One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known as the Akpafu) is a little book written in 1998 by Rev. H.B.K. Ogbete. This book contains a wealth of material: it records oral traditions, names of ancestors and chiefs, and a lot of background information on the culture of the Mawu. However, it is very difficult to find. Therefore, by popular demand, and with the permission of Prof. Kofi Agawu of Princeton University (who was involved in the publication of the book), I am making available a digital copy of it here.
Download it here: A history of the Akpafus (PDF, 2.5Mb) Just out: A new issue of the journal Senses & Society, featuring research by a dozen contributors to the Language of Perception project. This special issue, edited by Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, also features two articles on ideophones: one by Sylvia Tufvesson and one by yours truly. Sylvia’s article is entitled Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World. You can find the electronic version via the DOI or download the PDF directly. Abstract: Sylvia Tufvesson, Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World In the interplay between language, culture, and perception, iconicity structures our representations of what we experience. By examining secondary iconicity in sensory vocabulary, this study draws attention to diagrammatic qualities in human interaction with, and representation of, the sensory world. In Semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian), spoken on Peninsular Malaysia, sensory experiences are encoded by expressives. Expressives display a diagrammatic iconic structure whereby related sensory experiences receive related linguistic forms. Through this type of form-meaning mapping, gradient relationships in the perceptual world receive gradient linguistic representations. Form-meaning mapping such as this enables speakers to categorize sensory events into types and subtypes of perceptions, and provide sensory specifics of various kinds. This study illustrates how a diagrammatic iconic structure within sensory vocabulary creates networks of relational sensory knowledge. Through analogy, speakers draw on this knowledge to comprehend sensory referents and create new unconventional forms, which are easily understood by other members of the community. Analogy-making such as this allows speakers to capture fine-grained differences between sensory events, and effectively guide each other through the Semai sensory landscape.
My article is titled Ideophones and the Aesthetics of Everyday Language in a West-African Society. You can find the electronic version via the DOI or download the PDF directly. Abstract: Mark Dingemanse, Ideophones and the Aesthetics of Everyday Language in a West-African Society This article explores language, culture, and the perceptual world as reflected in a particular linguistic device: ideophones, marked words that depict sensory imagery. Data from a range of elicitation tasks shows that ideophones are a key resource in talking about sensory perception in Siwu. Their use in everyday conversations underlines their communicative versatility while at the same time showing that people delight in their expressiveness. In ideophones, we have an expressive resource that combines sheer playfulness with extraordinary precision This is the first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu. It was written down by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887. The account was originally written in Twi, and translated in German in 1889 by the eminent linguist J.G. Christaller, who published it in a German geographical journal. It was translated from German into English by Mark Dingemanse in 2009. I posted the German text on this blog earlier. What follows is my English translation. You can also download a pdf version which includes both the original German and the English translation. Enjoy! When we travelled on in the morning, the chief of Tɛtɛman provided us with a guide to Akpafu. In actual fact we had wanted to go from Tɛtɛman via Baika to Lolobi; but we were told here that that road was blocked and was no more travelled; but the Akpafu one would be good and short. And the disease [which the travellers had been told previously reigned in Akpafu] had not been in Akpafu itself, but in Odomi, and it was long gone. We looked very much forward to come to Akpafu, which is famous for its ironwork and blacksmiths. Everywhere along the way we saw the charcoal that they use to melt the iron. They chop green wood, dig a pit in the ground, stack the wood in it, and cover it with leaves and earth, leaving only a small hole through which they set fire to the wood. Only after eight days they quench the fire and take out the charcoal. Soon after climbing the mountain and reaching the plain we saw the place where they melt the iron, which is a little away from the town. Their furnaces they build like a rice granary, but the walls are much stronger than that, about 5 feet high, and open at the top. At the bottom there is a opening, through which they insert the charcoal. The iron ore is then poured on the charcoal. When the charcoal is set fire to, the opening at the bottom is closed with clay until only a small hole remains, through which air can enter; also, 5 or 6 small holes are made in the furnace, so that the fire will draw and not go out. If everything goes well in the blaze, one will see the melted slag flow slowly out of a hole that is made at the bottom; but the good iron remains in the furnace. Only 24 hours after lighting the oven it is taken out. The emptied furnace however retain its heat for a long time; whatever food one puts in will be well done. A deep, steep abyss is next to one of the smelting-furnaces; when one rolls a stone into it, it will be heard rolling for 5 to 7 minutes, and still it has not arrived at the bottom. Children like playing that game. We arrived in Akpafu somewhere around 9 o’clock. The town is big, its main street wide. When we arrived, all of the townspeople flocked together to see us — even the smiths stopped their work — because never before had any whites come to this town. Had it depended just on these people, we would have stayed for several days. They first led us to a place where we could refresh ourselves; from there we went to salute the king, an old, powerfully built man. They took us into a forge and showed us everything they make there. Their anvil is not made of iron, but it is a big quartzite stone that is attached to the ground, the upper side of which is polished. When they are forging, they don’t remain in one place but they walk around the anvil. They make their own tools, like hammer, tongs, chisel and so on. Their hammer is not like a European one, but the handle is iron like the upper part, short and smooth round about; some are big, others small. Their bellow is like one of the olden days; one grasps it with both hands and works it like a drum; therefore this is not done by a single man, but by 3-5 persons in turn. All of the tools they forge are made in the same way: a long, curved piece of iron is made into cutlass, hoe, and celt alike. Their hoes are different from ours, in that they are rounded; others are like ours [flat with two corners], and only the edge is rounded. After that they showed us where they dig iron ore; it is on the same mountain as the town. The shafts are similar to the gold mines in Akem; they dig down and then make side galleries connecting the vertical shafts to one another. Some few people here understand Twi; one of them, who had been in Cape Coast, we got to translate our preaching. Their giant king was very amiable and wanted us to stay for several days; however, our schedule did not permit us to do so. We talked with him about God’s word, and he said that if we wanted to station someone in his town, he would comply with pleasure. Of the people of Buem, these are the brightest. That the children go naked has become a custom, here too. Because of their ironwork, everything is well-organized; for people from all over the region come here to buy iron tools. The houses here are not covered with grass, but they have flat mud roofs; these are not called adán [normal houses] but àbã [houses like forts and stone houses]. The Buems that live in such houses are the following towns: Borada, Akpafu, Tɛtɛman, Baika, Lolobi, Santrokofi. The towns in which iron is worked, are Akpafu, Santrokofi and Lolobi. There are two Akpafu towns: Akpafu-gã (the big one), which is on the mountain; and Akpafu-Dome, which lies on the plain. Lolobi consists of two towns; Santrokofi has three towns, all of them not more than five minutes removed from the other. Because of the ironwork done here there are many forges in the town; when one sees their zeal in forging and ironsmelting, one has to wonder. The people are all pitch-black. One of the smiths showed us a wonderful feat: after he had rubbed his hands in the dust of the floor of his forge, he took a red-hot piece of iron out of the fire and brushed past it with his hands so that it sparked; but his hands were not hurt. The diligence of these people, their hospitality, and their quiet behaviour pleased us so much that we really came to love them. If only we would have had more time, we would have met their wish to stay with them one more day. When we took our leave, the king said that we should return soon and bring guns, because their guns were all damaged. We told him that we were preachers of the gospel and had nothing to do with that kind of business. He gave us a guide, who brought us to Santrokofi in the evening of that same day. Gérard Diffloth, writing about the paradox of catching ideophones in the wild, notes the following: Il faut donc guetter les expressifs et les attraper au vol ; mais dans le feu de l’action et de la discussion animée où ils naissent, qui aurait le culot d’interrompre tout le monde afin de pouvoir vérifier une voyelle, un sens, une intention? Or in English: We must therefore watch for the expressive and catch it in full flight; but in the heat of the action and animated discussion in which they are born, who would have the gall to interrupt everybody to be able to check a vowel, a meaning, an intention? Who indeed, we may ask. Interrupting an animated conversation anytime an ideophone flies by is a surefire way to kill any spark of spontaneity. In good French academic style, Diffloth is highly skeptical about ways to subvert this problem: “Quant au magnétophone, n’en parlons pas, il gâche la spontanéité et il supprime le contexte non-sonore … La caméra est plus balourde encore.” (In English: “As for the tape recorder, don’t get me started, it ruins the spontaneity and removes the non-auditory context. … The camera is even more clumsy.”) I share a lot of Diffloth’s skepticism, but as the Mawu say (using ideophones), àsi kpoo, ilo kpoo: if you do nothing, nothing happens. Interrupting a videotaped conversation is a lot easier than interrupting “tout le monde”. And using the sequential structure of recorded conversations to get access to participants’ own interpretations of each others’ talk is a extremely valuable complement to post-hoc reflections on meaning or intention. So for all its clumsiness, I prefer the camera. Building a multimodal corpus of everyday interaction is a job fraught with difficulties (even if cameras have become a lot less clumsy since 2001). But if it is the closest we can currently get to a faithful (if not complete) representation of everyday social interaction, it is infinitely better than nothing. Note. At the request of Gérard Diffloth, I changed my slightly literalist translation of “tout le monde” as “all the world” to the more common “everybody”. The LSA asks its members in a survey to choose the most important papers in Language, 1925-2000. Have you ever wondered what might be the most cited ones? The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is currently doing a member survey to collect suggestions for an anthology of the most influential and significant articles published in Language. From the survey: For each volume of the Anthology, we are seeking input on those articles which represent the best scholarship published during that particular period. By “best,” we mean the most influential, the most cited, the most visited in JSTOR, and those considered a must-read for students and scholars of the discipline. The survey includes some data that is normally hard to come by: most viewed articles from the JSTOR archive of Language. Since I think we can learn some useful things by crowdsourcing this data, I have put it in a publicly editable Google spreadsheet called Language Anthology data. Looking over the lists, a number of interesting observations could be made. One thing that strikes me is the relatively low number of generativist studies, or conversely, the large number of non-generativist studies. There is more to say, but I don’t want to interpret too much. (Supply your own interpretations in the comments below!) As a first addition to the spreadsheet, I thought it would be interesting to get some idea of the number of citations of the items listed in the LSA survey. Do articles that are ‘viewed’ or ‘downloaded’ actually get cited? As a rough approximation, I use the “cited by” number from Google Scholar (if anyone has better data for all of the items, feel free to add a column in the spreadsheet!). The citation chart below is generated from the data in the spreadsheet: Some interesting things emerge here. First, there is the Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) paper on turn-taking, which with a whopping 5638 citations must surely be the most cited article in the history of the journal Language. There was an interesting discussion on Funknet the other day (prompted by a question of Fritz Newmeyer) about outside views of linguistics as a discipline. In a contribution to this discussion, Brian MacWhinney noted the following: Finally, I wish that I could refer to Conversation Analysis as a part of linguistics. I know that I can’t really get away with this, although personally I think it is a part. In any case, I see a lot of interest and respect for CA from areas as diverse as marketing, sociology, politics, aphasiology, and so on. Seeing statistics like this (and noting that the fourth most cited article on the list —Schegloff et al. 1977, with 1698 citations— is another CA article), the question whether or not CA should be considered part of some (apparently narrowly construed) discipline doesn’t really matter. Clearly, scholars inside and outside of “linguistics” have no trouble finding the results of CA worthwile enough to cite. That said, I do agree with MacWhinney: if there is to be a true science of human language (a reasonable gloss for “linguistics” I would say), it seems clear to me that the analysis of conversation should form an integral part of it. Curiously, the next most cited article, Dowty 1991, has a little over two thousand citations, leaving a enormous gap. Her’s something to think about: What will these charts look like for the upcoming decades? What kinds of approaches to language are going fill that gap in the next fify years? My bet is on more data-driven approaches: CA, corpus linguistics, large scale typological studies based on fine-grained datasets, and the like. An outlier on the other side of the spectrum is Michael Shapiro’s “Sound and meaning in Shakespearer’s sonnets”, which according to Google Scholar is cited by only 3 works. One wonders how it ends up in the JSTOR top 25 downloads — and why it is not getting cited! Now the LSA survey would not be a member survey if they did not ask their members to supply their own candidate articles for inclusion in the Language Anthology. I have a few of my own (Friedrich’s “Shape in grammar”; Jakobson’s “Grammatical parallelism”; Fromkin’s “Anomalous utterances”; Clark & Gerrig’s “Quotations as demonstrations”; Evans & Wilkins’s “In the mind’s ear”), but perhaps it is more interesting to look at some other widely cited articles that didn’t make it through the LSA selection process. Here is a Google Scholar search that will produce articles from the period 1925-2000 in Language, sorted (roughly, as all data in Google Scholar) by number of citations. On that list we find the following widely cited articles that are not present in the LSA survey (though I suspect that many of them should also be in the top 25 downloads from JSTOR): There are some great and important articles in this list that would in my opinion be worth anthologizing. What are your choices? Although the data is in the Google spreadsheet, I include the lists from the LSA survey below in a proper bibliographic format. All of this is simply pulled from Zotero (which made it a breeze to get the papers from JSTOR), and users of Zotero will see a little “folder” icon that they can use to import the references into their library. Additionally, the papers are in the public Zotero group “Linguistics”: see the collections 1976-2000 and 1925-1975, respectively. (I’m not sure how this list is ordered; I’m presenting it here as it is presented in the survey.) Then there is “a list of nine additional articles falling within the top 25 downloaded articles from 1976-2000″. It is unclear why there wouldn’t also be a top 10 or even top 25 list of articles for the 1925-1975 period, but anyway, the survey gives only the following six, in this order: This blog has been suffering from a bad case of thesis-writing neglect. But I’m getting there. I just launched thesis.ideophone.org, a site that will be the home of online supplementary materials to go with my PhD thesis, The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. There isn’t all that much to see yet, but I did upload some pictures of Kawu and some enticing figures from the chapter on the pile sorting task to whet the appetite of you ideophone afficionados out there. More details soon! “The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss, once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,” he said, “he gets to middle age — and by the way, he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five more years until that craziness peters out, and now he’s almost fifty — a guy like that at last explains to himself that life is made of time, that time is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then he either blows his brains out, gets religion, or settles down to some major-league depression. Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights torque wrench — no, you moron, the other one.” Summer Job, by Richard Hoffman. From the bundle Gold Star Road, Barrow Street Press 2007. Spotted on Michael Agar‘s home page and also seen on the Poetry Foundation. I keep forgetting the kind of simple edits that are so trivial to make in CSL styles. Here I catalogue a few, for my own benefit and hopefully also useful to others. The occasion is a festive one —one paper in press and another accepted with minor revisions!— and I’m not going to let the fun be spoiled by the tedious job of making minute changes to the referencing styles. Where did the editors and reviewers find all this time anyway? One of them manually added spaces before the page numbers in all of my forty+ in-text references! I refuse to do that kind of monkey-work. Instead, I’m simply going to edit the nearest CSL style and woosh, the whole document will be fine. The Zotero documentation offers the basic information on how to edit CSL styles and how to get your new style into Zotero; here I assume that you’ve read that. (The lowdown: use the reference test pane to see the XML code of an existing style. Make it your own. Save it under a different name. Drag it onto Firefox to add it to Zotero.) Before I give the code snippets, it is probably useful to briefly outline what a CSL style looks like so that the code looks less terrifying. A CSL style is simply a file that you can edit in any text editor consisting of a number of different ‘blocks’ of information. The information is couched in terms of a relatively simple but powerful XML-based metalanguage called “Citation Style Language” or CSL for short. Every CSL style basically looks as follows. First, an info block providing the metadata for the style (author, name, url, type); then a lot of macros defining the building blocks; a citation block that determines what citations look like in your document; and finally a bibliography block. Some styles have initials, others have full first names. Some of the first have initials followed by a period, others without. Personally, I think it is not the best thing to abbreviate information that is crucial for disambiguation, but this is what does it: The above form gives you “Gombrich, E.” Removing the period (i.e. having Some well-known styles (for example the Chicago Manual of Style) substitute subsequent recurrences of an author with three em-dashes. The highlighted line below is what does it: If you don’t want that happening, simply remove this option from the bibliography block. Some editors don’t like issue numbers. In the Chicago style, the issue number comes out of the Deleting that line gets rid of the issue number. For page numbers in in-text citations, some styles want (Doe 2010:5), others (Doe 2010, 5) and yet others (Doe 2010: 5) (note the space before the page number in the latter case). This is controlled by the group delimiter in the citation block towards the end of the CSL style. Do you want more information, or need to make further customizations? The Zotero documentation has a page giving a CSL syntax summary. The common options given on that page are probably most useful to start with. Also, Rintze Zelle has written a very nice CSL 1.0 primer. And don't forget you can always ask for help in the Zotero forums. Loads of volunteer supporters there know more about CSL than I do. We’ve been working on this for quite some time, and we’re excited to go live now: the L&C Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials. This is a website providing access to many of the field manuals produced over the years by the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. As the front page explains: This site contains a bonanza of material for the field elicitation of semantics and and the field collection of verbal behaviour. These are unique resources that have been compiled over nearly twenty years of investigation of under-studied languages by the Language & Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. During this period we collectively pioneered the field of semantic typology. Many entries from these manuals have been circulating informally for years and they have been used by field workers all over the globe. With this archive we offer a centralized, easy to use resource. We’ve started by making available the most recent couple of years. Over the coming months, we will be uploading older manuals and materials, but you can start by checking out the wealth of materials already there — from guidelines on Building a Corpus of Multimodal Interaction in your Field Site to our cross-cultural Synaesthesia Pilot, and from the recent Language of Perception project to the classic Put Project: The Cross-Linguistic Encoding of Placement Events. Transient Languages & Cultures published a nice post by Peter Austin last month on the question of how much time it takes to transcribe linguistic data. Working under tight time constraints during some recent fieldtrips, I found one way to speed the process up. It still takes an awful lot of time, but here goes. In my experience, two very important bottlenecks in transcription, especially of conversational material, are (1) initial recognition (what exactly was said?), and (2) writing it down (how quickly can this be written down in the orthography you have chosen?). In my field situation (a Siwu-speaking village in eastern Ghana with few literate and even fewer computer-literate people), I don’t have someone (yet) who could do the actual transcribing, which is usually done directly in ELAN, so I am responsible for bottleneck #2 (getting it into the computer). As regards the first bottleneck, for a native speaker it is much, much easier to ‘hear’ a fuller form of conversational speech than for a non-native speaker, so it makes sense to get that kind of help for bottleneck #1. Initially therefore, I would sit down with a consultant, play a conversation utterance by utterance (I would have done the segmentation in ELAN beforehand), and have the consultant repeat the speech while I wrote it down. For bottleneck #2 reasons this often meant replaying the same utterance multiple times. I soon realized that this was a waste of time for my consultant, who would patiently repeat two to four times what he already got right the very first time. Essentially I was using him as a tape recorder, rewinding and replaying his careful repetitions to make up for my deficiencies in short-term memory and typing speed! So here is what I did to speed up the process: Continue reading
New publications on ideophones
References
A visit to Akpafu by David Asante, 1887
Interrupting everybody
— Gérard Diffloth, 2001
References
The LSA Language Anthology survey: some additional data
More data
Some missing items
Appendix: the lists
LSA 1. JSTOR’s most viewed/downloaded Language papers, 1976-2000.
LSA 2. Nine more articles from the top 25 downloads, 1976-2000
LSA 3. Six articles from the period 1925-1975
Update
Aha!
Simple citation style edits: the power of CSL
Basic anatomy of a CSL style
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="in-text" xml:lang="en">
<info>
here goes the metadata
</info>
here go all the macros
<citation>
this block defines what a citation looks like
</citation>
<bibliography>
this block defines what the bibliography looks like
</bibliography>
</style>
Initials vs. full first names
initialize-with="."
initialize-with="") gives you “Gombrich, E”. Removing the option as a whole gives you “Gombrich, Ernst”. Note that in some styles, this setting is included in several macros (e.g. editor as well as author) so you might have to adjust it in several places.Multiple entries by the same author
<bibliography>
...
<option name="subsequent-author-substitute" value="———"/>
...
</bibliography>
Issue numbers
<text variable="issue" prefix=", no. "/>
Page number prefix for in-text citations
<citation>
...
(basic options)
...
<layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
<group delimiter=": ">
...
(contributors, date, locators)
...
</group>
</layout>
</citation>
delimiter=": " yields (Doe 2010: 5), while delimiter=", " yields (Doe 2010, 5), etc.Want more?
Now online: fieldmanuals.mpi.nl
Transcribing linguistic data: bottlenecks and one way to speed up
