Category Archives: Ideophones

Ideophones are marked words that vividly evoke sensory events. They are found abundantly in Asian and African languages, as well as in some native American languages. As a class of words, they are relatively rare in Indo-European languages.

Phonosemantics, Chinese characters, and coerced iconicity

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The light descending (from the sun, moon and stars.) To be watched as component in ideograms indicating spirits, rites, ceremonies.The linguistic blogosphere featured some posts recently on the topic of phonosymbolism, phonosemantics, and Chinese characters. It started with a post by Victor Mair over at Language Log, outlining several approaches to “etymologizing” Chinese characters. A follow-up by David Branner highlighted some of the problems with simplistic notions of phonosymbolism. Here I add some texture to the conversation by discussing the views of Ezra Pound, making a comparison to form-meaning mappings in ideophones, and introducing the notion of coerced iconicity.

The posts by Mair and Branner address a popular but quite mistaken notion: the idea that Chinese characters are like little pictures whose meaning can be “read off” from the strokes. The academic best known for debunking this popular misconception was John DeFrancis in his (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. He showed that the bulk of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds in which one element indicates (at most) a general category of meaning and the other suggests the pronunciation.

The pictorial view

The roots of the “pictorial” view of Chinese characters in the Western world no doubt go far back. One of the driving forces behind it in the first half of the 20th century was the poet Ezra Pound. Pound is a fascinating figure, famed for his influence as a Modernist, Imagist poet and literary critic (and controversial for some of his political views). I have recently described Pound’s ideas about Chinese ideograms:

Over the years, Pound developed a fascination with the poetic affordances of logographic writing systems, especially Chinese. This fascination originated with his discovery of a theory of the Chinese character by Ernest Fenollosa [published in an edition by Pound in 1920], who argued that Chinese writing reflects etymology (‘true sense’) in a way that phonetic writing does not. In Pound’s idealist view of etymology (Li 1986), this rendered the Chinese character vastly superior to Western phonetic script in terms of picture-making. Soon enough however, scholarly studies of logographic writing systems showed that Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds rather than transparent pictures, and Pound’s idyllic conception of Chinese characters as evocative ideograms was severely and justly criticized (Kennedy 1958; cf. DeFrancis 1984).

(Dingemanse 2011:44-45)

In my paper (titled Ezra Pound among the Mawu and published in Semblance and Signification), Pound’s ideas serve as a cautionary tale. I argue that there is a parallel between Pound’s overeager “iconicization” of Chinese characters and the tendency of many linguists to ascribe iconicity to ideophones. One important point of the paper is to note that there are limits to the iconic representational powers of speech, and there is reason to be careful in ascribing iconicity to ideophones (p. 45-6).

Ideophones are not the unproblematically imitative words that many people have made them out to be. There is something about them that makes us want to believe this, no doubt — just like there is something about Chinese characters that makes us want to believe the pictorial story. In my analysis of ideophones, this something is not iconicity, but first and foremost their depictive nature — the fact that they are presented as, or to use a more apt metaphor, framed as depictions.

Three types of form-meaning mappings

It may be useful to describe the development of my own thinking about these matters. Back in 2007 my reading of the ideophone literature suggested that ideophones are simply sound-symbolic words. Over time, with my inventory of Siwu ideophones steadily growing and my grasp of the semiotics of depiction in speech slowly evolving, I came to question simplistic notions of sound symbolism and iconicity in ideophones.

It became clear to me, for instance, that in a language with thousands of ideophones, it would be very difficult for all ideophones to be iconic to the same degree or in the same way. So there had to be different types of iconicity — different ways in which ideophones could evoke sensory imagery. My paper addressed this matter empirically by surveying the Siwu ideophone inventory. The result of this survey was a description of three basic, non-exclusive types of form-meaning mappings in ideophones.

Coerced iconicity

While working on this I also realized that even if we allow for different types of iconic mappings, certain ideophones do not actually seem to be that transparently iconic. How does one iconically map colours, internal sensations, or cognitive states? Is iconicity really the point of ideophones like Siwu fùrùfùrù ‘seeing things in a blur’ or Japanese iya iya ‘with a heavy heart’? It seems unlikely. Have ideophone enthusiasts (native speakers as well as linguists) simply been over-eager in iconicizing ideophones? Doing an Ezra Pound in the domain of sound? If so, it is important to figure why the form of ideophones is so often identified with their meaning. I argue that it is their depictive nature:

Depiction, rather than iconicity, is what invites people to treat the ideophone as a performance of sensory imagery. An analogy may help to explain this point. Consider the category of objects called paintings. Paintings vary quite widely in the degree to which they are iconic (i.e. show a perceived resemblance to what they depict). And yet there is a distinct interpretive frame we bring to all of them: we tend to view them as depictions rather than read them as texts (Gombrich 2002[1960]; Walton 1973). In a similar way, we may think of ideophones as setting up a depictive interpretive frame, inviting the listener onto the scene and invoking images of being there.
(…)
If we want to invoke iconicity here at all, we should call it COERCED ICONICITY. The depictive nature of the ideophone coerces us into treating the word as an adequate rendition of the depicted event.

(Dingemanse 2011:51)

Coerced iconicity may be a useful concept in discussions of supposed iconicity because it describes a mechanism familiar to us all and realistically locates it in the eye of the beholder. In Peircean terms, it locates iconicity in the interpretants of eager observers rather than solely in properties of the sign-object relationship. Why was it difficult for Pound to resist associating meaning with the shape of Chinese characters? Why does the pictorial view of Chinese characters, thoroughly debunked as it is, keep coming back? One reason may be that there is some amount of truly pictorial characters that feed the imagination and that makes all Chinese characters look like pictures, especially to the untrained eye. This coerces people into treating all characters as pictorial renditions. Why do speakers treat all ideophones as perfectly adequate depictions of sensory imagery? Perhaps all that is needed is a critical mass of transparently iconic ideophones (using the three principles I described), and for the remainder, the framing devices of performative prosody and expressive morphology may be enough to coerce people into treating them as good depictions.

Explanatory leakage

Sapir famously said that all grammars leak. Much the same holds for any grand theory of how linguistic signs —spoken as well written words— are motivated. (This is the source of my unease with the “big picture” theory of Chinese phonosymbolism by Howell that Mair outlines in his post.) All linguistic systems are the messy, fuzzy products of a long term interaction of human communicative needs, intersubjective language use, modality-specific features, and the mindless opportunism of evolution (among other factors). In the case of the form and meaning of ideophones, there are many forces tugging at them and shaping them. Although many people like to think of ideophones as prototypically “iconic” words, on reflection, it is clear that the story leaks. Yes, there are clearly iconic structures in ideophones that help guide the imagination, perhaps somewhat like the lines and shading in a naturalistic painting. But some ideophones (many in some languages?) may be more like abstract paintings: depictions that are invested with meaning by eager observers, not necessarily on the basis of information contained within their form.

Often a certain amount of explanatory leakage is more exciting than a neat account. Seeking regularity all the way leads to oversimplification. In some possible world, all Chinese characters are neat pictograms, the Chinese language is phonosemantic in nature, and all ideophones are nice imitative words. This world is not ours however; and isn’t it is far more interesting to investigate the manifold ways in which humans can do cross-modal mappings of form to meaning, and to describe the different processes by which they discern motivation in what to the analyst may look like arbitrary gibberish? Gibberish. Hmm, let me frame that word for you so that you can experience some coerced iconicity on the way out. Gibberish.

References

  1. DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  2. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. ‘Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and Iconicity in Siwu’. In Semblance and Signification, edited by Pascal Michelucci, Olga Fischer, and Christina Ljungberg, 39-54. Iconicity in Language and Literature 10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (download here)
  3. Dingemanse, Mark. (in press) “Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones.” Language and Linguistics Compass.
  4. Fenollosa, Ernest. 1920. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Edited by Ezra Pound. London: Stanley Nott.
  5. Kennedy, G. 1958. ‘Fenollosa, Pound, and the Chinese Character’. Yale Literary Magazine 126, no. 5: 24–36.
  6. Li, Victor P. H. 1986. ‘Philology and Power: Ezra Pound and the Regulation of Language’. boundary 2 15, no. 1/2: 187-210.
  7. Pound, Ezra. 1947. The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest. New York: New Directions.

Ideophones around the web: ideophones and product naming

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This long overdue instalment of Ideophones around the web features ideophones in the names of snappy new mobile apps from an Indian software startup.

I’d noticed long ago that the domain “ideophone.com” was registered by a domain name squatter, and I wondered whom they thought would be interested. A videophone company perhaps? Anyway that particular domain has been lying dormant for years now with one of those useless “what you need when you need it” templates on it.

Recently however a real company called “ideophone” has entered the scene: Ideophone.in. The people at Ideophone.in make mobile apps for commuting people — “redefining commute”, as they say themselves, with mobile apps that are journey- and location-aware. Some cool things about this company are the multilingual people behind it — they speak Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, English and Hindi — and the fact that their product names are inspired by ideophones.

Ideophonic apps

One of the products of this company is a digital metering app which shows time and distance travelled during rikshaw and taxi rides. Here’s what Sundar writes about the name of this app:

It sounded like a neat idea to name the app with an ideophone. It’ll evoke the same impression in people speaking different languages, right?

Given that the bulk of the Bangalore population speaks some Dravidian language or other, the choice fell on Suruk, which connoted diligence, speed, sharpness etc. signifying what Suruk does. And, it helped that www.suruk.com was available.

Product naming isn’t exactly my expertise (for that, I look to Fritinancy), but it is certainly not a bad idea to use ideophones to name your products. In fact the use of sound-symbolism in product names is quite a thing nowadays, with researchers from marketing and (psycho)linguistics weighing in on the issue (Klink 2001, Lowrey et al. 2007, Yorkston & Menon 2004). And with the linguistic sophistication displayed by the people behind Suruk, Pyka, and other apps, Ideophone is certainly a nice name for the company itself.

The good people at Ideophone.in credit this blog for inspiration. Folks, I’m surely happy to be of help, and I salute you! I’m looking forward to your new products. Meanwhile, if you want some ideophones, check out my thesis!

References

  1. Klink, R.R. 2001. “Creating meaningful new brand names: A study of semantics and sound symbolism.”
  2. Lowrey, T.M., and LJ Shrum. 2007. “Phonetic symbolism and brand name preference.” Journal of Consumer Research 34 (3): 406.
  3. Yorkston, E., and G. Menon. 2004. “A sound idea: Phonetic effects of brand names on consumer judgments.” Journal of Consumer Research: 43–51.

Now available: The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu

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Yesterday I successfully defended my PhD thesis at the Radboud University Nijmegen. I was promoted to doctor cum laude.

This means that I can now make the thesis officially available to anyone interested. You can find it at thesis.ideophone.org, where you can also inspect the online supplementary materials, listen to audio clips, and check out photos. Or just download the PDF directly. Enjoy!

Also check out these press releases related to the thesis and the defense:

Daniel Tammet invents his own Siwu ideophone

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I loved Daniel Tammet’s Born On A Blue Day, in which he tells of his life with autistic savant syndrome. His second book, Embracing The Wide Sky (2009), is just as enthralling. In his own words, Embracing The Wide Sky is “a personal and scientific exploration of how the brain works and the differences and similarities between savant and non-savant minds”. To my great delight, I discovered that it even indirectly (okay, very indirectly) features my work on Siwu ideophones!

One of the chapters of the book is on language, covering topics from Greenberg’s universals to psycholinguistic research on language acquisition and from aphasia to sound symbolism. The section on sound symbolism, onomatopoeia and phonestesia contains a survey “to test your own intuitive sense for word meanings”. That little survey is proving quite popular online: copies have appeared on dozens of websites (just search for siwu pambalaa and you’ll see what I mean). Here’s how it starts:

Test your own intuitive sense for word meanings from a range of languages with the following multiple-choice questions:

1. Does the adjective ‘pambalaa’ in the Siwu language of Africa describe (a) a round, fat person or (b) an angular, thin person?

That’s right! The first question features “the Siwu language of Africa” — the Ghanaian language that I have been studying —and writing about— as a field linguist since 2007. The question was probably inspired by my online writings; this website has featured a lot of Siwu examples through the years. (This post may be the source.)

No pambalaa in Siwu…

Now here’s the funny thing: there is no Siwu word pambalaa. The word just doesn’t exist. But rather than taking Daniel to task for spreading misinformation about Siwu, I want to argue that his ‘misremembering’ illustrates exactly what is so interesting about this kind of words, known in linguistics as ideophones.

First things first though. How do I know that this word is not actually an existing word in Siwu? The answer is that I checked. I have a list of hundreds of ideophones in Siwu, and it isn’t on there. It’s also in none of my publications so far, on or offline. Additionally, I asked several speakers of Siwu, and they tell me that the word doesn’t exist, though there are some words that are like it (that were indeed on my list, and in my publications): pimbilii, pɔmbɔlɔɔ, and pumbuluu.

Now pimbilii, pɔmbɔlɔɔ, and pumbuluu all have to do with something round and protruding, though varying in magnitude. This kind of pattern is familiar to ideophone aficionado’s. In my thesis, I have called it “relative iconicity”; it has also been referred to as “vowel symbolism” or “magnitude symbolism”.

What about the non-existent pambalaa? Daniel Tammett proposes the meaning “someone round and fat” (as opposed to someone angular and thin). His form is clearly a variation on a theme. And it is a sensible one. I’m pretty sure almost anyone would answer (a) to the quiz question above. Heck, even Siwu speakers say it’s (a) and not (b). That is, they can make sense of the word even though it doesn’t exist — just like us.

…whereby Tammet proves his own point

Daniel’s point in the section on sound-symbolism is that we have an intuitive sense for the meaning of some words. By misremembering this Siwu word, he inadvertently proves his point in a powerful way. For he got the sound-symbolic pattern right. Many of the world’s languages feature words like these, in which the vowel quality is used in a meaningful way (more on that in this recent post on lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu, and an old post on some Japanese ideophones). Cross-linguistically, the vowel a tends to be used for things of greater magnitude; or more precisely, the relation between that vowel and other vowels is often used iconically to map onto a relation between bigger and smaller things. This is why we go for choice (a) in Daniel’s quiz.

So Daniel, if you read this, thanks for the demonstration that sound-symbolism makes sense, and that memory is not just about storing hard and dry facts, but also (perhaps even moreso) about storing relational structures that allow us to creatively reconstruct stuff when needed. To me, this is one of the things that make human language and the human mind so endlessly fascinating.

Rembrandt and Van Gogh

Some interesting features of ideophone systems can be illustrated using this case. For one thing, we can often at least partly make sense of ideophones even if they’re not our own language. This is because they often tap into the general depictive potential of speech sounds and articulatory gestures. But that is not the whole story. Notice how Daniel’s quiz focuses on only one dimension of the ideophone’s meaning: size. Notice, too, that we use only one cue to decide on our answer: vowel quality. But pambalaa and more precisely the existing forms pimbilii and pumbuluu are not just about magnitude; they depict something quite specific, namely the bulging roundness of a belly. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t have predicted that part. Here we are moving beyond generic, possibly universal cues; we are getting into the realm of convention.

Ideophone systems always show this interesting combination of iconicity and convention. This is why they don’t always look the same across languages. We can tell Siwu ideophones from Semai ideophones just like we can tell a Rembrandt from a Van Gogh. Different languages represent slightly different depictive traditions, and this is what gives ideophone systems their language-specific signature.

Siwu speakers can tell whether some form is an existing word or not. Pimbilii is, pambalaa is not. Ideophones tend to be actual words — existing items in a language, not just expressive outcries or spontaneous sound-paintings. But pambalaa illustrates a good way to make new ideophones: use widely shared iconic principles and build on existing words. This is, incidentally, exactly what I occasionally see happening in my video-recordings of every conversation in Siwu: people sometimes create new ideophones, and when they do so, they use the toolkit for depiction provided by existing ideophones. Like Daniel Tammet’s pambalaa, the cases of ideophone creation I recorded in the video corpus show that creative depictions never occur in a vacuum, but always in the context of a broader linguistic system, using existing depictive practices.

That’s it for today — I’m off to get something to eat. If I tell you that my belly is pimbilii now, you can tell what it should be like in a couple of hours!

References

  1. Tammet, Daniel. 2007. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant: A Memoir. New York: Free Press.
  2. Tammet, Daniel. 2009. Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind. New York: Free Press.

Can you tell the difference between lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu?

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Lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu are two Siwu ideophones depicting imagery of being well-rounded. But they differ in degree. One of them evokes an image of being seriously fat, the other depicts the state of being merely chubby. Can you guess which is which?

Few people find this question difficult to answer. But I won’t reveal the right answer just yet. Instead, by way of celebrating the fact that thesis.ideophone.org is now fully up and running, I want to show you how my senior consultant Ruben explains these ideophones in Siwu. Pay particular attention to his gestures — you’ll see that it is fairly easy to get an idea of the meanings of these ideophones even if you don’t understand Siwu!

Folk definition of lɛkɛrɛɛ by Ruben:

[jwplayer file="/wp-content/blogs.dir/4/files/video/9_lekeree_RO.flv" captions.file="/files/video/9_lekeree_RO.srt"]

Folk definition of lukuruu by Ruben:

[jwplayer file="/wp-content/blogs.dir/4/files/video/9_lukuruu_RO.flv" captions.file="/files/video/9_lukuruu_RO.srt"]

(Note. I somehow can’t get the subtitles to display here on my blog. Another reason to check out the clips on their own page, where everything works smoothly!)

Continue reading →

New publications on ideophones

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Just out: A new issue of the journal Senses & Society, featuring research by a dozen contributors to the Language of Perception project. This special issue, edited by Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, also features two articles on ideophones: one by Sylvia Tufvesson and one by yours truly.

Sylvia’s article is entitled Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World. You can find the electronic version via the DOI or download the PDF directly. Abstract:

Sylvia Tufvesson, Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World

In the interplay between language, culture, and perception, iconicity structures our representations of what we experience. By examining secondary iconicity in sensory vocabulary, this study draws attention to diagrammatic qualities in human interaction with, and representation of, the sensory world. In Semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian), spoken on Peninsular Malaysia, sensory experiences are encoded by expressives. Expressives display a diagrammatic iconic structure whereby related sensory experiences receive related linguistic forms. Through this type of form-meaning mapping, gradient relationships in the perceptual world receive gradient linguistic representations. Form-meaning mapping such as this enables speakers to categorize sensory events into types and subtypes of perceptions, and provide sensory specifics of various kinds. This study illustrates how a diagrammatic iconic structure within sensory vocabulary creates networks of relational sensory knowledge. Through analogy, speakers draw on this knowledge to comprehend sensory referents and create new unconventional forms, which are easily understood by other members of the community. Analogy-making such as this allows speakers to capture fine-grained differences between sensory events, and effectively guide each other through the Semai sensory landscape.

My article is titled Ideophones and the Aesthetics of Everyday Language in a West-African Society. You can find the electronic version via the DOI or download the PDF directly. Abstract:

Mark Dingemanse, Ideophones and the Aesthetics of Everyday Language in a West-African Society

This article explores language, culture, and the perceptual world as reflected in a particular linguistic device: ideophones, marked words that depict sensory imagery. Data from a range of elicitation tasks shows that ideophones are a key resource in talking about sensory perception in Siwu. Their use in everyday conversations underlines their communicative versatility while at the same time showing that people delight in their expressiveness. In ideophones, we have an expressive resource that combines sheer playfulness with extraordinary precision

References

  1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. Ideophones and the aesthetics of everyday language in a West-African society. The Senses and Society 6(1). 77-85. doi:10.2752/174589311X12893982233830.  
  2. Tufvesson, Sylvia. 2011. Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World. The Senses and Society 6(1). 86-95. doi:10.2752/174589311X12893982233876.  

Interrupting everybody

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Gérard Diffloth, writing about the paradox of catching ideophones in the wild, notes the following:

Il faut donc guetter les expressifs et les attraper au vol ; mais dans le feu de l’action et de la discussion animée où ils naissent, qui aurait le culot d’interrompre tout le monde afin de pouvoir vérifier une voyelle, un sens, une intention?
— Gérard Diffloth, 2001

Or in English:

We must therefore watch for the expressive and catch it in full flight; but in the heat of the action and animated discussion in which they are born, who would have the gall to interrupt everybody to be able to check a vowel, a meaning, an intention?

Who indeed, we may ask. Interrupting an animated conversation anytime an ideophone flies by is a surefire way to kill any spark of spontaneity.

In good French academic style, Diffloth is highly skeptical about ways to subvert this problem: “Quant au magnétophone, n’en parlons pas, il gâche la spontanéité et il supprime le contexte non-sonore … La caméra est plus balourde encore.” (In English: “As for the tape recorder, don’t get me started, it ruins the spontaneity and removes the non-auditory context. … The camera is even more clumsy.”)

I share a lot of Diffloth’s skepticism, but as the Mawu say (using ideophones), àsi kpoo, ilo kpoo: if you do nothing, nothing happens. Interrupting a videotaped conversation is a lot easier than interrupting “tout le monde”. And using the sequential structure of recorded conversations to get access to participants’ own interpretations of each others’ talk is a extremely valuable complement to post-hoc reflections on meaning or intention. So for all its clumsiness, I prefer the camera.

Building a multimodal corpus of everyday interaction is a job fraught with difficulties (even if cameras have become a lot less clumsy since 2001). But if it is the closest we can currently get to a faithful (if not complete) representation of everyday social interaction, it is infinitely better than nothing.

Note. At the request of Gérard Diffloth, I changed my slightly literalist translation of “tout le monde” as “all the world” to the more common “everybody”.

References

  1. Diffloth, Gérard. 2001. Les expressifs de Surin, et où cela conduit. Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 88(1). 261-269. doi:10.3406/befeo.2001.3516.
  2. Enfield, N.J., Stephen C. Levinson, J.P. de Ruiter & Tanya Stivers. 2007. Building a corpus of multimodal interaction in your field site. In Asifa Majid (ed.), Field Manual Volume 10, 96-99. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. (online)

Update

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This blog has been suffering from a bad case of thesis-writing neglect. But I’m getting there. I just launched thesis.ideophone.org, a site that will be the home of online supplementary materials to go with my PhD thesis, The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu.

There isn’t all that much to see yet, but I did upload some pictures of Kawu and some enticing figures from the chapter on the pile sorting task to whet the appetite of you ideophone afficionados out there. More details soon!

Aduerbia sonus: Ideophones in two 17th century grammars of Japanese

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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.

Ideophones around the web

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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.

Sound Suits

One of the many sound suits by Nick Cave

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.

Ideophones in pop culture

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.

Squee

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.