Monthly Archives: December 2008

Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Ideophones for involvement at FeedBurner

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FeedBurner, a service for managing RSS feeds, provided us with a nice example of ideophonic language on its corporate blog last year:

Starting right now, you just log into your Blogger account, select Settings | Site Feed, enter your FeedBurner feed address and click “Save Settings.” Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Now you’ve got the complete picture of how your content is being consumed out here, out there, out everywhere.

HIT! (Emaki.net/The Visual Linguist)

The technique at work here is commonly used in comics. Neil Cohn over at The Visual Linguist refers to it as ‘replacing a certain panel to get an entailment of the action’ (see example to the right).

I would think of it not so much as replacing a panel for something else but rather as zooming in on the action. The goal is not to get the entailment of the action, although that may be the effect. The goal is rather to drag the reader onto the scene to focus on the raw action, inviting her/him to recreate it in the imagination.

Behind the scenes

The ideophones used in the FeedBurner post invite us to imagine what happens after we click ‘Save settings’. They provide us with a peek behind the scenes, suggesting that a whole slew of machinery is set going by this one click, and Zap! Pow! Kraakkkk! produces the desired result.

Dragging us onto the scene is something ideophones do exceedingly well (see ‘Under the spell of ideophones‘). As marked words, they set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic stuff and take center stage (Kunene 2001). As sound images (depictions, Lautbilder) of sensory events, they ‘fire the individual imagination’ (a phrase used by Deborah Tannen (2007[1989]:134) in a discussion of the role of imagery in conversation) and create a heightened sense of involvement (Nuckolls 1992).

The FeedBurner example is interesting because this type of mimetic use of language is stylistically marked for most English speakers. It sort of fits in with the branding strategy of FeedBurner, which is characterized by a decidedly colloquial style of communication all throughout their website. Cornelius Puschmann had a thoughtful post on such issues of style some time ago.

References

  1. 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.
  3. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1992. Sound Symbolic Involvement. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 1: 51-80.  
  4. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. 2nd ed. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Unlocking the potential of the spoken word?

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An intriguing article in Science two months ago suggests that advances in speech processing ‘may soon place speech and writing on a more equal footing, with broad implications for many aspects of society’. It reminds us that most of humanity’s approximately 50,000 years with language was dominated by the spoken word, and that the balance was upset only some few thousands of years ago by the invention of writing. But was it?

An example of a multi-modal speech event. (Credit: Joe Sutliff)

The author, information retrieval specialist Douglas Oard, starts by reviewing how writing caused a landslide in humanity’s cultural landscape, in large part due to the fact that it provided its users with solid permanence and findability — properties that the spoken word, due to its ephemeral nature, did not possess to any great extent. The argument is a familiar one, and although I think that the relative permanence of orally transmitted information in non-literate societies is often underestimated, the basic thrust of the argument strikes me as plausible.

This leads to Oard’s key observation: writing has been hugely succesful due to providing these advantages — but with todays’ (and tomorrows’) speech recognition technologies these advantages are no longer exclusive to writing. Why? Continue reading →

Scandalised missionaries and quite a new class of priests: some unforeseen effects of early missionary efforts in the Gold Coast

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In pursuit of early written sources about Kawu I came across a useful summary of explorations in the Volta Basin in the 1870s and 1880s. The document is clearly based on some dead serious German reports from around the same time, but it is written in a dry tone with barely submerged irony as only the British can do it.

These travel reports are probably of greater value to anthropologists than to geographers. Here are two fascinating bits on some of the unforeseen effects of the diligent missionary efforts of the Basel Mission:

On the 17th, much to our surprise, we reached the pleasant village of Nkaneku after a march of only an hour and a half. It is inhabited by fifty or sixty Asante, who are hunters, and were busy smoking the meat of the buffaloes which they had killed the day before. We here met with another caravan coming from Salaga. Its guides were two Fante Christians from Cape Coast Castle, who much scandalised us by alternately calling upon Allah and Christ. (p. 250)

The fetishes have quite recently come into discredit, for rumours have reached Adele and Akabu from Efe, affirming that a son had been born to God, who had forbidden all work on the Sabbath-day. At the same time quite a new class of priests, male and female, has arisen, who claim to prophesy by inspiration of God, and not of a fetish, and who have built themselves huts at the outskirts of the villages, where the credulous may consult them. One of this new order of priests claimed fellowship with David Asante. (p. 256)

(David Asante, you will remember, was an indigenous pastor educated by the Basel Mission. It is not difficult to imagine how inwardly torn he must have been at times.)

Excerpts from:

  1. N.N. 1886. Recent Explorations in the Basin of the Volta (Gold Coast) by Missionaries of the Basel Missionary Society. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 8, no. 4. 2 (April): 246-256.

Mumbling and other mouth sensations: Ideophone proeverij II (with sound clips)

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With three mouth-related ideophones we’ve got a true proeverij this time. Welcome to dinner! You’re invited to try the first ideophone on the menu, mùkùmùkù. Feel free to sustain the mumbling to get some feeling for the word. Mùkùmùkùmùkùmùkù. The mumbling mouth movements of a toothless person. This is quite a special ideophone in that uttering it (or shall I say muttering it) actually gives one a bit of the mouth feeling a mumbling toothless must be having.

mùkùmùkù
[mùkùmùkù] the mumbling mouth movements of a toothless person
ɔ̀ɖe kanya mukùmùkù • he eats like a toothless person [lit. eats mouth mùkùmùkù]

Now take a deep breath, and get ready for the next course: saaaaaa. This is a Siwu ideophone for a cool sensation in the mouth, as one would get for example with mint or toothpaste. It is devoiced towards the end, so it ends, quite appropriately, in a breath sound. It has a sister ideophone suuu, which evokes a burning sensation as one would get when taking in, for example, a very spicy soup. (The burning is continuous, i.e., not punctuated; yuayua would be an ideophone for a punctuated burning sensation.)

saaa
[saaḁ] cool sensation [esp. in the mouth]

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ì-se sááá
it-COP IDPH.cool
it is saaa
suuu
[suuu̥] burning sensation [esp. in the mouth]

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ah! ì-te ì-bɛbɛrɛ mɛ [sucks in air]… ì-te ì-bɛbɛrɛ mɛ sùuú kɛ̀lɛ̀!
INTJ.pain it-PROG it-be.burning me … it-PROG it-be.burning me IDPH.hot just
Ah! It is burning me … it’s burning me suuu!

If you listen to the audio clips, you’ll note that the ideophones are uttered in a prosodically marked way, with a drawn out vowel, intonational foregrounding, and (in the case of suuu) heavy tonal modulation. This performative aspect of ideophone use is one of the ways in which ideophones stand out in discourse, calling attention to themselves and thereby to the imagery they evoke (cf. Nuckolls 1996:62-78).

Together, saaa and suuu form a sound-symbolic cluster of items that are closely related in both form and meaning. There are more clusters like that — last time’s ɣeee ‘swarming of animals’ for example has a close relative ɣɔɔɔ which describes a moving mass of water. This type of clustering (it has been likened to templatic morphology) is quite common in ideophonic vocabulary worldwide. Finally, note that the opposition between saaa/suuu and mùkùmùkù illustrates once again the iconicity of word form that was highlighted in the previous proeverij.

References

  1. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1996. Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua. New York: Oxford University Press.