What better way to compensate for the overload of text in the previous posts than with some excellent illustrations of Japanese gitaigo? I have recently been looking at Taro Gomi’s delightful Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, featuring cartoon-like depictions of almost 200 Japanese sound-symbolic words used to evoke certain sensations, feelings, and sensory perceptions. Continue reading
Today’s posting brings you the second part of Pfisterer’s 1904 article (see the previous posting for details on the context and provenance of this piece of missionary writing). This part gives us information on religious beliefs; myths of origin; the afterlife and reincarnation; so-called ‘fetishes’ (kùɣɔ/àɣɔ in Siwu) and how they are to be served (the indigenous hilly rice plays an important role); functions of priests and their servants; the mabia cult of priestesses; amulets and other objects wielding spiritual power; and funeral customs, including an all too brief bit on the funeral dirges Agawu (1988) has written about. All of this is brought, of course, with the characteristic arrogance of the colonizer and some added recipient design (Pfisterer was very conscious of the fact that he was writing for the loyal and pious supporters of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft in Germany).
In the future, I want to talk about some of the issues this text raises. To mention just one thing, Pfisterer narrates how he destroyed a powerful object (left in someone’s home by a witch doctor) by burning it on the public forum for all to see. The significance of this event cannot be overestimated. Pfisterer simply wanted to demonstrate the irrationality of the beliefs of the Mawu. But in the eyes of those present, he was participating in a rather dangerous type of spiritual power play. The fact that he could destroy the bewitched object without being harmed himself established his own spiritual power over that of the witch doctor, providing the Mawu with excellent reasons to align with Pfisterer and the superior power he apparently represented. More on this later; now, let’s see what Pfisterer has to say. Continue reading
One of the goals of The Ideophone, besides functioning as a sounding board for ideas on expressivity and sound symbolism in African languages, is to make available sources on Siwu and other GTM languages which are otherwise hard to come by. This posting is the first in a series furthering that goal. Below you will find the full text (in German) of an early account by Pfisterer, the first missionary to live in Akpafu. Ignoring the colonial tone of voice and the inevitable racial prejudices, we get valuable information on sociolinguistics, oral history, housing, smithing, socio-economical conditions, polygamy, and slavery.
Before giving the floor to Pfisterer, let me provide some context to his account (if you can’t wait, you can skip right to Pfisterer’s own words — don’t forget to look at the beautiful picture below, though!). A lot of material documenting the missionary history of Akpafu can be found in the archives of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft, which have been deposited at the Staatsarchiv Bremen. More often than not, these missionary documents consist of only marginally interesting chitchat about building projects, visitations of other mission posts, and the health of the missionaries, but every once in a while we get more ethnographic detail.
One source offering such detail is a 1904 piece by Andreas Pfisterer on Kawu and the Mawu in the periodical Monatsblatt der Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft. Pfisterer was the man who established the first mission post at ‘Akpafu’ (today’s Akpafu-Todzi) in 1897. He was originally with the Basel Mission, but was ‘dismissed in 1899’, upon which he changed to the Bremen Mission and stayed in Ghana until 1910. According to a brief history of the station by one of the later missionaries, Hermann Schosser (Schosser 1907), Pfisterer had abandoned the Akpafu station by 1902, leaving behind an unfinished house and the indigenous catechist Mensa with his Christian family.
Pfisterer’s account was published in two parts, and in an attempt to keep the postings here within reasonably length I will keep to that division, reproducing the first half of his account below and the second half in a second posting. I have marked a few obvious errors that were present in the source; any remaining typographical errors are probably mine.
If you’ve read yesterday’s post (Zotero, an Endnote alternative) or come across Zotero elsewhere, you may have been wondering about its name. I believe most Anglophones pronounce the word [ˌzɔˈtɛɹoʊ], but the term itself actually derives from the Albanian verb zotëro-j [zɔtərɔj] ‘master, acquire’. The final -j marks the 1st person indicative (the regular citation form for Albanian verbs); in the imperative, we would get the bare verb root zotëro [zɔtərɔ]. Such subtleties did not figure in the initial baptismal act though, as we learn from the following transcript of a podcast featuring the people behind Zotero:
The web being what it is, I just quickly googled and found an English-Albanian dictionary and typed a bunch of our keywords that we associated with the project and when I typed in ‘learning’, uhm… one of the variants was ‘to learn something extremely well, that is to master or acquire a skill in learning’ was “zotëroj” [pronounced [ˌzɒˈtuəɹʏdʲ] by DC, MD] (laughs), which we have shortened, we took of the -j at the end which is more of a ‘y’-sound and uh we took off the umlaut …
(Dan Cohen, Library Geeks Podcast 5, 22:48—25:15)
It’s that simple. And for good reason: essentially, want you need in branding is a name that sticks but at the same time is not too common; if it makes some sense (as ‘Zotero’ does), that’s even better. The main reason for choosing an Albanian word was thus quite simply to minimize namespace competition. It could have been any other language — in the podcast, Cohen mentions Maori; Hawaiian is another popular one (wikiwiki), and Bantu languages do well too (cf. Ubuntu, a trendy Linux distribution).
Well, not really any other language of course — a quick glance over the newest web 2.0 names shows that the preferred languages for this kind of stuff seem to be those with simple phonotactics, a preference for open syllables, a basic 5 vowel system, and not-too-outlandish consonant inventories. So at least in the Zotero case, Siwu is out of luck with suã ‘learn’ (nasal vowel penalty); as is Tamashek with əlmæd ‘learn, acquire’ (muddy vowels and a voiced coda, tsk); as is Ibibio with kpéép ‘learn, acquire’ (a labio-velar stop, for petes sake!); readers are no doubt able to come up with better examples.
Fortunately, these need not be fatal problems. Dan Cohen’s account shows that if it doesn’t fit, we can always make it fit; just chop off needless morphology and diacritics and you’re good to go. Now Albanian, hitherto an obscure 6 million speaker language making up it’s own branch of Indo-European, enjoys celebrity status as the language that endowed the Next-Generation Research Tool with a worthy name. Come to think of it, who would not like to sacrifice some orthographic blunt for publicity’s sake? Suddenly all those woefully inadequate orthographies we linguists have been cursing at are beginning to make sense! Next time the underspecified orthography drives you nuts again, find a product in need of a name and monetize your despair. I’ve heard naming consultants easily make twice as much as linguists.
P.S. A great resource on naming is Nancy Friedman’s Away With Words, which I found via the posting on Web 2.0 names referenced above.
I wasn’t planning to make this a software weblog, but I’ll make an exception for Zotero because I think fellow researchers will find it an interesting tool. Zotero [ˌzɔˈtɛɹoʊ] is a free piece of software that lives in your browser, helping you to ‘collect, manage and cite your research sources’ in all sorts of beautiful ways. It bills itself as The Next-Generation Research Tool, and in this post I’ll try to explain why I think that’s true. The background to this posting is that I made the move from Endnote to Zotero two months ago — and I have never since considered going back.
It all started when I upgraded from Endnote 7 to Endnote X to get Unicode support. Endnote X included Endnote Web, a web-based implementation that looked interesting. I had some difficulty getting the two to work together, and when I finally did, there were drawbacks that made me look out for an alternative. A Google search led me to Zotero, which was a breeze to install. I could simply import my Endnote library and started a testdrive. Within minutes I was totally hooked. The Zotero interface offered everything I had been missing in Endnote and then some. What makes Zotero so good?
First of all, Zotero answers the needs of researchers in the digital age. The rise of online repositories like JSTOR, ProQuest, SpringerLink, and Google Scholar has caused a shift in our research habits; we spend more time browsing virtual libraries, and less time hanging around in physical ones. Zotero seamlessly integrates with this online experience by automating the wearisome labour of saving references and by offering many ways to manage and enrich the data thus collected. All from within the web browser. Continue reading
The Akpafus must immediately strike even the most casual observer as a people differing from the surrounding tribes. Their huts are flat roofed (with mud) instead of the conical grass-roofed houses of the Ewe race. Their language is not Ewe, but a remnant of some ancient tribal idiom. (Rattray 1916:431)
Having been a small and quite isolated language for centuries, Siwu was relatively late to attract attention from outsiders. Europeans in search for gold, slaves, and other goods for the most part stayed near the coast. Halfway the nineteenth century, German firms (looking for cheap land) and missionary organizations (looking for converts) started to explore the Hinterland and it is in this period that the name Akpafu turns up for the first time in the historical record. (If you wonder about the etymology, see here.) The earliest mention I found so far is a photo by the German missionary photographer Christian Hornberger, titled Fetischpriester in Akpafu and dated 1864 (see below). Still, it took some time before Akpafu became more generally known, due in part to its remoteness, but probably also because of the turmoil caused by the Asante-British wars.
Only when the area became part of the German colony of Togoland (1884-1914), more information became available. The earliest ethnographic source is a study by Rudolf Plehn, published as his dissertation in Halle in 1898 and titled Beiträge zur Völkerkunde des Togo-Gebietes (Contributions to the ethnography of the Togo area). It is here that we find the oldest fragment of Siwu to appear in print, and in this posting I’ll report on an attempt to decipher it. Continue reading
A common term for expressive vocabulary in African linguistics is ‘ideophone’. It has become a tradition to cite the first paragraph of Doke’s definition in any study on ideophones:
Ideophone (Idéophone) [Ideophon]
A vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, colour, sound, smell, action, state or intensity.
Doke, Bantu Linguistic Terminology, 1935, p. 118
Samarin, in his excellent overview of ideophony in Bantu, carefully notes that ‘[i]t is reported that Doke also is responsible for creating the term ideophone, but I have not come across supporting evidence. Its first appearance seems to be in 1953 with the publication of his Bantu Linguistic Terminology.’ (Samarin 1971:132). Indeed, examples of studies crediting Doke with inventing the term are easily found; here are just a few invoking Doke’s definition [relegated to a footnote to save space].
It is little known that Doke did not actually coin this term, but just gave a new definitional twist to an already existing concept. Continue reading
Some years ago I was following a course by Maarten Kossmann on Tuareg (Tamasheq, Tamajeq, Tamahaq). It was thoroughly enjoyable. After the first lecture we were all alotted a letter of the great Dictionnaire Touareg — Français (a consonant, obviously), and for the remainder of the course these 15 to 40 dictionary pages would form the basis for a number of excercises in the weeks to follow. It was an interesting method; for Kossmann this must have felt like letting loose a bunch of sheep just to see what patterns their random grazing would produce.
Anyway, I was given the letter F and I remember being intrigued, during those hours of grazing pp. 169-189 of the Dictionnaire, by those classes of verbs that were characterized by reduplication. There are various types of reduplication here: classes 7, 8 and 15 are characterized by full, classes 11 and 16 by initial, and class 9 by final reduplication. The interesting thing is that these verbs also seem to cluster together semantically in various ways.
Let’s look at some data. Of the 168 verb roots starting in F in the dictionary, there are five class 7 verbs, eight class 8 verbs, 18 class 9 verbs, and two class 11 verbs (no verbs from class 15 and 16 in this sample). That’s 5%, though that percentage is pretty meaningless with such a small sample. Here’s a selection of expressive verbs: Continue reading