Many of the terms that were either borrowed from or modeled on Khoisan neighbors (say into Zulu, as click-initial forms) deal with material textures and various ways of interacting with these.

In the Khoisan I’ve examined, many of the forms that end in -m, glottalized -m, nasalized -o or -u have something to do with eating.

Interestingly, so do verbs beginning with the rare labial clicks. In languages like Mongolian, where one can have CVC-C ideophone stems, the phonosemantics of the third C seems identical to that of the first (while the second is opposed). This third C can be any of the allowed phonemes.

Perhaps then the final C in Khoisan verbs is similar this regard to the first, click-based one (though not a click itself).

Thanks for your insightful response. I look forward to your post comparing Westermann and Nuckolls. And good luck, btw, on your upcoming fieldwork!

You were quite right to correct my crude representation of Nuckolls’ position, but at the end of the day I think we are still left with a hypothesis that connects a society’s relationship with nature – be it philosophical, ideological, or material (or all three!) – with the occurrence of ideophones in language spoken in that society. There may very well be a plausible mechanism connecting the two phenomena, but I still have a hard time seeing what that might be.

My personal hunch is that the use of ideophones, and their systematization, has probably more to do with language ideologies regarding the role of mimesis in discourse. Even in Western societies, children use ideophones in play (Blam blam! Kaboom! etc.), and informal interactions are frequently rich in other expressive resources. But in more formal interactions, I believe, the skilled selection of lexical items is valued over the deployment of expressive resources like ideophones. (As a though experiment, imagine a political leader of a Western society employing an ideophone in a political address.) I suspect that speakers in a given society associate the use of mimesis with certain kinds of social positions and interactional stances, and that it is the value placed on these positions and stances by speakers that affect the use of mimesis and its subsequent elaboration into resources like ideophones. As you suggest, many different factors could feed into this.

Your suggestion that I look at other expressive resources is well-taken, and its worth mentioning that in Nanti, one of the languages I am working with, there is significant elaboration of prosodic features to express a wide range of affective and interactional stances. In fact, my partner, Chris Beier, is writing her dissertation on this very topic, and she has uncovered some very subtle and interesting ways in which prosodic features encode stances. You two should talk!

Nuckolls, by the way, doesn’t say the Japanese are close to nature; what she says is that “Japanese culture has at base ideas about nature that are so radically different from Judeo-Christian constructions that ideophony has been allowed to flourish” (p. 133). I think we must at least entertain this possibility, yet at the same time I feel this cannot be the whole story. One problem with the Japanese mimetics, for example, is that a lot of them don’t have that much to do with nature (but rather with inner feelings and emotions). Perhaps the Japanese data points in another direction; I think it shows that there are multiple powers at work shaping the nature of ideophony in any given language. Anyway, more on that later. (It may take some time; I won’t be working on this during my six-week fieldtrip which begins in a few days.)

I’ve worked in Amazonian societies that are very ‘close to nature’ whose languages exhibit relatively little ideophony

See, that’s intriguing, and an interesting limiting case to be reckoned with in any theory of ideophony. But certainly you overlooked the food texture verbs, on which I just prepared a follow-up posting. Just kidding.

Only half kidding, though — it would be interesting to know how and to what extent the languages you mention cultivate their expressive resources. What about landscape vocabulary? Visual patterns? Manners of movement? Inner feelings and sensations? What about narratives — how involved is the audience, and what kind of techniques are used by narrators to get them involved? And moving beyond the verbal domain: what about gestures?

I also find it hard to understand how, precisely, being ‘close to nature’, however one chooses to operationalize the notion, would give rise to ideophony. What is the link? At root, might the hypothesized correlation be — to put it somewhat provocatively — anything more than a whitewashed and updated conception of the bogus correlation once seen between ‘primitive societies’ and ‘primitive languages’, where ideophony is an index of ‘primitiveness’?