One of the earliest English sources on the geology of what is today the Volta Region in eastern Ghana is a survey report by Thomas Robertson. It was published in 1921 by the Gold Coast Geological Survey in Accra. The economical goals of the survey are clear from Robertson’s repeated examination of rivers for gold (“River X gave black sand but no gold on panning”). Download the report here (20Mb).

For anyone interested in early sources on Akpafu and Santrokofi, the document contains some interesting notes. The early 1900s was the time when several of the mountain-dwelling peoples in the central Volta Region started building villages in the valleys, and Robertson has the following to say about this:

In the Akpafu hills, however, there seems to be something similar to what we have in the Avatime highlands, a small group which has kept fairly distinct from the peoples of the low country round about. It is noteworthy, however, that in both districts there is of recent years a very strong tendency for the hill-peoples to desert their old villages and make new ones in the valleys below. Borada and Santrokofi are examples of this in the Buem country, and Akpafu threatens to do likewise.

Historical note: the people of Akpafu indeed made new villages in the valley — Akpafu-Mempeasem, established in the 1920s, and later Adɔkɔ in the east valley — but they did not desert their old village and Akpafu-Todzi is still inhabited.

There is also a description of three iron ore mines in Akpafu on pages 41-43. The fairly specific description of their location enables us to identify at least two of Robertson’s sites as still extant today (one of them can be visited under the guidance of the Akpafu Tourist Council). Sadly, the iron industry of Akpafu was already a thing of the past at the time of Robertson’s survey, as witnessed in the following quote:

Very near the second occurrence [of an iron mine, MD] is an old bank of furnaces which have been used at some time for smelting the ore. They were built of earth from ant-hills, according to the guide, who was an old man, and said he remembered their being used when he was young. There is very little left of them now. Six furnaces are to be seen in a row, and a good deal of slag is lying about, but no ore.

I have highlighted here only some things related to the area where I do field research myself, but the survey covers a wide area and should be of interest to anyone from the Volta Region interested in geology and recent history. This is is why I make it available for download here:

Robertson (1921) Report on the Geology of Western Togoland.

1. Robertson, Thomas. 1921. Report on the geology of Western Togoland. Accra: Gold Coast Geological Survey. — download the report (20Mb)

Travel journals provide some of the first written sources on Akpafu. I have previously posted an excerpt from a 1887 journal by David Asante. This here is an excerpt from a similar journey two years later. The whole journey took three months, but this excerpt relates only a trip to two Akpafu towns on 17-18 December 1889. Nicolas Clerk, an indigenous missionary born in Aburi, was alone during the first part of the journey and accompanied by his colleague Hall from Dec. 30 onwards.

The account was originally written and published in German. This excerpt was translated by Mark Dingemanse in 2011.

Out of Bowiri I went 2 hours southwards to visited the town Odome with about 300 inhabitants. The town is beautifully situated on a hill and has a street in the middle. The whole town was startled when we got there, so during my sermon I had to call out several times, “Do not be afraid, I bring no evil tidings.” I asked them after my sermon whether they would accept the doctrine, to which they replied that their head chief was in another town which we were planning to visit. If he told them to accept it [the doctrine] they would do it.

Since it was already quite late, we slept there [in Odome] and we arrived the next day (18 December) after a one and half hour hike in the town of Apafo (Akpafu). This town has a charmingly beautiful location on a high mountain. The view is very beautiful. The town has well over 500 residents and is built in terraces on the slopes of two mountains, with a road in the middle where the mountains collide. So one who stands on the street can see all corners of the town.

After we had rested a little, we went to the house of the chief to greet him and to report the reason for our visit. To our surprise, he offered us Schnaps, which we of course rejected. We invited him to come out on the street with his people. (It is unfortunate that so much Schnaps and gunpowder is being imported from Bagida, so that one can get these goods cheaper in the interior than in Accra. Far inland, where we were, people often asked for Schnaps and they did not want to believe that we do not drink liquor. In fact many probably never knew of the drink before, much less tasted it, but they have an unquenchable thirst for it.)

Our hand bell summoned the people and in a moment we had a large number of listeners before us, whom I told of their God and Saviour. Then I asked them if they would accept it if we would come live with them. There was a consultantion, and immediately they declared themselves willing to accept us. I put before them the other points as I had done in Bowiri, and they promised to build a house for the teacher, to provide students for the school, and to give Christians all rights. When asked how many students they would give for a start, they said, “As many as there are; we all want to worship the true God”. I was received very friendly here, and they also wanted us to go to another nearby town to bring the good news, but because I was a little feverish, I found it advisable to return to Bowiri.

The main business of the Apafo people is that they melt iron. The blocks of iron ore are dug in the mountain and melted in large furnaces made for this purpose. The Apafo’s have the bad habit to boil tobacco and to take the water drawn from it in the mouth after getting up in the morning; whether they swallow it I do not know. They keep it in their mouth for a while, during which they express themselves only with signs and with unclear sounds if they want to speak. Before they go to sleep they take this poison in their mouths again. Cleanliness of the teeth is not practised here as elsewhere.

1. Clerk, Rev. N. J. 1892. “Neue reise in den Hinterlandern von Togo nach Nkonya, Buem, Obooso, Slaga, Krakye von 2 Dec. 1889 bis 5 Feb. 1890” Mitteilungen aus den Geographische Gesellschaft zu Jena 9: 77-98.

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.

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:

waawaa-to it-te

IDPH.bark-QUOT say-CONJUNCTIVE

‘saying waawaa’

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.

Landresse 1825 [based on Rodrigues 1604]

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‘.

References

1. Collado, Diego. 1632. Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae. [Project Gutenberg e-text]
2. Spear, Richard L. 1975. Diego Collado’s grammar of the Japanese language. Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas.
3. Rodrigues, João. 1825[1604]. Élémens de la grammaire japonaise [abridged from Arte da lingoa de Iapam] tr. et collationnés par C. Landresse. [With]. Trans. C. Landresse.

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.

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:

“Wie die Henne die Küchlein beschützt, so beschützen die Apafu-Leute die umwohnenden Stämme. Es bezieht sich dies auf die Schmelz- und Schmiedekunst der Apafu-Leute, die sie in Stand setzt, die umliegenden Stämme mit eisernen Waffen und Werkzeugen zu versehen. Sie thun sich auf ihre Berühmtheit als Schmiede viel zu Gute.”

“Just as the hen shelters the chicks, the Akpafu people shelter the surrounding peoples. This refers to the iron smelting and forging craft of the Akpafu people, which puts them in the position of providing the surrounding tribes with weapons and tools. They are very proud of their renown as blacksmiths.”

From Plehn 1898 to Agudze 1991

Now fast forward a century. We’re still in Akpafu-Todzi, the mountain citadel of the Mawu people. Francis S. K. Agudze, the son of the then paramount chief (ìgara kpakpa) Oyete Akuamoah II, has access to the elaborate musical traditions connected to the worship of the deity Tokpaikɔ and decides to write on this topic for his diploma in Music at the University of Ghana. The thesis is essentially a description of Tokpaikɔ music, instruments, and texts. I think it is worthwile to quote Agudze’s motivation for his work:

Two categories of readers have been kept in mind in the writing of this thesis. Firstly, it is meant for citizens of Akpafu who should see it as a great relief to have a written document, on the religious music of their ancestors, which they can easily lay hands on for reference.

Secondly, it is meant to disabuse religious fanatics of prejudices against traditional religion. It is also hoped that this thesis will help the general reader by broadening his scope on matters concerning traditional religious music. An attempt has been made, through the exposure of Tokpaikor music, to show that African traditional religion is based on the worship of God.”

Agudze’s concern about prejudices against traditional religion links back to my previous discussion of the decline of funeral dirges in Kawu.

Apart from a wealth of very valuable ethnographic and ethnomusicological information, this thesis contains over 40 transcribed songs. And one of these happens to be the song of which Rudolph Plehn wrote down a fragment in the 1890s. How cool is that? Now we have not only the full version of the song (admittedly short though it is), but also its translation, a transcription of its melody, and background information on its ethnographic context: the worship of Tokpaikɔ. From the fact that it was the first song written down by Plehn, we may infer that it was relatively well known in the community at that time.

The song

Below is Agudze’s flagstaff transcription of the song, followed by a glossed translation.

(Agudze 1991:101)

Couplet 1

Ɔ̀-ɖe kɔkɔ́ nɛ ɔ-fu mà-bi iso

3SG-be hen TP 3SG-cover Cma:PL-child on

‘Like a hen covering the chicks’

Couplet 2

Ɔ̀-lɛbɛlɛbɛ ɔ-fu mà-bi iso

3SG-IDPH.be.hovering 3SG-cover Cma:PL-child on

‘Hovering, covering the chicks’

The first stanza consists of repetitions of this one line, which, as Plehn correctly noted, conveys the image of a hen providing shelter for its chicks. Plehn applies the image to the Mawu people themselves (it is not clear on whose authority), but according to Agudze it actually refers to the deity Tokpaikɔ.

The second stanza, not recorded by Plehn, changes the first half of the line into ɔ-lɛbɛlɛbɛ, which Agudze translates as ‘He [sic] hovers’. Now lɛbɛlɛbɛ, a reduplicated monovocalic disyllable, is clearly an ideophone. And this song is not alone in featuring ideophones — 9 out of 37 songs (or a good 25%) in this collection prominently feature one or more ideophones. Is it surprising to find ideophones in traditional worship songs? Perhaps no more than it is to find them in funeral dirges or greeting routines. (Check out my paper “Ideophones in unexpected places” to learn more about this.)

Refinding something that was never lost

On reflection, one may wonder what’s so special about finding a piece of text written down by a German colonial in the 1890’s back in an obscure thesis a century later. Of course, it’s gratifying for me as a linguist and lover of early sources to connect the pieces of the puzzle and thereby place this ‘lost’ fragment back in its proper context. But that’s not the only reason I’m happy with the finding.

Here is the other reason. Significantly, this fragment has always been embedded in the continuity of Tokpaikɔ worship, which Agudze happened to have better access to than Plehn a hundred years before. So the two pieces of written text that I have connected here are mere decontextualized artefacts of a living and breathing cultural heritage, kept alive and well by generations of Siwu speakers.

In a time of severe language loss all over the world, that is not a given — especially seeing Plehn’s prediction, in the 1890′s, that it was only a matter of time before these ‘little islets of tribal languages’ would disappear. Yet as I have learned, on the whole, the Mawu turn out to have strong and positive attitudes to their language and culture. The really cool thing, then, is not so much the refinding of this mangled fragment recorded by Plehn. It’s that in a very real sense, this fragment was never actually lost.

References

1. Agudze, Francis Symon Komla. 1991. The music of Tokpaikor shrine in Akpafu: a case study of the role of Tokpaikor music in Akpafu traditional worship. University of Ghana.  
2. Christaller, J. G. 1888. Die Volta-Sprachen-Gruppe, drei altbekannte und zwei Neubekannte Negersprachen vergleichend besprochen. Zeitschrift für Afrikanische Sprachen 1: 161-188.
3. Dorvlo, Kofi. 2008. A Grammar of Logba (Ikpana). PhD thesis, Leiden University.
4. Plehn, Rudolf. 1898. Beiträge zur Völkerkunde des Togo-Gebietes. Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 2, no. part III: 87-124.  
5. Seidel, August. 1899. Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Sprachen in Togo. Zeitschrift für Afrikanische und Ozeanische Sprachen 4: 201-286.  

In pursuit of early written sources about Kawu I came across a useful summary of explorations in the Volta Basin in the 1870s and 1880s. The document is clearly based on some dead serious German reports from around the same time, but it is written in a dry tone with barely submerged irony as only the British can do it.

These travel reports are probably of greater value to anthropologists than to geographers. Here are two fascinating bits on some of the unforeseen effects of the diligent missionary efforts of the Basel Mission:

On the 17th, much to our surprise, we reached the pleasant village of Nkaneku after a march of only an hour and a half. It is inhabited by fifty or sixty Asante, who are hunters, and were busy smoking the meat of the buffaloes which they had killed the day before. We here met with another caravan coming from Salaga. Its guides were two Fante Christians from Cape Coast Castle, who much scandalised us by alternately calling upon Allah and Christ. (p. 250)

The fetishes have quite recently come into discredit, for rumours have reached Adele and Akabu from Efe, affirming that a son had been born to God, who had forbidden all work on the Sabbath-day. At the same time quite a new class of priests, male and female, has arisen, who claim to prophesy by inspiration of God, and not of a fetish, and who have built themselves huts at the outskirts of the villages, where the credulous may consult them. One of this new order of priests claimed fellowship with David Asante. (p. 256)

(David Asante, you will remember, was an indigenous pastor educated by the Basel Mission. It is not difficult to imagine how inwardly torn he must have been at times.)

Excerpts from:

1. N.N. 1886. Recent Explorations in the Basin of the Volta (Gold Coast) by Missionaries of the Basel Missionary Society. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 8, no. 4. 2 (April): 246-256.

A steady influx of vocabularies of exotic languages during the nineteenth century caused a veritable flowering of comparative philology. It became en vogue to be looking at primitive languages, and the late nineteenth century especially was a time in which every respectable gent in academia had to have dabbled in African philology.

One such gent was the Harry Thurston Peck (1856-1914). A classicist who would later become known for such works as Latin Pronunciation (1890), an edition of the Suetonius (1889), and most importantly the Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, he apparently had access to some dictionaries of West African languages in the 1880′s and could not, of course, resist the temptation to do something with it. The results were published in the American Journal of Philology in 1886.

Peck’s article is both disappointing and interesting. Disappointing for its dubious methodology, interesting because of the sheer amount of ideophones it presents in a time when the pervasiveness of ideophony in African languages was not widely recognized. To tackle the method first, Peck’s approach boils down to a simplistic attempt at reducing all multisyllables of Twi, Fante and Gã to monosyllabic CV roots. Virtually all multisyllables containing -ba-, for example, are considered ‘derived’ from the root BA; the only constraint seems to be that there has to be some conceivable semantic link, however vague or far-fetched.

It is this kind of sloppy method, I am afraid, that was partly responsible for getting research into sound symbolism a bad name. I will come back to that point below, but not before I’ve allowed the reader a brief peek into Peck’s data.

The data

The body of Peck’s study is basically a dense list of ideophonic vocabulary from Twi, Fante, and Gã. You only need to see a fragment to get a sense for what it is like:

Some specimens of purely isolated onomatopoetic words are given below, to show with what facility they are formed, and how numerous they are: Babababa, raindrops. bambam, clapping. bereberedere, gentle dropping ; used of rain, slow steps, etc.; hence, fluency, sweetness of speech. desebese, whispering. birebire, confused talk ; (…) butubutu, drum-taps ; also butubutubutu. dododow, to stutter. fatafata, flickering, flitting as a bat ; also expressed by ferefere and fefereefefeere. fwe, the peep of a bird ; a whistle ; hence, bofwe, to whimper. (…) fwifwi, the swish of a whiplash ; hence, a whiplash. (…) gengengenfeng = tintinnitus. gyirigyiviw, gristly to the teeth. habababa, chatter. Cf. biribiri; so hobobobo, and kasakasa in the sense of confused whispers ; found also under the forms akasakasa, nfkase, okasafo, etc., and giving rise to a very large number of derivatives (cf. Christaller, Lexicon, p. 224). kesiw, to belch wind. kirididi, and kirrrr, to rush, roll. kitikiti, rushings, turbulence; also, kitirikitiri. kokoko, the dropping of water. akokoakoko, id.; also used of a quarrel; (…) ridididi, trippingly. sorow and surowsorow, susurrus. susu, the sound of pounding maize in a mortar. asusu, to whisper; Fr. chuchoter. tafotafovo, to lap up. takataka, to drip. taradada, id. tetere, id. (…) tumtum, pounding. tutututu, the boiling of water; cf. kukukufu, supra. twawn, the blow of a stone when it falls. ntwom, a smack. woroworo, the roar of waves; to murmur. worwowo, dripping. yang, a drum. yoŋŋ, a reverberation. (pp. 494-5)

‘Vanishingly small’

Now, Peck’s stated goal was not just to uncover the primordial monosyllables of the West African tongue; his paper was also a contribution to an ongoing debate about the pervasiveness of imitation as a formative principle in languages. Peck vehemently opposed the position articulated by Max Müller in his widely publicized Lectures on the Science of Language (Müller 1862): “Though there are names in every language formed by imitation of sound, yet these constitute a very small proportion of our dictionary. They are playthings, not the tools of language, and any attempt to reduce the most common and necessary words to imitative sounds ends in complete failure.” Peck sought to demonstrate that imitative words did not constitute ‘a very small proportion’ and were not mere ‘playthings’ either — at least not in these three West-African languages.

Meanwhile, it is interesting how similar Müller’s position is to an oft-quoted statement by F. J. Newmeyer in his discussion of iconicity and generative grammar (Newmeyer 1992): “the number of pictorial, imitative, or onomatopoetic nonderived words in any language is vanishingly small.” (Newmeyer presents this as an indirect quotation from Whitney 1874.) I suspect it is partly due to awkward rebuttals like Peck’s that views like those of Müller and Whitney, which simply reflect the relatively poor state of linguistic knowledge of the late nineteenth century, are still current in some quarters of linguistics. (A certain fondness for de Saussure’s radical arbitrariness of the sign may also play a role in this marginalization of sound symbolism, some people have argued.)

Real data

It seems Peck was right in at least one thing: it will take real data to disarm this view. I’m not intent on doing so in a single blog post, if only because I realize all too well that haphazard collections of ideophonic vocabulary of the Peck type bring us nowhere. But it won’t hurt to turn to our bookshelves for a moment and inspect some of the work that has appeared since 1874 to get some estimates on the actual pervasiveness of ideophony:

• over 5000 ideophones were collected in Gbeya (Adama-Eastern, Niger-Congo, Central African Republic) by Samarin (1970:155);
• 2097 entries out of a total of 8544 are ideophones in a dictionary of related Gbaya (Noss 1986);
• a Zulu (Southern Bantu, South Africa) dictionary contains over 2600 ideophones (Samarin 1970:155);
• in Semai (Central Aslian, Austroasiatic, Malaya), ideophones form ‘a word-class of the same order of magnitude as the first two [nouns and verbs]’ (Diffloth 1976:249);
• in Japanese, there are several dictionaries devoted to ideophonic words, many of them containing several thousands of entries (Kita 1997).

The list could be expanded, but it will do for now. What it makes clear is that Whitney’s sweeping statement (‘the number of pictorial, imitative, or onomatopoeic nonderived words in any language is vanishingly small’) is not just exaggerated — it is utterly and wildly misguided. What is more, earlier installments in this series have shown that already by the time it was uttered, it was problematic: there was ample data from Yoruba (Vidal in Crowther 1852) and Ewe (Schlegel 1857) to suggest a greater role for imitation/depiction in language. Nowadays, it seems there really is no excuse to keep repeating the claim. (Unless of course you’d rather keep the number of languages in your typological sample vanishingly small.)

In closing, I should make clear that it is not so much the uninformed claim itself that bothers me, but rather the fact that it blocks the sight on so many other interesting issues. By a priori assuming that imitative strategies are marginal everywhere, we are turning a deaf ear to the music of language. To mention just a few questions one might want to ask, what do we know about the differential distribution of depictive strategies in the lexicons of the world’s languages? Why ideophony? Whence this spectacular elaboration of vivid sensory vocabulary in some languages? But those are issues for another series of posts. Or indeed for a dissertation.

References

1. Crowther, Samuel Ajayi. 1852. A Vocabulary of the Yoruba language, Together with Introductory Remarks by the Rev. O. E. Vidal, M. A. London: Seeleys.
2. Diffloth, Gérard. 1976. Expressives in Semai. Austroasiatic Studies 1, Oceanic Linguistics. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, Special Publication 13: 249-264.
3. Kita, Sotaro. 1997. Two-dimensional semantic analysis of Japanese mimetics. Linguistics 35: 379-415.
4. Kropp Dakubu, Mary Esther. 1998. Ideophones in Dangme and their place in linguistic semantics. Papers in Ghanaian Linguistics 11: 1-18.
5. Müller, Max. 1862. Lectures on the Science of Language. 3rd ed. London: Longman.
6. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1992. Iconicity and Generative Grammar. Language 68, no. 4 (December): 756-796.
7. Noss, Philip A. 1986. The Ideophone in Gbaya Syntax. In Current Approaches to African Linguistics, ed. Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, 3:241-255. Dordrecht: Foris.
8. Peck, H. T. 1886. Onomatopoeia in Some West African Languages. The American Journal of Philology 7, no. 4: 489-495.
9. Samarin, William J. 1971. Survey of Bantu ideophones. African Language Studies 12: 130-168.
10. Schlegel, Joh. Bernhard. 1857. Schlüssel der Ewesprache, dargeboten in den Grammatischen Grundzügen des Anlodialekts. Stuttgart.
11. Whitney, William Dwight. 1874. Physei or thesei – natural or conventional? Transactions of the American Philological Association 6: 95-116.

Part two of our series on early sources (part one is here) is dedicated to Reverend O. E. Vidal, M.A. who as early as 1852 made a number of very insightful comments on ideophones in Yoruba in the preface to Samuel Crowther’s Yoruba dictionary:

There is another very striking feature in the Yoruba language, which I feel unwilling to pass over in this memoir, although, at the present stage of our knowledge on the subject of African philology, it will not afford any help in assigning to this language its proper position on the ethnological chart. The adverb is a part of speech in which we do not commonly recognise any characteristic sufficiently prominent to become a distinctive mark of any language, either generic or specific. But in the case of the Yoruba there is a most observable peculiarity in the use of this part of speech, which must, I think, eventually prove to be such a distinctive mark. Speaking in general terms, we may say, that each individual adverb of qualification possesses an idiosyncrasy of its own which altogether incapacitates it from supplying the place of another. It contains within itself the idea of the word which it is employed to qualify, although, as to form and derivation, totally unconnected with that word. In this way “almost every adjective and verb has its own peculiar adverb to express its quality” or rather its degree. This peculiarity must certainly greatly increase the expressiveness of the language. (Vidal, p. 15-16)

Vidal’s reserved tone shows just how little known the phenomenon of ideophony was at the time of his writing. Yet his comments are incisive and to the point; he sums up pretty much of what is significant about ideophones. He continues:

Thus, for example, in sentences where we should employ the word “very” let the subject of which we were speaking be what it might, the Yoruban would express the same meaning with far more of definiteness and precision by a separate adverb in each case, no two of which could be used convertibly. We should say, for instance, ” The tree is very high;” ” the bird flies very high;” “this cloth is very yellow;” ” the scarlet is very red;” ” the glass is very dazzling.” But the Yoruban would vary his adverb in every example ; thus “iggi ga fiofio;” “eiye fo tiantian;’ “aso yi pon rokiroki“; “ododo pipa roro;” “awojijin ndan maratimaran”

It is true, we have adverbs which can only be applied to certain classes of subjects, as the word “beautifully” can only be used concerning objects of sense ; but even here the tendency to generalize is observable : “beautifully” belongs of course, in its original acceptation, only to objects of sight, as, “the cloth is beautifully yellow ;” but we employ it constantly in reference to objects of hearing, speaking of harmony as beautifully soft, and so on. In the Yoruba, on the contrary, we observe the working of a principle the very opposite of this generalization. Thus the word “fiofio,” used above, can only apply to the idea of height, and that, too, only when the subject of which height is predicated is connected with the ground, and stands upon it ; for when the idea of height implies distance from the ground and separation from it, another distinct adverb, “tiantian,” must be employed. So, too, the adverb ” rokiroki” can only be used of a yellow colour, although the word itself does not mean yellow; and ” roro” only of a red, or, at least, dark colour, though the word has no such meaning; the fact being, that they imply ideas connected with those colours respectively, and not with the category of colour generally. (Vidal, p. 16-17)

Here Vidal touches on one of the defining features of ideophones: their amazing semantic specifity. The English translation equivalent ‘very’ pales in comparison to the work done by this type of adverbs. The four examples he cites are by no means isolated cases; as he notes:

And this principle seems to pervade the language; so that, in order to speak it correctly, it is necessary to know not only the verb or adjective which expresses what we wish to say, but also the peculiar and appropriate adverb which denotes the degree or quality attaching to it. 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. (Vidal, p. 17)

Here once again it becomes clear how little was known at the time about ideophony in African languages. Today we know of course that ideophony pervades the great majority of African languages (and lots of non-African ones too).

Owen Emeric Vidal deserves major credit for attending to a phenomenon that he could have easily overlooked or ignored (as witnessed by many contemporary —and later— grammars and dictionaries that remain silent on the issue), and for capturing a good deal of its essential features.

References

• Crowther, Samuel Ajayi. 1852. A Vocabulary of the Yoruba language, Together with Introductory Remarks by the Rev. O. E. Vidal, M. A. London: Seeleys. [Available on Archive.org]
• McLaren, J. 1886. An Introductory Kafir Grammar with Progressive Exercises. Lovedale.

The earliest description of Kawu (Akpafu) I have found so far is quite special in that it was written by an African in an African language. A German translation of it appeared in 1889 and can be found below. The original is a report of a travel made in early 1887 by David Asante. David Asante (1834-1892) was the son of a christianized chief in Akropong, and one of the first Africans to be trained in Basel. Together with a few unnamed white missionaries, Asante travelled throughout what is today the central Volta Region of Ghana, visiting Nkonya, Boem, Akpafu, and Santrokofi (amongst other places). He wrote down his experiences in Twi and sent the report to Basel, where it was subsequently translated into German by J.G. Christaller, one of the founding fathers of West African linguistics. The translation was published in 1889 in the transactions of the Geographische Gesellschaft für Thüringen zu Jena.

Akpafu-Todzi in the late nineteenth century (the picture is from a later date than David Asante’s expedition)
Source: Staatsarchiv Bremen #7.1025-0077

According to the account itself, this was the first time that Europeans set foot in Kawu. I hope to be able to provide a full English translation later, but here are a few nice excerpts to start with:

We arrived in Akpafu somewhere around nine; 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 there had never been a European there before. Had it depended just on them, 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. (…) Their giant king was very amiable and wanted us to stay for several days; however, our schedule did not permit us to do so.
(…)
Of the people of Boem, these are the brightest. (…) Because of their ironwork, everything is well-organized; for people from all places come here to buy iron tools. (…) The diligence of these people, their hospitality, and their tranquil behaviour pleased us so much that we really came to love them.
David Asante, 1889.

Apafo, January 25, 1887

Als wir am Morgen [25. Jan.] weiterreisten, gab uns der Hauptling des Ortes einen Führer bis Apafo. Von Tɛtɛman hatten wir eigentlich über Beyika nach Lolobi gehen sollen; aber wir hörten hier, jener Weg sei versperrt und werde nicht mehr begangen, aber der über Apafo sei gut und kurz, auch sei jene böse Krankheit nicht in Apafo selbst, sondern in Adome sei sie gewesen und langst erloschen.

Wir freuten uns sehr, nach Apafo, das wegen seiner Eisenschmelzen und Schmieden berühmt ist, zu kommen. Auf dem ganzen Weg, den wir gingen, sahen wir die Kohlen, mit denen sie das Eisen schmelzen. Sie zerspalten grünes Holz, graben ein Loch in die Erde, schichten das Holz darin auf, bedecken es gut mit Laub und Erde und lassen nur ein Loch, wo sie das Holz anzünden; erst nach acht Tagen löschen sie das Feuer und nehmen die Kohlen herans. Als wir den Berg bis auf die Ebene desselben erstiegen hatten, sahen wir bald den Ort, wo sie das Eisen schmelzen, ein wenig vom Dorfe entfernt. Ihren Ofen bauen sie wie einen Reispfeiler [worin Reis aufbewahrt wird], nur machen sie die Wände viel stärker als für den Reis, etwa 5 Fuß hoch, und oben offen; unten ist ein Loch, durch das sie die Kohlen hineinthun, dann wird das ausgegrabene Eisenerz auf die Kohlen geschüttet; sind diese angezundet, so wird das Loch mit Lehm zugemacht bis auf eine kleine Offnung, durchwelche die Luft Zutritt hat; auch werden am Ofen 5 oder 6 kleine Löcher gemacht, damit das Feuer Zug hat und nicht verlöscht. Ist alles gehörig in der Glut, so sieht man die Schlacken geschmolzen zu einem unten gemachten Loch langsam herausfließen, aber das gute Eisen bleibt im Ofen zurück; erst nach 24 Stunden vom Anzünden des Ofens an nimmt man es heraus. In dem so entleerten Ofen bleibt aber die Hitze noch lange; irgend welche Speise, die man hinein thut, läßt sich darin gar kochen. Ein tiefer, etwas steiler Abgrund ist neben einer der Schmelzen; wenn man einen Stein hinunterrollen läßt, so hört man ihn 5 bis 7 Minuten fortrollen, und er ist noch nicht unten angelangt. Kinder, die dort zu thun haben, vergnügen sich damit.

Wir kamen nach Apafo, etwa um 9 Uhr; die Stadt ist groß, ihre Hauptstraße breit; als wir ankamen, strömte die ganze Einwohnerschaft zusammen, um uns zu sehen, sogar die Schmiede hörten auf zu schmieden und kamen auch herbei, weil eben noch kein Europäer jemals hierher gekommen war. Wäre es auf sie allein angekommen, so hätten wir hier mehrere Tage bleiben müssen. Sie führten uns einstweilen in ein Gehöfte, wo wir abstellen konnten; von da gingen wir, den König, einen alten, kräftigen Mann, zu begrüßen. Sie führten uns in ihre Schmieden und zeigten uns alles, was sie dort machen. Ihr Amboß ist nicht von Eisen, sondern ein großer Quarzstein, welcher im Boden befestigt und dessen obere Seite geglättet ist. Wenn sie schmieden, bleiben sie nicht auf einem Platz stehen, sondern gehen gehen um den Amboß herum. Sie machen auch ihre Werkzeuge, wie Hammer, Zange, Meißel U. s. W. selbst; ihre Hammer sind nicht wie die der Europäer, sondern auch der Griff ist wie der Teil, womit man schlägt, vond Eisen, kurz und ringsum glatt; die einen sind groß, andere klein. Ihr Blasebalg ist wie einer aus der alten Zeit; man faßt ihn mit beiden Handen und bearbeitet ihn wie eine Trommel; deshalb thut dies auch nicht ein einzelner Mann, sondern 3-5 Personen thun es abwechslungsweise.

Alle Werkzeuge, die sie schmieden, werden auf einerlei Art gemacht; ein langes gekrümmtes Eisen wird zu Buschmesser, Haue und Stoßeisen zumal. [Nicht ganz deutlich!] Ihre Hauen sind verschieden von den unsern, indem sie rund sind ; andere sind wie unsere hiesigen [flach mit 2 Ecken], und nur die Schneide ist gerundet. Hernach zeigten sie uns auch, wo sie das Eisen graben; es ist auf demselben Berg, wo ihre Stadt liegt; die Erzgruben sind den Goldgruben in Akem ähnlich; sie graben in die Tiefe und machen unten Seitengänge, daß man von einem Schacht in den andern kommen kann. Einzelne Leute hier verstehen Tschi; einen derselben, der früher in Cape Coast gewesen war, ließen wir unsere Predigt übersetzen. Ihr riesengroßer König war sehr gütig gegen uns und wünschte, daß wir mehrere Tage bleiben sollten; aber unsere Zeit erlaubte es uns nicht. Wir unterhielten uns mit ihm über Gottes Wort, und er sagte, wenn wir jemand in seine Stadt setzen würden, so hätte er es sehr gerne.

Unter den Boe-Leuten sind die hiesigen die aufgewecktesten [wörtl. Boe-Leute, deren Augen geöffnet sind ein wenig, (das) sind die Hierleute]. Daß die Kinder nackend gehen, ist eben Sitte geworden, auch hier. Um ihrer Eisenarbeit willen befinden sie sich in ordentlichen Verhältnissen, denn von allerwärts kommt man hierher, um Eisengeräte zu kaufen. Alle Hauser hier sind nicht mit Gras gedeckt, sondern haben flache Lehmdächer; sie heißen dieselben nicht adán [gewöhnliche Negerhäuser], sondern abán [Häuser wie die Forts und Steinhauser]. Die Boemer, welche in solchen Hausern wohnen, sind die Orte : Borada, Apafo (Akpafo), Tɛtɛman, Beyika, Lolobi, Santrokofi. Die Orte, in welchen in Eisen gearbeitet wird, sind: Apafo, Santrokofi und Lolobi. Der Apafo-Orte sind es zwei: Apafo-gã (das große), welches auf dem Berge liegt, und Apafo-Dome, welches auf der Ebene liegt. Lolobi besteht aus zwei Orten; Santrokofi hat 3 Orte, jedes nicht fünf Minuten von dem andern entfernt.

Wegen der Eisenarbeit, die hier betrieben wird, giebt es viele Schmiedewerkstatten in der Stadt; wenn man ihren Eifer im Schmieden und Eisenschmelzen sieht, muß man sich wundern. Die Leute sind alle kohlschwarz. Einer der Schmiede zeigte uns ein Wunderstückchen: nachdem er seine Hände in dem Bodenstaub seiner Schmiede gerieben hatte, nahm er ein glühendes Eisen aus dem Feuer und streifte mit seinen Händen darüber hin, daß die Funken sprühten, aber seinen Händen that es nichts.

Der Fleiß dieser Leute, ihre Gastfreundlichkeit und ihr ruhiges Benehmen gefiel uns sehr, so daß wir sie recht lieb gewannen. Wenn uns die Zeit nicht gemangelt hatte, so wären wir gerne nach ihrem Wunsch einen Tag länger bei ihnen geblieben. Als wir uns verabschiedeten, sagte uns der König, wir sollten bald wiederkommen und ihnen Flinten zu kaufen mitbringen, denn ihre Flinten seien alle schadhaft. Wir sagten ihm, daß wir Prediger des Evangeliums seien und keine solche Geschäfte machen. Er gab uns einen Führer, der uns denselben Tag abends nach Santrokofi brachte.

(…)

References

1. Asante, David (trans. J. G. Christaller). 1889. Eine Reise in den Hinterländern von Togo, beschrieben von einem christlichten Neger und aus der Asante-Sprache übersetzt von J. G. Christaller. Geographische Gesellschaft für Thüringen zu Jena 7/8: 106-133.