paintings. But pambalaa illustrates a good way to make new ideophones: use widely shared iconic principles and build on existing words. This is, incidentally, exactly what I occasionally see happening in my video-recordings of every conversation in Siwu: people sometimes create new ideophones, and when they do so, they use the toolkit for depiction provided by existing ideophones. Like Daniel Tammet’s pambalaa, the cases of ideophone creation I recorded in the video corpus show that creative depictions never occur in a vacuum, but always in the context of a broader linguistic system, using existing depictive practices.

That’s it for today — I’m off to get something to eat. If I tell you that my belly is pimbilii now, you can tell what it should be like in a couple of hours!

References

  1. Tammet, Daniel. 2007. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant: A Memoir. New York: Free Press.
  2. Tammet, Daniel. 2009. Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind. New York: Free Press.

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.

Follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you have the latest version of Zotero (3.0 Beta currently)
  2. Install the Chrome or Safari connector for Zotero in the browser of your choice.
  3. Start Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. Within the options, search for “zotero”, locate the extensions.zotero.httpServer.enabled option and double-click to enable it. (See kb article here.)
  4. Restart Firefox as well as your other browser to get them linked up properly.
  5. Enjoy the goods of Zotero translators in Chrome or Safari! (Remember that Firefox has to be open for Chrome to recognise and save the reference.)

Quick Q&A

Huh? When was this cool feature added?
Work on the Standalone version started about a year ago. The connectors have been developed for use with Standalone, but in a streak of insight, the developers also allowed communication with the Firefox version of Zotero. This was never announced, which is why I’m devoting a post to this well kept secret!
Can I now install Zotero in Chrome or Safari?
No, this post describes a way to get Zotero support in Chrome or Safari. You still need to have your main Zotero library in Firefox. If you are adventurous, you can try the Standalone Alpha or Beta version and connect it in the same way.
What are Zotero translators?
Translators enable Zotero to sense when you’re on a site displaying bibliographic information that you can import into your library. Thousands of sites are supported. Translators allow one-click saving of references in your library; if a PDF is available, they even download it for you and automatically attach it to the entry in your library!
What if it doesn’t work?
Be sure that Firefox is open, otherwise Chrome won’t be able to sense and save items. Try the troubleshooting translator issues page. If that doesn’t work, you can ask for help in the Zotero forums, where a lot of helpful people hang out.

Can you tell the difference between lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu?

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Lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu are two Siwu ideophones depicting imagery of being well-rounded. But they differ in degree. One of them evokes an image of being seriously fat, the other depicts the state of being merely chubby. Can you guess which is which?

Few people find this question difficult to answer. But I won’t reveal the right answer just yet. Instead, by way of celebrating the fact that thesis.ideophone.org is now fully up and running, I want to show you how my senior consultant Ruben explains these ideophones in Siwu. Pay particular attention to his gestures — you’ll see that it is fairly easy to get an idea of the meanings of these ideophones even if you don’t understand Siwu!

Folk definition of lɛkɛrɛɛ by Ruben:

Folk definition of lukuruu by Ruben:

(Note. I somehow can’t get the subtitles to display here on my blog. Another reason to check out the clips on their own page, where everything works smoothly!)

Continue reading →

Transcription mode in ELAN

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A new version of ELAN, the widely used tool for time-aligned annotation of linguistic data, was released today by the developers, Han Sloetjes and Aarthy Somasundaram. One of its major features is a whole new user interface for high-speed transcription. This interface is the outcome of a process of user consultation and usability testing at the MPI for Psycholinguistics led by Mark Dingemanse, Jeremy Hammond, and Simeon Floyd in close collaboration with the ELAN developers Han Sloetjes and Aarthy Somasundaram. In this post we outline the most important features of Transcription mode.

Transcription mode

Transcription Mode is a mode designed to increase the speed and efficiency of transcription work. The interface is keyboard-driven and minimizes UI actions. All annotations of a certain tier type are displayed in a vertical list for easy visual access. Transcription mode brings down the transcription work to the bare essentials: listen, type, listen, type, listen, type.

Note. Transcription mode presupposes that the initial segmentation of the recording is already done. The rationale for this is that the most efficient workflow for transcribing large amounts of linguistic data is a two-step process: first segmenting the recording into turns —also attributing turns to the appropriate speaker— (this can be done in Annotation mode or in the special purpose Segmentation mode), and then transcribing and translating these turns.

1. Setting it up

You can reach Transcription mode via the Options > Transcription mode menu. If you go to Transcription mode for the first time, a Settings dialog will come up. Here you can select the tier types to be used for up to three columns. Note that you select tier types, not individual tiers. This is because Transcription mode displays all annotations on all tiers of a certain type in a vertical column.

For the purposes of this description we will asssume that the user is working with a file that has four main tier types: po (practical orthography), tl (literal translation), tf (free translation), and vb (visible behaviour). Our example file contains tiers of these types for two participants, and the overall tier structure looks like this (tier names in bold, tier types in courier):

  • A_po po (practical orthography)
    • A_tl tl (literal translation)
    • A_tf tf (free translation)
  • A_vb vb (visible behaviour)
  • B_po
    • B_tl
    • B_tf
  • B_vb

In our example, we choose the type po (practical orthography) as the first column. We can leave it at that if we just want to work on the transcript. Or we can display up to two additional columns next to the primary one. In our example, we’ll add the literal translation type.

For the second and third columns we can only select tier types that are time-aligned with the first using the stereotype “Symbolic Assocation”. In our example, we can select tl (literal translation) and/or tf (free translation) as second and third columns. We cannot choose the tier type vb (visible behaviour) here, because it is not time-aligned with our primary column.

Having selected the tier types we want, we click “Apply”. Now the chosen tier types are displayed in vertical columns, and the two largest differences from the default Annotation mode become visible: (i) all annotations are displayed vertically (top to bottom) rather than horizontally (left to right), and (ii) columns display all annotations of a certain type. For instance, the po (practical orthography) column displays turns from both speakers A and B.

Note. Transcription mode presupposes that you use linguistic types to differentiate the types of information in your tiers. Thus the linguistic type of your free translation tier should be different from the linguistic type of your main transcription. This is necessary for any serious corpus work anyway — for instance, ELAN’s multiple layer search also relies on this. If you haven’t been using linguistic types yet, consider investing the time to bring your files up to speed. This will not only let you use Transcription mode, it will also allow complex corpus searches and in general make your data more structured. The best way to enforce proper use of linguistic types across your files is to use a template.

2. Using Transcription mode

Transcription mode is built for high-speed transcription work. It plays automatically so that you can start typing right away. You can hit TAB to replay, and if you finish typing you hit ENTER, which brings you to the next annotation, which is played automatically so that you can start typing right away… and so on. Transcription mode boils down the transcription process to the two most essential actions: listening and typing. Once you’ve set it up, you don’t need to worry about anything else.

You can use Transcription mode to do initial transcription of a segmented recording. For this you would use the simplest, one-column setup. You can also use it to work on translations if you already have transcriptions. For this you would display both tier types side by side. And of course you can do the transcription and translation work in one go. For this you would use the two-column setup and check the option to “Navigate across columns”.

The basic philosophy of Transcription mode is to make things as easy as possible for the transcriber. This is why it displays annotations in a table rather than on a timeline, plays automatically on selection, and moves to the next annotation without requiring additional clicks or key presses. It will also silently create child annotations if they don’t exist yet — merely clicking an empty cell (or moving there using the keyboard) creates an annotation and opens it for immediate editing. The user just has to make sure the relevant tiers exist for all participants, and Transcription mode takes care of the rest.

3. Essential shortcuts

Typing and playing back

  • ENTER saves the current annotation, moves to the next annotation, and plays this new annotation if the automatic playback option is selected. [Three for the price of one!]
  • TAB plays the current annotation. It acts as a play/pause key, so you can press it again to pause playback, and again to continue playing.
  • SHIFT+TAB plays back the current annotation from the start.

Moving around

  • UP and DOWN arrows move up and down within a column.
  • ALT+LEFT and ALT+RIGHT arrows move left and right across columns (and just because we know you’d try this, ALT+UP and ALT+DOWN also move up and down within a column)
  • Remember that ENTER automatically moves to the next annotation. The Navigate across columns setting controls whether you go down within a column or you move across columns (from left to right).

Using the mouse

  • Clicking on any annotation activates it for editing. The cursor will be placed close to where you clicked and you edit right away.
  • You can also use the mouse to select part of the waveform for playback. TAB will play/pause the selection.
  • Right click on annotation will give you an option to jump to the Annotation mode. This will allow you to finely manipulate annotation boundaries and then return to Transcription mode.

4. The settings explained

Below the video signal and above the waveform you find the normal playback buttons (Play, Play selection, Clear selection). (Though recall that you can simply use Tab for quick playback of the full annotation or the selection.) In this area there are two further options:

  • screen layout. This option determines whether the media and settings are displayed on the left side or on the right side of the screen. Clicking it flips the screen layout. Default: video, audio and settings on the left.
  • loop mode. This option is found to the right of the play/pause buttons. When checked it means that a selected annotation while constantly loop until a new annotation is selected. Default: unchecked.

Below the waveform your find a couple further options that you can use to customize the Transcription mode experience.

  • automatic playback of media. This controls whether the annotation is automatically played or not when you arrive at it. Default: checked.
  • show tier names. This controls whether tier names are shown within the list or not. If unchecked, colour coding distinguishes different tiers/participants, and hovering over an annotation will tell you the tier/participant name. (There is an additional choice to show colours in the cells themselves or only in the line number column.) Default: checked.
  • navigate across columns. This controls what annotation you move to after hitting Enter. If unchecked, you move only within a column (from top to bottom). If checked, you move across columns (from left to right). Default: unchecked.
  • always scroll the current annotation to the center. This mode keeps your current annotation always in the middle of the screen. Default: unchecked.

5. Layout and viewing

The layout of the transcription mode is designed to replicate the best aspects of a word processor and a spreadsheet – all the while allowing you access to the time-aligned video and audio signals.

  • The video column, which also includes the options and wav form, can be placed on the right or left. Press the screen layout button to toggle the video/settings column from left to right. The video can also be detached for viewing independent of the main window, for instance on a secondary monitor.
  • All of the columns are resizable: just mouse click and drag the boundaries to fit your desired widths.
  • You can order columns as you please. So once you have established your types you can then reorder them on the screen simply by dragging them to the desired location.
  • You can zoom in on the video signal in order to focus a particular part (also available in annotation mode). This works best with HD footage.
  • Font size of the columns is variable: you can change this in the settings dialog box.

6. Have (quick and easy) fun

We hope you enjoy this addition to the Elan toolset. It is designed to cut down on the many hours it takes to do detailed transcriptions and we feel that you will find it an indispensable part of your workflow.

We welcome your comments and feedback!

(This post was co-written by Mark Dingemanse & Jeremy Hammond and appears in slightly different form in the help function of ELAN.)

The Albert Einstein Award of Excellence: another ABI scam

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Last year’s post on the Great Minds of the 21st Century award continues to attract attention from people who want to find out more about the American Biographical Institute (ABI) and its vanity awards.

Surprisingly, there are still people clueless (shameless?) enough to list vanity scams like this on their CVs. Thankfully, the ABI decided to nominate me again this year, this time for another honour: the Albert Einstein Award of Excellence for 2011, no less. Here’s an excerpt from their letter:

One of the most compliments to a person’s career in science is an honor bestowed that symbolizes the practice and genius of one of the world’s great intellectuals – Albert Einstein. You, Mr. Dingemanse, have by the American Biographical Institute to be a recipient of its Albert Einstein Award of Excellence for 2011. You have demonstrated effectiveness and distinction in your field and are deserving of this honor.

It is with great pleasure that I accept this invitation to expound on the dubious value of this award, and the services of the American Biographical Institute in general. The long and the short of it: The American Biographical Institute is a publisher of paid inclusion reference works — you pay $400 to be included in their directory. They also sell ridiculously expensive commemorative plaques — you pay $400 for a piece of wood with your name on it. This is not something to be proud of. It is essentially a paid flattery service. That is exactly why their letters devote so much real estate to assure you of their admiration:

Your accomplishments through scientific intelligence and steadfast efforts personify the contributions Albert Einstein gave to society. … To choose a finite group representing all of the demands of the deep-thinking profession that is science took months of consideration … It is with great admiration that we have chosen you for this distinct honor. … It was my pleasure as president to have been a part of the selection process to choose honorees for the esteemed Albert Einstein Award 2011. It is those, like you, who have committed themselves to an honorable discipline that makes a difference in the enlightenment of others and to the progress of humanity.

Please don’t fall for the vanity awards of ABI. And if you must, be assured that the rest of us will award your “accomplishments” and “steadfast efforts” with the distinct honor of one of the most respected awards in the field of “scientific intelligence” — the esteemed Gullible People of the 21st Century award.