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.

Illustration © Imai Lab 2006

A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the results should be treated with caution. And Japanese gargle with salt water regularly as a prevention against the common cold; they even have an ideophone for it (but so do we, don't we?). That's giggles and gargles today. Let's tackle the giggles first.

Ideophones that make you feel good

A 2005 brain imaging study suggests that ideophones for laughter, but not nonsense syllables, activate reward areas in the brain. Here is the abstract:

The neurobiological reward components of laughter induced by words were investigated. A functional magnetic resonance imaging-based brain imaging study demonstrated that visualization of mimic words and emotional facial expressionwords, highly suggestive of laughter, heard by the ear, significantly activate striatal reward centers, including the putamen/caudate/nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortices, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, while non-mimic words under the same task that did not imply laughter do not activate these areas in humans. We tested a specific hypothesis that implicit laughter modulates the striatal dopaminergic reward centers by image formation of onomatopoeic words implying laughter and successfully confirmed the hypothesis. [Osaka & Osaka 2005]

Since ideophones have been claimed to somehow establish a more direct link between sounds and sensations than other words, brain imaging of ideophone production and comprehension is an exciting research area. Basically, the finding of Osaka & Osaka is that Japanese ideophones for laughter activate striatal reward areas, just like real laughter and other pleasurable activities do. The ideophones used are ‘ghera-ghera’ (strong laughter), ‘nikoh-nikoh’ (strong), ‘kusu-kusu’ (medium), ‘niyah-niyah’ (medium), ‘herahherah’ (weak) and ‘nitah-nitah’ (weak) (p. 1622, romanization by the authors).

But is it ideophony?

That is an interesting result, but I wonder: does the effect really occur because the words are ideophones, evoking the experience of laughter through their sound-symbolic form and imagistic meaning? Or could it simply be due to the fact that the words have to do with laughter? We can't tell, because the baseline comparison is not with non-ideophonic real words but with nonsense words (called 'nonsense phonemes' by the authors). Since non-ideophonic laughter-related words have been kept out of the comparison, we cannot be sure that ideophony (onomatopoeia/mimesis) is causing the effect, although this is what the authors would like to claim.

There is some reason to think that embodied semantics might be enough to induce such effects; think for example of the brain imaging studies showing that certain sensori-motor cortex areas not only upon tactile stimulation of the body part in question (e.g. the hand), but also during the processing of body part terms and verbs implying them (e.g. hand, grasp; Rohrer 2001). So the question is: would the effect found by Osaka & Osaka also occur with non-ideophonic laughter-related words in Japanese? For comparison, it would also be good to have a not so heavily ideophonic language thrown in. Would the English verbs 'giggle' and 'laugh' also trigger the effect? Sound-symbolic 'giggle' moreso than 'laughter'? Then things start to be really interesting.

A related problem is the claim that 'image formation of onomatopoeic words' plays a role in the effect. Once again this would be an interesting claim to test; native speakers of ideophonic languages often report that ideophones evoke vivid images. But in this study it remains an untested background assumption. The way the experiment is set up doesn't seem to allow for any inferences about it. For all we know the effect might just be due to an association between the sound and the experience of laughter; it is not at all obvious why image formation would come in. One way to approach this issue would be to do imaging studies of ideophones that don't imitate sounds, but other sensory events.

[Update: Kimi Akita notes that the stimuli, described by the authors as 'laughter onomatopoeic words' (p. 1622), actually mix sound-imitating ideophones (geragera and kusukusu) and movement/visual pattern-imitating ideophones (nikoniko, niyaniya, herahera, and nitanita). It doesn't really help that all of the results are averaged. I might add that Japanese itself does distinguish the two groups by the terms giongo and gitaigo, even though to a non-native speaker the actual categorization in this case isn't obvious (I would've grouped herahera with geragera, and I wonder what kusukusu laughter sounds like...).]

Gargles

So much for the giggles. What about the gargles? The gorgeous gargling girl above is one of the stimuli used by Prof. Mutsumi Imai in a study of child-directed speech in Japanese. One of her findings is that when describing scenes like this to their child, mothers will tend to use more mimetics (ideophones) than when they are describing the same scene to an adult.

I'm planning to do a pilot in Kawu using prof. Imai's stimuli, and one question is to what extent the original material would be usable in a West-African context. The idea is that the stimuli can be described using ideophones. Since most of the illustrations are simple events (jumping down, jumping across, throwing, rolling sth. up) I think they should be usable by and large. Perhaps the skin color will have to be changed — I prefer stimuli to be as culturally inconspicuous as possible — though the question is whether that really would affect what we're after.

However, the one stimulus that I think won't be familiar is the gargling one above. In the Japanese context, it is meant to elicit the ideophone garagara, probably in the light verb construction X suru 'do X'. But in Kawu, the scene isn't very recognizable. People usually drink from calebashes (or their hands), though whites are known to prefer cups — so my guess is that the girl would simply be seen as drinking. Since gargling is not a culturally salient event in Mawu society, I don't think people would readily think of it, even if there happens to be an ideophonic word for it.

The Japanese ideophone for gargling is garagara. Interestingly, Kimi Akita tells me that "Japanese mothers tell their kids to pronounce "garagara" while gargling. This is because the articulation (especially, that of the velar consonant) of the mimetic is believed to help kids gargle successfully." Now that's an interesting intermingling of habitus and embodied meaning. I tried this (without any appreciable gargling experience) and nearly choked. This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Embodied semantics is a killer idea"!

References

1. Imai, Mutsumi, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo, and Hiroyuki Okada. 2008. Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning. Cognition 109, no. 1 (October): 54-65. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015.
2. Osaka, Naoyuki, and Mariko Osaka. 2005. Striatal reward areas activated by implicit laughter induced by mimic words in humans: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Neuroreport 16, no. 15 (October 17): 1621-1624.  
3. Rohrer, Tim. 2001. Understanding through the body: fMRI and ERP investigations into the neurophysiology of cognitive semantics. Talk presented at the 2001 International Cognitive Linguistics Association, Santa Barbara: University of California.

P.S. Check out the wonderful bibliographies compiled by Kimi Akita:

1. Akita, Kimi. 2009-02. A Bibliography of Sound-Symbolic Phenomena in Japanese. Electronic ms, Kobe University.
2. Akita, Kimi. 2009-02. A Bibliography of Sound-Symbolic Phenomena in Other Languages. Electronic ms, Kobe University.

waza waza, Gomi 1989:193 · © 1989

I came across this lovely Japanese ideophone in my own copy of Gomi's Illustrated Dictionary, and I'm sharing it waza waza just for you to enjoy.

References

1. Gomi, Taro. 1989. An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions. Transl. by J. Turrent. Tokyo: Japan Times.

uja uja, Gomi 1989:24 · © 1989

What better way to compensate for the overload of text in the previous posts than with some excellent illustrations of Japanese gitaigo? I have recently been looking at Taro Gomi's delightful Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, featuring cartoon-like depictions of almost 200 Japanese sound-symbolic words used to evoke certain sensations, feelings, and sensory perceptions. The style of the illustrations calls to mind another favourite of mine, The Far Side. But whereas Larson has to create his weird world from scratch, Taro Gomi merely illustrates existing words from Japanese. Talking about the genius of language!

Given the special status of ideophonic vocabulary (the fact that it depicts rather than describes), it should come as no surprise that illustrations of such words work so well; better perhaps in fact than verbal definitions (see Samarin 1967 for some of the issues lexicographers face in the description of ideophones). In the preface to his dictionary, the author/illustrator voices some pretty clear opinions on this issue:

So linguists do not deal with onomatopoeic expressions. Or perhaps I should say, they are unable to deal with them. And this is not surprising; onomatopoeic expressions are not the kind of subject matter that expert linguists can take up as a separate topic and study academically. [Oops! MD] After all, onomatopoeic expressions are not really language; they are, in a sense, raw language.

Moyamoya, dorodoro, gochagocha, barabara, fuwafuwa — no other words can describe these expressions. They represent a world of their own (...). Linguists, who are always described by such orthodox adjectives as kashikoi (wise), tadashii (right), erai (great), or rippana (respected), cannot handle them. If they handle them carelessly, they will run into problems.
(Gomi 1989:iii)

What can I say? One thing I'll grant the illustrator immediately: he is indeed perfectly qualified to handle this subject matter. Here's another example:

buku buku, Gomi 1989:149 · © 1989

In Siwu, one would probably use the ideophone lùɖùù for this, or pumbuluu if it was a person's stomach. Even though every ideophonic language has its own conventionalized inventory of expressive forms, there are cross-linguistic tendencies in sound-symbolism that amount to universals or near-universals. The use of voiced consonants and back vowels to evoke large and heavy things, as both Japanese and Siwu do in this case, may reflect one such universal.

nyoro nyoro, Gomi 1989:123 · © 1989

Although many of the ideophones illustrated by Gomi seem to be about inner feelings and emotions (cf. also Kita 1997:181), there are also words that evoke other types of sensations and sensory perceptions. Visual patterns, for example, as shown in the the illustration above. Interestingly, in Siwu, the corresponding ideophone is nyɛmrɛnyɛmrɛ.

I'm taking this dictionary with me on the next fieldtrip to Ghana — it's going to be lots of fun!

References

1. Gomi, Taro. 1989. An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions. Transl. by J. Turrent. Tokyo: Japan Times.
2. Kita, Sotaro. 1997. Two-dimensional semantic analysis of Japanese mimetics. Linguistics 35:379-415.
3. Samarin, William J. 1967. Determining the meaning of ideophones. Journal of West African Languages 4, no. 2:35-41.
4. Westermann, Diedrich Hermann. 1927. Laut, Ton und Sinn in Westafrikanischen Sudansprachen. In Festschrift Meinhof, 315-328, Hamburg: J.J. Augustin.