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.

References

1. De Wolf, Paul P. 1971. The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo. The Hague: Mouton.
2. Kelly, John. 1973. Review of The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 36(3). 716-718.

On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users' sensitive feeling for language, a deep sensitive attachment to sounds and their power of vivid suggestion or representation. In many cases, a speaker or oral artist can avoid an ideophone by simply duplicating a word of action: for jegidezie tiii, for instance, the narrator could have said jegide jegide, which would translate into something like 'walked on and on.' But tiii has a special appeal both as a sound and as a more dramatic way of capturing the idea of extent.

Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature, 1992 p. 96. (The example is from Ijo.)

Okpewho's remarks highlight the importance of the material properties of the ideophonic word. It is not a simple case of having words for things that some other languages may not have lexicalized words for; it is the nature of the ideophonic word —the fact that meaning is suggested by the material properties of the sign— that makes it such a significant linguistic device. What Okpewho calls 'vivid suggestion' I have tried to capture with the phrase 'vivid depiction' in my working definition of ideophones ("marked words that vividly depict sensory events").

References

1. Okpewho, Isidore. 1992. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One day in Accra, my daughter came home from school and talked to me in English. I said, "I no be hear English. In my home, we speak Siwu." My daughter said, "But the teacher has said that we should not speak Vernacular at home!"

Vernacular! Vernacular! By that he means any local language other than English. So I said to her: "Siwu is my language. In my home we speak Siwu! At school you can speak English!" She started shivering and crying, because the teacher had threatened children who spoke Vernacular. So he had put her in fear. But I said to her: "If you do not speak Siwu to me in my home, I will not pay your school fees!" Now that she is grown up, she boasts that she can speak Siwu fluently even though she grew up in Accra. Many of her cousins don't hear Siwu at all.

This quote is from T.T., a very proud speaker of Siwu. Not all Mawu people raising children outside of Kawu are quite so insistent on maintaining Siwu, but his words do highlight the prevailing attitude among Mawu speakers, namely that it is good to speak Siwu. Teachers, meanwhile, are steadfastly convinced that speaking 'Vernacular' is about the worst thing a student can do.

In the same conversation, which took place some months ago in his home in Akpafu-Tɔdzi, T.T. continued:

I cannot pray in English. I cannot pray in Ewe. I talk to my God in my own language. When someone outside Kawu asks me to pray, I will pray in my own language. They may not understand, but they will hear 'Amen'. They will know alright that I have prayed, and they will say 'Amen' to it.

AMEN!

If you're in London and able to come to SOAS at short notice, there will be two talks on ideophones tomorrow afternoon: one by my colleague Sylvia Tufvesson and one by myself. The talks will be on Wednesday, 3 June, 3-5pm, in room 4418 in SOAS. Here are the titles and abstracts:

Phonosemantics and perceptual structures: The case of Semai ideophones

by Sylvia Tufvesson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Ideophonic vocabulary often displays some degree of sound symbolism; i.e. perceived likeness between form and meaning such that words with similar meanings resemble each other phonetically. Languages differ in their means of attaining such form-meaning mapping and these correlations can develop freely in spontaneous speech. This talk examines one such pattern, that of stem alternation. The language of focus is Semai (Austroasiatic, Mon-Khmer), spoken by an Aslian community on Peninsular Malaysia. Semai ideophones convey speakers´ perceptual experiences in semantically detailed ways, often withmultiple aspects of an experience encoded in one word. Data show that through different types of stem alternation, speakers express fine-grained semantic differences between different sensory events. This structural tool is used to switch between sensory modalities or convey differences in the internal structure of a specific sensory event. In addition, some types of alternations are used more productively than others in spontaneous speech, suggesting a continuum of conventionality in the linguistic encoding of perception.

How to do things with ideophones. Observations on the use of vivid sensory language in Siwu

by Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Many African, Asian and American languages have a class of words called ideophones: marked words that vividly evoke sensations and perceptions. Hitherto, research on ideophony has focused almost exclusively on the form of ideophones to the neglect of their function. This talk will look at ideophones in actual usage in Siwu, a Kwa language of eastern Ghana. It will be shown that ideophones occur across a wide variety of speech genres, including conversations, arguments, insults, narratives, greeting routines, and special genres like riddles, recreational dances, and funeral dirges. A closer look at data from about 60 minutes of spontaneous conversations will elucidate the different uses to which ideophones are put by both speakers and recipients in tellings and turn-by-turn talk. Some specific genres, including funeral dirges and recreational dances, will be compared to show how the use of ideophones may be constrained by genre.

In a neat 1965 paper on ideophones in Southern Sotho, Daniel P. Kunene writes about an ideophone derived from a gesture:

There is an interesting and amusing case of the coining of an ideophone from the type of gesture used. The gesture for running is clenched fingers, outstretched thumb pointing upwards and wiggled from side to side in imitation of the swaying of the body as the weight is transfered from the one foot to the other. Normally it is the right hand that is used. By coincidence, the thumb of the right hand represents the number 'six' in counting on the fingers — counting beginning on the small finger of the left hand, and 'crossing over' from the thumb of the left hand (five) to the thumb of the right hand (six). From this has come the ideophone siks in Sotho! This refers to running, especially fleeing from something:

a-re síks

he did this: siks!

he ran away

Kunene calls this an ideophone for structural and semantic reasons: it occurs in the same syntactic slot (introduced by re like most ideophones) and it vividly depicts an event. A footnote however reveals 'Restricted to relatively few people, it is true, but there all the same.' The question is: does anyone know whether the form has caught on and has been used more widely? I've looked around on the web, but googling for short words like that seems hopeless.

References

1. Kunene, Daniel P. 1965. The ideophone in Southern Sotho. Journal of African Languages 4: 19-39.
2. Kunene, Daniel P. 1978. The Ideophone in Southern Sotho. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
3. 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.

Below follows an abstract for a talk I will be giving later this year at WOCAL 6.

Ideophones are marked words that vividly depict sensory events (cf. Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). This paper presents results of an ongoing research project into the linguistic and cultural ecology of ideophones in Siwu, a Ghana-Togo-Mountain language spoken north of Hohoe in Ghana’s Volta Region. Of central interest to the project is the role played by ideophones in the discursive practice of the Mawu. A range of methods is used to investigate this issue (including elicitation tasks and collections of folk definitions), but this paper will focus on data from natural conversational discourse.

It will be shown that ideophones occur across a wide variety of speech genres, including greeting exchanges, conversations, arguments, insults, narratives, and special genres like riddles (mìdzòlo), recreational songs (àlikpi), and funeral dirges (sìkubiɛnɔ). Zooming in on one usage context, we will look at conversations during the making of gunpowder. [N.B. The conversations are of course in Siwu. The examples are presented in pseudo-English because of the abstract requirements.]

A   Now this stuff here looks ɖɔbɔrɔɔɔ [soft].
B   Wũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩ [fine and granular]
A   Wũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩwũrĩ!
B   So it will pass through the gun nipple.
A   Indeed. It won’t be kpokolo-kpokolo [lumpy], you see? It will be very grinded very soft ɖɔbɔrɔɔɔ. So that it can reach inside the gun nipple.

Example (1) shows how, during material culture production, the speakers calibrate their understanding of processes and technologies not with cold technical language, but with ideophones (cf. Nuckolls 1995). Later on in the same conversation, some speakers anticipate the ceremonial gunfire for which the gunpowder is being produced by collaboratively creating a vivid sensory spectacle:

C   When it does tawtaw, you would be standing silently. The gunman topples [because of the recoil] — he puts [this sound] in your ears rrrɔ̂ŋ! Then you’ll just be silenced kananananana, standing there. You’ll be watching things.
E   [In background] It goes gbií im̀ ̀!
C   Boy will it sound — it goes gbíiiìim̀ ̀m̀ !

An analysis of this 'poetry in ordinary language' (Evans-Pritchard 1962) will throw light on the interplay of language, culture and the perceptual world in Mawu society.

References

1. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1962. Ideophones in Zande. Sudan Notes and Records 34: 143-146.
2. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1995. Quechua texts of perception. Semiotica 103, no. 1/2: 145-169.  
3. Voeltz, F. K. Erhard, and Christa Kilian-Hatz, eds. 2001. Ideophones. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.