Now online: SemiotiX New Series, an e-journal in semiotics. SemiotiX Bulletin has been around for several years, in hand-edited HTML. Its reincarnation, SemiotiX New Series, runs on WordPress, automating all of the technical stuff so that the editors can spend their time writing and editing contributions. Geek alert: the rest of this post details some of the technical stuff behind the scenes. Feel free to skip! Continue reading
One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850′s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions. Today we look at Japanese, for which I have found some early 17th century grammatical treatises that offer information on ideophones (nowadays called ‘mimetics’ in Japanese linguistics).
Back then, it was not very clear to Western grammarians that imitative words could imitate anything besides sound, and therefore our first source, Diego Collado’s Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae, calls them “adverbia sonus” (it would be interesting to know whether Japanese words for the category itself —like giongo/gitaigo— already existed back then). Here’s an excerpt from Collado 1632:
Aduerbia concludendi, & aduertendi
Aduerbia sonus sunt multiplicia secundum diuersitatem quam Iapones in sonus terminatione percipiunt, & illis, to, solent postponere: v.g. ua ua to xite, vociferando dicentes, ua ua, & si illis postponitur meqi, u, significat talem strepitum facere: v.g. ua meqi, u, va dicendo vociferor, aris, &c.
Adverbs that conclude and claim attention
The adverbs of sound (adverbia sonus) are many and vary in accordance with the way that the Japanese perceive the sound. The particle to is added to them; e.g., va va to xite ‘vociferously saying wa wa,’ and if they add meqi,u, it means to make even a louder noise; e.g., va meqi,u ‘to shout saying wa.’ [transl. by Richard Spear 1975]
According to Kimi Akita, who has kindly helped me to identify these constructions, the particle to can be identified with the quotative particle or complementizer, used in contemporary Japanese to introduce reported speech and adverbial ideophones. Collado’s first example can thus be glossed as follows:
What Collado transcribes as ‘meqi,u’ can probably be identified with the verbalizer ‘-meku’ which (according to Kimi Akita) is less productive nowadays. Kimi provides some interesting examples of lexicalized verbs derived from ideophones using this suffix:
(1) mimetic: kira-meku ‘twinkle’ (< kirakira), zawa-meku 'hum' (< zawazawa), hira-meku 'be inspired' (?< hirahira)
(2) nonmimetic (rare): haru-meku 'get like spring' (< haru 'spring'), huru-meku 'get old' (< huru-i 'old'), nazo-meku 'look mysterious' (< nazo 'mystery') [Kimi Akita p.c.]
Attaching this suffix to a monomoraic root like ‘wa’ is not allowed in Modern Japanese, notes Kimi.
But there is a fragment that is more interesting and that takes us even further back; it is found in Rodrigues’s Arte da lingoa de Iapam. I have not been able to consult the original and am relying on an abridged French version published by Landresse in 1825. Here is what it has to say:
§81. Les Japonais ont un grand nombre d’adverbes dont ils se servent non-seulement pour exprimer les modifications d’une action, mais qui indiquent encore le son, le bruit, la position de la chose. (…) On forme encore un grand nombre d’adverbes par la répétition du même mot, pour exprimer la manière dont se fait une chose, ou le son de cette chose : comme farafara, bruit de la pluie ou des larmes qui tombent. (p. 87)
[my translation:] §81. The Japanese have a great number of adverbs which serve not only to express the manner of an event, but which also indicate the sound, the noise, the position of the thing. (…) A great number of these adverbs are formed by repetition of the same word, to express the manner in which a thing is done, or the sound of the thing : like farafara, ‘sound of rain or of falling tears’
Here, we actually have a somewhat broader conception of the class — these adverbs are not mere imitations of sounds, they also express positions and manners. Moreover, we have a first morphological observation: many of them are reduplicated. Not all, mind you; most ideophone inventories known today do include a great deal of reduplicated words, but there are also plenty of morphologically simple roots. Incidentally, we’ve seen examples of both types before in the artful renditions of Kisi ideophones by Joanna Taylor: bákàlà-bákàlà ‘the sound of big, fat raindrops‘ and bíààà ‘rain softly falling‘.
Finally, some commentaries on the Evans & Levinson paper are trickling down the blogosphere. Nigel Duffield‘s “Roll up for the mystery tour” is one. Unfortunately, the comments on that post are closed. I have a question, so let me just post it here, where the comments are open.
The commentary is entertainingly written. Basically, it agrees with E&L’s rallying cry for the need to describe and recognize diversity; but it argues that, due to certain misconceptions about UG on the part of E&L, “Universal Grammar … walks free from the courtroom.” The first point that E&L get wrong about UG according to Duffield is the status of the notion ‘subject’. He has an interesting quote from McCloskey to support this point; and he also points out that, ironically, the topic/agent/pivot distinction championed by E&L is in fact ‘commonly accepted, if differently formalized’ in (some) UG quarters.
But it is really the second point, about the ontology of UG, that piqued my interest. Duffield argues that “UG is a theory of the initial state, which Chomsky now terms FL (Faculty of Language), not of any particular endstate grammar (LEnglish, LJiwarli, LPiraha, etc.,).” But that is not all; he adds, “The problem is not merely that UG is not claimed to be a property of final state grammars, but that it need not even be definitional of these grammars.” (emphasis mine, MD). And then comes the crucial point, for me as well as for Duffield:
the crucial point here is that facts about attained, endstate grammars bear only tangentially on theories of UG. Baldly stated, the absence of Language Universals—granting for the sake of argument that these are a ‘myth’—does not imply the absence of UG.
To be honest, this baffled me. Not so much because I disagree, but rather because there is so little left to agree or disagree with! I have wondered before (in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek post on the ‘grammar of the gaps‘) about the gradual shift of UG to evermore abstract territories — compare for example the switch-like parameters of the Principles & Parameters approach (some of which clearly refer to concrete (endstate) grammatical phenomena) with the most recent claims that recursion and some form of Merge should be sufficient for the FLN (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002). Duffield himself quotes Chomsky to the effect that ‘It is a coherent and perhaps correct proposal that the language faculty constructs a grammar only in conjunction with other faculties of mind.’ (Chomsky 1975:41). In my earlier post, I mention the question posed to Adele Goldberg by Jan-Wouter Zwart at the Nijmegen Lectures 2007. Zwart, in search of common ground between generative grammar and construction grammar, asked ‘Is it conceivable that underlying the structure of constructions are abstract principles of a simple kind, rooted in universal properties of human cognition?’ Goldberg’s answer was affirmative — but as I note in my discussion, the statement is sufficiently general to engender agreement from almost everyone.
The big question such abstract conceptions of UG raise for me is this: but is it grammar? That is, if it is indeed the case, as Duffield holds, that UG is not a property of endstate grammars; that it is not even definitional of these grammars; and moreover that ‘attained, endstate grammars bear only tangentially on UG’, what exactly is UG supposed to be, how do we go about empirically validating the UG hypothesis, and why are we calling it “universal grammar“?
My worry goes deeper than the apparent misnomer (though I do wonder whether the theory is not in need of a new name, if ‘endstate’ grammars have so little to do with it; but then I’m probably overlooking useful connotations of ‘grammar’ for the initial state). I find it difficult to see (1) how such an abstract concept could be isolated from more general cognitive abilities, and (2) why one would want to isolate it a priori. To isolate it —i.e. to show that UG is the ‘language faculty’ in some relevant sense— would one not need to show that its core business is language? (But how would one go about that if it doesn’t necessarily show in ‘endstate’ grammars?) And would one not need to show, conversely, that more general cognitive abilities cannot take care of language — in other words, that UG is necessary to explain (aspects of) language usage and language structure?
A final issue, prodded by another statement from Duffield’s commentary:
No matter how deep one digs into mature grammatical systems, there is no logical reason to expect that one will excavate UG in any recognizable form, any more than one should discover universal principles of embryology through an in-depth study of mature organisms.
This does raise the question of what linguistics as a science is looking at. Following the analogy here (which is always a dangerous thing to do, but then, it is perhaps a dangerous analogy), Duffield seems to say that UG is to language structure what universal principles of embryology are to mature organisms. That would imply that UG is not about language structure (since digging into language structure is not going to yield UG ‘in any recognizable form’) but about the early ontogenesis of language in acquisition. I would agree that acquisition is of central importance (though again, I don’t see why we shouldn’t try and see how far we get with (1) domain-general cognitive abilities and (2) a socially grounded approach, before assuming there has to be a non-trivial ‘language organ’). But what of the flood of generativist literature that does dig deep into ‘mature grammatical systems’, purporting to learn things about UG (presumably in recognizable form)? Does this literature bear more than a tangential relation to the notion of UG espoused here?
Now, I expect there are interesting answers to these questions. No doubt I have overlooked some important ramifications, and perhaps I, too, have mistaken the ontology of UG. If so, set me straight! Comments are open.
High time for a new issue of ‘Ideophones around the web’. First, the ultimately blend of ideophone and idiophone: Nick Cave’s sound suits. Then, in English pop culture, the non-identity of ideophones and onomatopoeia is finally registering, thanks to bling. And finally, some word tasting notes on squee from Sesquiotica.
Fiber-textile artist Nick Cave (once a professional dancer) makes fullbody “sound suits” from mixed materials (metal, fabric, buttons, hair, etc.) that make all sorts of noises when they’re worn. They are the perfect blend of idiophone (self-sounding) and ideophone (idea-sounding) art. Art blog Beautiful/Decay features an interview with the artist.
That rap makes for cutting-edge linguistic innovations isn’t news — but who would’ve thought it would help to tear down the single most common misconception about ideophones? And yet it does, through the word bling. The thing with bling is that its not imitative of sound (its meaning is essentially visual, referring to the dazzling reflection of light), but that people still feel that the form fits the meaning very well. So people seem to feel that it’s not onomatopoeic and look for a better term. Who was the first calling it an ideophone I don’t know, but the Wikipedia entry does, and it is trickling down into popular media like Rolling Stone magazine:
Lil Wayne applied such lyrical impressionism to the crew’s stock rims-and-grills material that he ended up coining a linguistic oddity known as an “ideophone”: a word meant to convey a visual effect through an imaginary sound. In this case, that of light bouncing — or “blinging,” if you will — off precious gems or metals.
Another recent coinage in pop culture is squee. James Harbeck’s Sesquiotica has a very nice post about squee in the series “word tasting notes”. Excerpt:
“Squee is a noise fangirls make,” Daryl said. “You know, anime fangirls, so excitable. It started out as onomatopoeia –” (“An ideophone,” Jess interjected) –”and has become a verb and a noun and probably an adjective too somewhere.” Ah, yes, the versatility of the English language — and of ideophones, which are words that have a performative aspect to them, like lickety-split, whoosh, and so on.
Actually, the whole of Sesquiotica is worth checking out — a place to go if you want to savour some words. I added it to the Ideophone blogroll. From the about page:
Words are delicious and intoxicating. They do much more than just denote; they have appearance, sound, a feel in the mouth, and words they sound like and travel with. All of these participate in the aesthetic experience of the word and can affect communication. So why not taste them like a fine wine?
Exactly. For some word tasting notes on Siwu ideophones, check out my Ideophone proeverij posts.
Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf’s (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo:
This work falls within the ‘clay tablet’ tradition of African comparative linguistics, and, like other things in the same tradition (Meinhof, Greenberg), it has the properties of being inscrutable and yet at the same time, in broad outline, convincing. The two together make an infuriating whole. (Kelly 1973:716)
Kelly goes on to list some good things and some major problems about the book; unfortunately, the problems are much bigger than the good things in his opinion. His final paragraph is also worth quoting for the subtle (and not so subtle) critique ingeniously giftwrapped in a counterfactual:
Anyone interested in African comparative linguistics need not regret 50 shillings spent on this monograph, which represents a good deal of painstaking work, more than actually appears between the covers. Used in conjunction with the previous publications of the Benue Congo section of the West African Linguistic Society, it provides a mass of data together with some attempt at a historical overview. But the price is not, alas, 50 shillings. It is £7.55 at this time of writing.
Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen’s well-known book Talking Voices. Here is the pdf.
In the review I am slightly critical of this classic for three reasons. First of all, for a second edition of a work that appeared two decades ago, it is very thin on updates and revisions. Secondly, it still focuses on the acoustic signal only (thereby overlooking a wealth of work on gesture and multimodal interaction that appeared since the first edition). Third, despite its general claims, Talking Voices limits itself mainly to various Anglophone ways of speaking (excepting some Greek examples). The Greek examples (which derive from an interesting 1983 paper) actually point to the relevance of a widespread linguistic resource that happens not to be very common in either the Greek or the Anglophone cultures discussed: ideophony. I argue that ideophones are immediately relevant to ‘repetition, dialogue, and imagery’ (the subtitle of TV), and thus to core themes of Tannen’s work (see also Nuckolls 1992, 1996).
Here is the conclusion:
The strength of Tannen’s book lies in its insightful analysis of the auditory side of conversation. Yet talking voices have always been embedded in richly contextualized multimodal speech events. As spontaneous and pervasive involvement strategies, both iconic gestures and ideophones should be of central importance to the analysis of conversational discourse. Unfortunately, someone who picks up this second edition is pretty much left in the dark about the prevalence of these phenomena in everyday face-to-face interaction all over the world.
Should Tannen have looked at gesture and ideophones? Of course every researcher has to make general choices and every published piece of scientific work is by definition incomplete. So I don’t think there’s an issue of ‘should have’ — but I do think it is unfortunate for the 2nd edition to miss out on these phenomena, because they would have offered many interesting and helpful illustrations of the book’s themes.
The Basque word for their language is Euskara or Euskera, earlier Heuskara. The first part of this word is the Togo R. word for “Akpafu”, Likpe be-fu “Akpafu”, Bowili o-vu-ne “Akpafumann”, Santrokofi o-fu “Akpafumann”, Akpafu ka-wu, ka-’u “Akpafu”. The early initial Basque h is from k, as can be seen from ka-wu, ka’u. The a has changed to e in this lexeme. The consonant between e and u has been lost. Basque lacks the semivowel w, which drops out here in Akpafu ka’u. See Lafon (1960 : 92) for confirmation from placenames etc.: Ausci, Aoiz, Auch.
The second part of the word, ka or ke is a word for “speak”, Niger-Congo gue “voice, language”, Ewe, Ga gbe “voice”, Agni guere “language, speech”, Yoruba i-gbe “loud cry”, Gbari e-gwe, e-gbe “mouth”. The e is for original a in this word. Niger-Congo e is secondary. Compare Niger-Congo ka, ke, k’e “to speak”, which is related. The final sylable -ra is the Niger-Congo article. No clearer proof could be found that the Basques were originally the Akpafu!
Thus says mr. GJK Campbell-Dunn “M.A. (NZ), M.A. (Camb.) Ph.D.” in a most interesting document titled “Basque as Niger-Congo“. (Just to remind you, Akpafu is another name for Siwu, the language I’ve been doing fieldwork on over the last three years.) I mentioned this story over a year ago in the comments of an excellent post over at Glossographia titled Debunking and de-Basque-ing, but I never got around to posting about it here. In his post, Stephen Chrisomalis notes that “There is probably no culture or language that has attracted more pseudoscientific attention than Basque.”
I’m not intent on debunking Campbell-Dunn’s story here; I think the quotation above stands just fine on its own. But I do want to draw attention to the irony of this particular case. There you are, author of such groundbreaking works as The African Origins of Classical Civilisation, Maori: The African Evidence, and Who were the Minoans?: an African answer. You now want to solve the Basque enigma once and for all, and since the general thrust of your work is to link everything to Africa one way or another you set out to discover that Basque is in fact a Niger-Congo language. A look at the rich lexical material in Westermann (1927) provides ample inspiration. Let’s pick one of the Togo Remnant Languages, you think — after all, Basque is sort of remnant too. Akpafu. Euskara. Hey, why not. Let’s just see what we can do… no-one’s going to notice, right?
Well, I noticed. And I just want to say it loud and clear: Graham Campbell-Dunn’s work is crackpot science. Don’t believe it; don’t even read it. Siwu and Euskara are fascinating languages that deserve of serious research. But they are most certainly not related. Although… come closer, I have to tell you a secret…
Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science section, written by Berthold van Maris. There’s no online version of the article, but here is a PDF version if you read Dutch (or even if you just want to appreciate the look of Siwu ideophones in Dutch orthography!).
Nog meer goede pers! Ik ben geïnterviewd door Dolf Jansen in de Radio 2 show Spijkers met Koppen (zie ook twitter). Met minder dan 10 minuten was het een kort interview, maar ik ben erg trots dat het Siwu het nu zelfs tot op de nationale radio geschopt heeft! Ik ben ook best tevreden met het verloop van het gesprek, hoewel er natuurlijk te weinig tijd is voor nuance. Maar oordeelt u zelf — klik op de speler hieronder om het fragment af te spelen.
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O, en twee details, voor de goede orde: (1) hoewel ik promoveer bij de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, voer ik mijn onderzoek uit bij het Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek, ook in Nijmegen; en (2) ideofonen zijn bestaande woorden: woorden die iedereen die Siwu spreekt kent en die je in een woordenboek kunt opnemen. Het zijn dus geen spontane geluidseffecten, het zijn ook geen tussenwerpsels, maar ‘gewoon’ woorden die eruit springen vanwege hun opvallende klanken en kleurrijke betekenissen.
Just got this letter, on official-looking paper with an official-looking stamp:
Dear Mr. Dingemanse:
You have been nominated to appear in Great Minds of the 21st Century, a major reference directory including just 1,000 of the world’s top thinkers and intellectuals. (…) The ABI is contantly engaged with research centers throughout the world as well as its own global network of research advisors sitting on an international board. When the Institute is compiling a volume, these factors come together to point out individuals, through personal nomination, who deserve the recognition of inclusion in a biographical volume. Your contributions to the field of science have warranted the high regard of nomination for Great Minds of the 21st Century.
That’s impressive — but it sounds just a liiiiittle bit fishy, doesn’t it? As it turns out, the American Biographical Institute, which sends out these letters, has been in business for a long time. Here’s the catch:
Inclusion in a volume as prestigious as Great Minds of the 21st Century is quite an accolade, and to celebrate the occasion we offer several mementos, including keepsake copies of the volume at discounted rates to those included only. A Medal of unequaled quality and molded only for Great Minds of the 21st Century honerees is of special significance, as is the Proclamation Plaque designed to indicate your unique selection for this volume.
For $395, I learn, I can get the ‘medal of unequaled quality’; and for a mere $595 I get a Hardbound Luxury Keepsake Issue of the 5th Edition of Great Minds of the 21st Century embellished with gold engravings. Remember, just 1,000 of the world’s top thinkers and intellectuals will be included. What an honour!
But then, who says that they send this letter to just 1,000 people? Chances are it goes to at least a couple thousands more, maybe even in the ten thousands — and that they start publishing to commemorate hitting the mark of the first 1,000 Great Fools of the 21st Century. In fact, here’s someone who once worked at ABI explaining how they work:
ABI buys mailing lists from organizations. Using those names, they send out blanket mailings inviting individuals to be in biographical books. When the forms come back to ABI, they’re marked (A) buy, (B) bill and (C) no sale. A forms go directly to the “editors,” data-entry drones making minimum wage who never went to college and are beholden to type a certain amount of entries per day. B forms go next. C forms are saved in a pile, and the best are used to fill in the holes in titles such as “2000 Women of Distinction” et. al.
Nah, I think it’s not for me. But if you want a nomination, let me know — they also kindly provided me with a section where I can nominate ten colleagues so as to ‘assist in their research process’.
Bulbul posted an interesting anecdote in a comment on one of my earlier posts:
On my way home today, I took the scenic route, through the old town, where the Weinachtsmarkt is in full swing with Christmas lights glowing, Glühwein flowing and all that jazz. As I was trying to get through the crowds, I noticed a black gentleman standing next to one of the stalls obviously admiring something and talking on the phone in a language I could not immediately identify.
And just as I passed him, he said “You know” and then something I would transcribe as “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” followed by a laugh. “I bet this ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ is an ideophone” I said to myself and immediately started wondering whether the person on the other end truly understood what was being conveyed – in other words, whether that “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” was a word with a shared meaning. Now I know better – assuming I was right in identifying the word as an ideophone, of course.
I still don’t know what language that was (I’m guessing Yoruba based on a few words I might have heard), so do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them as such?
So that’s today’s question: do ideophones really stand out that much? This is something you can only decide for yourself. Here are three examples from Siwu. They come from my corpus of everyday discourse and represent the three most common ideophone constructions. These three constructions account for 88% of 230 ideophone tokens in the corpus; the examples thus can be said to be typical of ideophone usage in day to day conversations in Siwu.
I will not transcribe them at this point; I just want you to listen.
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Now you’re in the position to answer bulbul’s question: do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them? The answer —mine at least— is yes. If you are a hearing person, I’m willing to bet you had no trouble at all identifying the ideophones in the above three sound samples.
Before I give you the transcriptions, it is worthwile to ponder for a moment why ideophones stand out like this. I’ve hinted at this on other occasions, for example yesterday’s ditty on vivid suggestion, a post on Feedburner’s Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk!, and the last ideophone proeverij; and also in a recent paper, where I wrote:
As marked words, ideophones set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic material; as a likely locus of performative foregrounding, they stimulate emotional engagement; as depictions, they supply vivid imagery and recreate sensory events in sound, inviting the listener onto the scene as it were.
So ideophones stand out for a reason: to attract attention to themselves as words qua words, to mark themselves as depictions in a stream of descriptive material. Let’s suppose the gentleman overheard by Bulbul was indeed using an ideophone. Standing at the Weinachtsmarkt, he was attempting to share a vivid image of something he had in mind with the person on the other end; to do so, he needed to signal that what followed ‘You know’ was different somehow from bland referential prose; and this he did (unwittingly for sure) by performatively foregrounding ‘ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ‘.
Of course it’s a bit flaky to draw conclusions on the basis of a couple of syllables overheard on a Weinachtsmarkt. Was it Nigerian Pidgin, which we know has lots of ideophones (Faraclas 1996)? Was he codeswitching? Was he perhaps simply stuttering? There’s no way of knowing. That’s why I gave the Siwu examples, which come from an extensive corpus of everyday social interaction. Want to know what those mean? Click ‘Show’ below to check it out.