Subtitles in ELAN and beyond

ELAN is a tool for creating complex annotations on video and audio resources. It's great for doing the hard work of annotation, but less ideal as a way of displaying the result, for example in a presentation. This brief tutorial covers a common use case: displaying a short stretch of video material with subtitles overlayed on the image. The instructions below are geared towards Windows users, although Mac users can also benefit from ELAN-exported .srt subtitles using VLC Media Player or Quicktime + Perian. Continue reading »

The body in Yoruba

When I finished my MA thesis back in 2006 I made it available online as a gesture to the Yoruba community. It used to be available from my site until I changed servers. Then some good soul uploaded it at Scribd, where it continued to draw visits from various Yoruba forums; however, this happened without my permission and the file was out of my control. I asked the uploader to withdraw it so that I could distribute a slightly updated version. It is now available again on my goodies page, along with some other old and unpublished papers.

Please do not redistribute the PDF file; instead point people to this page or the page http://ideophone.org/goodies/. That way I can update the file if need be, and everyone can be sure they get the most recent version.

The Body in Yoruba (2.45 MB)

Dingemanse, Mark. 2006. The Body in Yoruba: a linguistic study. MA Thesis, Leiden University.

No free ride for semiosis

There is no free ride for semiosis. Signs have a cost and a carbon footprint. Sign processes, in any form we can observe them, consume energy and produce heat.
(...)
Energetic and caloric constraints are generally overlooked in semiotic theorizing which is long on hot air and short on metrics. To the extent that we operate within the range of the social network to which our biosemiotic hardware is adapted, we are not aware of these bio-economic conditions and the thresholds they imply. It is enough to take a break after a tiring conversation or to rest after a lecture for our system to cool down. But when we move from face-to-face interaction to global face-book networking or from horse driven postal messaging to texting and cloud writing, the consumption of energy and the heat generated by semiosis increase exponentially and become not only an economic but also an ecological problem.
(...)
The semiotic understanding of life and society must factor this bio-economic metrics if it is to escape the frivolous discourse of the philosophy of signs.

Paul Bouissac, Hot Signs, in SemiotiX Online issue 15 (just out).

Intangible and abstruse

 

Intangible and abstruse

the bright silk of the sunlight

Pours down in manifest splendor,

You can neither stroke

the precise word with your hand

Nor shut it down under a box-lid.

Tsze Sze's Second Thesis
Ezra Pound, The Unwobbling Pivot, 1947

 

Taro Gomi said: "So linguists do not deal with onomatopoeic expressions. Or perhaps I should say, they are unable to deal with them. And this is not surprising; onomatopoeic expressions are not the kind of subject matter that expert linguists can take up as a separate topic and study academically. After all, onomatopoeic expressions are not really language; they are, in a sense, raw language."

Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics Journals

Not all linguists may be aware of this, but since 2007 there has been a Unified Style Sheet for publications in our field, developed by the editors of a number of linguistic journals, including Language. (Oddly enough, just which journals besides Language joined in the effort remains unclear.) There is not much centralized information available about this style, but we have the 2007 specifications (PDF) and a page endorsing the style at the official LSA website.

As Stephen Anderson writes on the Linguist List,

Use of this style is encouraged, and if it is widely adopted, that could considerably facilitate the preparation of manuscripts. In support of that, it would be useful to have software support for it in popular document preparation systems.

I'm happy to report that Zotero now supports the unified style through the powerful open format CSL. If you have Zotero, you can simply install the style right away. Zotero of course already supported lots of other citation styles, including the widely used APA and MLA as well as styles for specific journals like Language (install) and the Journal of Pragmatics (install).

I haven't been able to find a definitive list of the journals that have adapted the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics, but some examples of journals using and/or endorsing it are Language itself, Semantics & Pragmatics, and the Journal of English Linguistics. Also, the LDLT conference series at SOAS, London is using it in its proceedings. Does anyone know of more journals?

Early sources on African ideophones, part IV: S.W. Koelle on Kanuri, 1854

It is high time for a continuation of our series honouring the ancestors of ideophone studies. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years. In the same year, besides his Kanuri grammar (from which the excerpt below is taken), he issued what may be called a corpus of Kanuri folklore, a grammar of Vai, and the first large-scale comparison of some 200 African languages, the famed Polyglotta Africana. Here is what he has to write about ideophones in Kanuri:

§289. The Kanuri language has a peculiar kind of adverbs, which we may call specific or confined adverbs, each being confined in its use to one or a few particular adjectives or their denominative verbs, as illustrated in the following examples. These singular adverbs which seem to be common in African languages, as they exist also in the Aku and Vei, have something in their nature which may be compared to the onomatopoetica, or something in which the immediate, instinctive sense of language particularly manifests itself. They are eminently expressions of feelings (German, Gefühlsworte), or manifestations of vague impressions rather than of clearly defined ideas. (p. 283)

As might be expected from someone who handled so many different languages, Koelle rightly hypothesized that ideophones would be a feature shared by many African languages. Note that Aku is an old term for Yoruba, the language for which Vidal had claimed independently that "This singular feature of the Yoruba language is unique, and therefore I shall not waste time in comparing it with the adverbial systems, whatever they may be, of other African languages."

As it happens, this singular feature of Yoruba would turn out to be not so unique among African languages. With Kanuri joining Yoruba (Vidal 1852) and Ewe (Schlegel 1857), we now have three independent claims from the 1850's on the significance of ideophones in three major African languages. Although I do not exclude the possibility of finding yet earlier sources, things are starting to look like we may justifiably call this period the decade of the discovery of ideophones in Africa.

References

1. Koelle, Sigismund Wilhelm. 1854. Outlines of a grammar of the Vei language, together with a Vei-English vocabulary. And an account of the discovery and nature of the Vei mode of syllabic writing. London: Church Missionary House.
2. Koelle, Sigismund Wilhelm. 1854. Grammar of the Bórnu or Kānurī language. London: Church Missionary House.
3. Koelle, Sigismund Wilhelm. 1854. African native literature, or Proverbs, tales, fables, & historical fragments in the Kanuri or Bornu language. London: Church Missionary House.
4. Koelle, Sigismund Wilhelm. 1854b. Polyglotta Africana London: Church Missionary House.
5. Schlegel, Joh. Bernhard. 1857. Schlüssel der Ewesprache, dargeboten in den Grammatischen Grundzügen des Anlodialekts. Stuttgart.
6. Vidal, Owen Emeric. 1852. Introductory Remarks. In A Vocabulary of the Yoruba language, ed. Samuel Ajayi Crowther. London: Seeleys.

Slides for ‘The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones’

Slides for a talk titled The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones, presented in Berkeley at the 2009 International Conference on RRG, August 9, 2009. The handout can be downloaded here. The slides are also available as a PDF file. You can cite this presentation as follows:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. "The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones". Paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on RRG, August 9, Berkeley.

Ideophones around the web

With another busy summer gone, here is a post highlighting some of the stuff that's floated by in the ideophonic blogosphere. I haven't seen anything like last year's ideophonic earrings, but we do have more news on Sotho siks!, the introduction of ideophones in the Nyungwe Bible, and a postcard from Taiwan on ideophones in children's stories.

In How is Sotho siks! doing?, I asked for more information on an interesting ideophone reported in 1965 by Daniel P. Kunene. I had trouble locating Kunene online, else I would've asked him directly. As it happens, this distinguished emeritus professor of African Languages and Literatures just started his own blog last month — and promply devoted the third posting to a most interesting response to my query. This for sure is the blogosphere at its best. In his response, Prof. Kunene builds on the helpful comments of Tebello Thejane regarding the fact that siks is very malformed for a Sesotho word:

The fact that, if Sothoized, English “six”, would have been “sikisi” is of cardinal relevance, precisely because my article deals with the phenomenon “siks,” and not “sikisi.” It immediately triggers the question of social and geographical mobility or restriction, and should make the reader go back to the restricted circulation mentioned in my footnote. The group in which I heard it and used it myself was of young people, maybe even as young as higher primary level. That would certainly explain “siks” versus “sikisi.” It also restricts it generationally, further limiting its ability to spread. Clearly, then, Thejane’s 56-year-old mother living in Qwa-qwa would have been most unlikely to hear it.

This gives us a lot more detail on on the provenance of the form. Given its limited circulation at the time, it may have fallen out of use by now, but it remains an interesting specimen of ideophonic language use.

Ideophones in bible translations

We stay in southern Africa for the next item, on ideophones in the Nyungwe bible translation (Nyungwe is a Bantu language of Mozambique). Ideophones and bible translations have never had an easy relationship (Noss 1999), but the times may be changing. David Ker of Lingamish reports on a checking session in the ongoing Nyungwe bible translation project. In verse 6 of John 18, "[t]he verb for “go back” was changed to a verb meaning “knocked back/reeling” and an ideophone was added to mimic the sound of them falling down". As David writes,

My favorite change was the addition of the ideophone in verse 6. I’ve never been able to get my head around ideophones. But they are very common in Nyungwe and they make the difference between a flat text and one that gets everybody interested. It was gratifying to see how excited the translators became reading the text aloud with the addition of an ideophone.

We may cite a more recent publication by Daniel Kunene for a description what happens here: the ideophone "climbs the stage to become an act, thus removing itself from the ordinary run-of-the-mill narrative surrounding it. (...) Having created a surreal world, the ideophone invites the audience to perceive with their senses that which it represents, whether aural, visual, olfactory, and so on" (Kunene 2001:190). For a less eloquent description of the persuasive effect of ideophones, compare my 'Under the spell of ideophones'.

A postcard from Taiwan

Finally, there's a postcard from Taiwan on onomatopoeia and ideophones in 'Chinese' (probably Min Chinese or Hokkien) children's stories:

There are some interesting examples onomatopoeia/ideophones, the variety of which is comparable to the sound effects you might see in Japanese manga. Heck, there's even one that doesn't have a Chinese character shorthand for it, and it's good old "Pu!" This nearly imitates the Japanese practice of using the syllabary system (like Hiragana) instead of the ideographic system (Kanji) to emphasize a sound effect, perhaps even serving to stretch it out.

What is especially interesting about this is the change of writing system, the effect of which is quite similar to the prosodic foregrounding of ideophones in live speech. In both cases this points to ideophones using a different mode of meaning — one in which sound and sense are intricately linked (Diffloth 1972).

References

1. Diffloth, Gérard. 1972. Notes on expressive meaning. Chicago Linguistic Society 8: 440–447.
2. 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. Noss, Philip A. 1999. The Ideophone: A Dilemma for Translation and Translation Theory. In New Dimensions in African Linguistics and Languages, ed. Paul F. A. Kotey, 261-272. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

What do we really know about ideophones?

Slides for my recent presentation at the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics. Incomprehensible without the handout. Since this is an overview talk, there is some overlap with presentations given in Berkeley (RRG, August 9) and London (SOAS, June 3).

I'm using the following working definition of ideophones: "marked words that vividly depict sensory events" (elaborated here; your comments are welcome).

Cite as:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'What do we really know about ideophones?' Paper presented at the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics, August 21, Köln.

Bingo! Refinding the oldest specimen of Siwu

The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). Besides some words and phrases (edited and published in 1899 by his friend Seidel), Plehn took down two lines of songs. To one of them I devoted a post some time ago. Now I’ve found a full transcription of the other, buried in a somewhat obscure thesis titled The music of Tokpaikor shrine in Akpafu: a case study of the role of Tokpaikor music in Akpafu traditional worship. How that thesis came to be in my possession is a story of its own, involving an utterly unhelpful secretary at the University of Ghana’s Music Dept, a forged letter, and a surprise parcel from professor Kofi Agawu in my pigeon hole back home — but let me not waste any more time on that.

(Gesänge der Apafu-leute, Plehn 1898:119)

So what do we have? First Plehn’s transcription. Rendered as mekoko lofomadisu, it's a bad case of garbled transmission at multiple levels. Word boundaries and the contrast between open and close vowels didn't make it; even the verb is lost in translation, leaving us with a simple apposition of ‘Die Henne, die Küchlein’ (‘the hen, the chicks’). Plehn does have quite an interesting interpretation of the song: Continue reading »