Comments on: Three misconceptions about ideophones

By: Mark Dingemanse

Mark Dingemanse — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:47:00 +0000

See, there is much work to do as regards the emancipation of ideophones.

By: Thera Crane

Thera Crane — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:26:54 +0000

(or videophone)

By: Thera Crane

Thera Crane — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:24:52 +0000

Word keeps trying to correct “ideophone” to “idiophone”…

By: Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries! — The Ideophone

Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries! — The Ideophone — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:16:05 +0000

[...] is about time I wrote another installment of misconceptions about ideophones. It seems this error is a particularly easy one to make for speakers of SAE languages. In this post [...]

By: Mark Dingemanse

Mark Dingemanse — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:43:46 +0000

Jess, thanks for this rich comment. That’s a lot of observations and hypotheses crammed into a few paragraphs.

Actually, on that very last point (how do ideophones react when vowel harmony dies) I should be able to say something in the future. Siwu has lost vowel harmony, but several of its close relatives (Santrokofi, Lelemi, Likpe) still have a working vowel harmony system. I’m planning to gather some comparative data on ideophones from Siwu neighbours to find out the extent to which ideophone inventories are shared (or related).

By: Jess Tauber

Jess Tauber — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:29:15 +0000

Highly inflective languages tend, on average, to have many fewer own-class ideophones than agglutinative or isolating languages. That not all isolating languages are equivalent may also have to do with the fact that fusion also seems to limit ideophone inventories, and some of the isolating languages have undergone a lot of fusion on their way to their current state.

One would be hard pressed to find more than a small handful of ideophones in strongly polysynthetic languages like Mohawk or Yupik Eskimo, and the ones they have are simple onomatopes.

Navajo ideophones, by and large, are also no longer phonosemantically transparent, which indicates they have moved pretty far from protypicality.

Interestingly, complex ideophones in languages that have very many have internal structure reminiscent of serial verbs- and many (most?) of the languages that have these also have real serial verbs. And strongly polysynthetic languages, according to Sasha Aikhenvald, don’t particularly like serial constructions either.

In some Niger-Congo languages ideophones can be derived FROM verbs and/or vice versa- roots often have suffixal expansions before the usual derivational suffixes- old serial morphemes?

OTOH, in other languages where such interaction is not living one can still clearly see some sort of remnant of process, where some ideophones are identical to intransitive verbs, or verbs have similar form/meaning mapping at the level of individual phonemes to ideophones, despite non-identity at the level of the string. This can be seen for instance in Ijoid.

If Niger-Congo was ancestrally SOV (and crosslinguistically, and geographically the languages with the largest transparent ideophone systems appear to be SOV), then it might serve as a testing ground for hypotheses relating to ideophone lexicalization and opacification in the face of historical phonological and morphosyntactic changes which disrupt the symmetries of consonantal, vocalic, and tonal inventories.

How do ideophones react when verb serialization stops working, or vowel harmony dies? What about reduction of syllable structures?

Jess Tauber

By: Wordcatcher Tales: Hodohodo, Czechia, Kanakysaurus « Far Outliers

Wordcatcher Tales: Hodohodo, Czechia, Kanakysaurus « Far Outliers — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:10:59 +0000

[...] into an adverbial you add the postposition ni, and so on. But I suspect hodohodo fails one test for onomatopoeic ideophones in Japanese: the ability to occur before -to ‘with’, in the equivalent of English [...]

By: Wordcatcher Tales: Hokahoka, Hougan, Hiiki « Far Outliers

Wordcatcher Tales: Hokahoka, Hougan, Hiiki « Far Outliers — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:09:52 +0000

[...] ideophone hokahoka does not behave grammatically like an adjective, despite its normal English translation [...]

By: Mark Dingemanse

Mark Dingemanse — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:00:40 +0000

Khawaji, great points as always.
To 1 and 3 I’d add that mimesis is associated with childishness and simplicity in SAE cultures (as noted by Childs and Nuckolls); that’s one reason that people have difficulty taking pervasive ideophony serious. See also the Max Müller quote at the right top of this page: ‘they are playthings, not the tools of language’.

By: khawaji

khawaji — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:01:42 +0000

happy to see that ‘twiddle’ is getting more press as an ideophone… my thumbs were getting jealous. As I was thinking about these misconceptions I wondered what the kernels of truth might be that led the mistaken parties to have gone astray. 1. The depiction of non-audible sensory experiences by linguistic means is inherently problematic in a culture which sees synesthesia as a “neurological condition.”
2.It is statistically true that there are fewer ideophones in the SAE’s I know, though they still have plenty
3.Ideophones seem to express an almost playful element of language, which I don’t think is primitive, but it seems connected to an idea of holding language loosely, or not taking one’s own language entirely seriously. The performativity of some ideophones is such that they seem to be self-referential with hyperbolic and humorous effect (almost like a hipster ;) which could to an outsider seem primitive, because they are missing a whole level of subtlety which goes straight over their heads… again perhaps the cultural perception is the dominating factor, and maybe the cultures which use many ideophones do not value or tolerate self-importance in speech. Just musings, but I’d love to here more on syneshesia…