Category Archives: Linguistics

(This is sort of a catch-all category for linguistics-related posts that do not fit under one of the more specific topics.)

On playthings and tools

Posted on by
2

Let me draw your attention to the newly added quote at the top right of this page: “…they are playthings, not the tools of language.” The quote comes from Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (I’m citing the 1862 edition). I wrote a little about the historical context of that quote recently but let’s not worry about that right now.

The quote is nice because along with Müller’s healthy skepticism we get an observation thrown in for free: that there is a playful dimension to imitative use of speech sounds. Müller was here of course relying on his own intuitions. In recent work, Janis Nuckolls has noted that besides playfulness, sound-symbolism for SAE speakers is often associated with ‘qualities such as childishness, whimsy, and simplicity, that make it inappropriate for many discursive contexts.’

‘You have to pepper your speech’

Not so in Siwu, and in many other pervasively ideophonic languages. In Siwu, to stick to my own trade, use and knowledge of ideophones is a marker of eloquence, and a sign indeed that one ‘knows the language’. In fact, although my Siwu is less than fluent (to say the least), I have quite often received compliments because of the way I used ideophones — saying, for example, ɔ-bù kpɛtɛ̀ɛ̀ɛ̀ {3SG-be.wet IDPH.soaked} ‘She was drenched to the skin’ instead of the simpler, ideophone-less version.

For Siwu speakers, ideophones are not just embellishments. As one of my assistants said, ‘we could tell a story without ideophones, but we use them to let people’s mind go, or get more understanding’. Another succinct explanation came from an elder in the community: à-kparara ara {2SG-IDPH.illuminate things} ‘you illuminate things’ (and yes, kparara is an ideophone). There you have it: ideophones as tools.

Playful ones nonetheless — said the aforementioned assistant, ‘without these words, speech is buààà [bland]. You have to pepper it’. You guessed it. Buààà is another of those playthings.

References

  1. Müller, Max. 1862. Lectures on the Science of Language. 3rd ed. London: Longman.
  2. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1995. Quechua texts of perception. Semiotica 103, no. 1/2: 145-169.
  3. Kunene, Daniel P. 2001. Speaking the Act: The Ideophone as a Linguistic Rebel. In Ideophones, ed. F. K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 183-191. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Wordle now does Extended Latin and diacritics

Posted on by
2

Great news for those who are into visual corpus linguistics but don’t work on SAE languages: since July, Wordle handles alphabets in the Extended Latin ranges; and today its maker, Jonathan Feinberg, added support for combining diacritics. That means that you can now feed Wordle texts from languages that use tone marks and other diacritics in their orthographies. Like Siwu.

Wordle based on some ten minutes of spontaneous conversation in Siwu.

The Wordle above displays the most common words in some ten minutes of spontaneous conversation in Siwu, one of the fruits of my last fieldtrip. The conversation has four participants. Nothing groundbreaking about this particular Wordle, it’s just a nice word cloud starring: Continue reading →

Confuse two aspects. I am.

Posted on by
2

Just a linguistic note here on Warren Buffett’s widely publicized advice to buy American stock. Buffett’s op-ed piece in the New York Times was graced by the headline “Buy American. I am.”

The quirky headline wasn’t picked up by the fellows over at Language Log, who are much too busy these days with the g-droppin’ or tactical g-lessness by a certain lady whose name ends in emphatic -in. It was, however, noticed by Fritinancy in a post titled ‘To “Am,” or Not to “Am”?.’ As she writes, ‘Trouble is, the two halves of the headline don’t match up.’

Why not? Friedman attributes it to the fact that “buy” is a ‘verb of activity’, requiring the declaration that follows to contain a similar verb such as “do”. But the be-verb is is not really incompatible with the ‘activity verb’ “buy”. It combines perfectly with the present progressive form ‘buying’, for example (as in the question mentioned over at Fritinancy: “Buying American?”). So the implied form must have been “I am [buying American]“.

That makes it an aspect issue — the truncated clause presupposes an imperative in the progressive aspect (‘Be buying American’) but for some reason it ended up following a bare imperative. The effect is a slightly jarring, but still understandable headline, just like the self-referential title of today’s posting. Understand this. Am I?

Three misconceptions about ideophones

Posted on by
15

In a previous post I have outlined the history of the term ideophone. This post takes on three common misunderstandings about the nature of ideophones. As an added bonus, if you read all three, you get one for free (below the fold). The working definition I adopt for ‘ideophones’ is the following: Marked word that depict sensory imagery. In lay terms, ideophones are words that stand out (are ‘marked’) and whose form betrays something of (is depictive of) their meaning.

  1. ‘Ideophone’ is just jargon for onomatopoeia. Not quite. Onomatopoeia is generally understood to be limited to words imitating sounds. Ideophones however evoke all sorts of sensory events — not just sounds, but also taste, gait, visual effects, texture, smell, and so on.
    Consider the following Siwu ideophones: vɛlɛvɛlɛ ‘a dizzy, giddy feeling in the body’; yuayua ‘a sensation of burning (the visual impression, the feeling, or both)’; kpotoro-kpotoro ‘moving jerkily like a tortoise’; ɣɛkpɛtɛɛ ‘delicately fragile, for example of autumn leaves’. These words do not imitate sounds, yet to a Siwu speaker they vividly depict sensory events in a way that is reminiscent of onomatopoeia. The German linguists had an excellent term for this: Lautmalerei ‘painting with sound’, the result of which was a Lautbild ‘sound picture’ (Westermann 1907, 1927, cf. also Bühler 1934).
  2. English and other Standard Average European (SAE) languages lack ideophones. Not quite. Given the definition of ideophone above, ideophony is probably a universal phenomenon. English, for example, has ideophonic words like glimmer, twiddle, tinkle which are depictive of sensory imagery: their form betrays something of their meaning in ways that words “chair” and “dog” do not.
    All the same it is true (and interesting) that languages differ in the extent to which they systematize and elaborate their ideophonic (expressive) resources. In that sense English is definitely a much less ideophonic language than, say, Semai (Central Aslian, Austroasiatic, Malaysia), where ideophones are a word class as big as the two other major word classes, nouns and verbs, or Gbeya (Adama-Eastern, Niger-Congo, Central African Republic), where over 5000 ideophones have been collected. In the latter type of language, ideophones make up a large and clearly recognizable class of words, whereas in English, ideophonic vocabulary is sprinkled all over the lexicon (and probably less common overall).
  3. Ideophones are a feature of primitive languages. Not quite. This idea is at least as old as the first descriptions of ideophones in ‘exotic’ languages. It was made popular by anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl’s musings about ‘primitive mentality’, in which ideophones were adduced as evidence for the ‘irresistible tendency’ of the native to ‘imitate all one perceives’ (1926:142). One thing we have learned since then is that the notion of ‘primitive language’ makes no sense outside the highly problematic model of cultural evolutionism in which it was coined.
    I don’t even want to give counterexamples in the form of supposedly non-primitive languages which nonetheless are ideophonic; anyone interested can look up some relevant literature (start with Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001). For linguists, languages differ in interesting ways and along all sorts of dimensions; but the supposed dimension of primitivity is not one of them.

Continue reading →

Le Ton Beau de Ta Hio

Posted on by
Reply

Reading about the two translations of the Confucian Ta Hio by Ezra Pound, the earlier one first published in 1928 and the later one created in 1945, I was reminded of Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot. Though Hofstadter’s book on the problem of translation is personal and impressive, I also found it annoyingly ignorant of the work of countless others in the same field.

Ezra Pound is an example of someone who was acutely aware of the intricacies of the art of translation. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his two versions of the Ta Hio, a careful comparison of which would bring home many of the points developed at greater length (and at the expense of clarity) in Le Ton Beau. This will be obvious to anyone who takes some time to compare the following passages: Continue reading →

Semantic cookies

Posted on by
1

Semantic cookies are sold in Akpafu-Mempeasem, central Volta Region, Ghana (among other places)

Fieldwork sessions on lexical semantics have become a lot easier since I found these cookies. I came across them in a small and dusty store in Akpafu-Mempeasem, my fieldwork hometown of all places.

Semantic cookies are made in Turkey by a company called BiFa Bisküvi. As BiFa they certainly have a knack (or failing that, a dictionary) for coining strange product names; other products of theirs are called Appeal, Effect, Talent, and Wisdom, to name just a few.

Out of comptrol

Posted on by
3

An ironic typographical error thwarts Hugh Kenner’s exposition of the Ching Ming ideograph in The Poetry of Ezra Pound:

The Ching Ming ideograph has levels of signification beginning with orthography and ending with the most intimate moral discriminations. ‘Call things by their right names.’ Don’t, for example, call a man Comptroller of the Currency unless he really controls it. (Kenner 1951:38)

Alas, the Comptroller of Typesetting (now of course deprived of his title) was not at his post to save Kenner from recursivity breaking loose, and that on the very page where a Pound quote reminds us that ‘orthography is a discipline of morale and of morals.’ A lovely strange loop it is.

Update: Helpful readers point out that the function of ‘Comptroller’ actually exists in the American system. This gives away two things: first, that I am currently writing posts offline (as I am in the field); second, that I am unforgivably ignorant of English typographic history. In my defense, I may note that the strange recursivity in Kenner’s passage still does hold; and that the title of my post tried to joke that not the noun (Comptroller) but the verb (control) is misspelled. I do admit guilt on the charge of trying to construct English puns as a non-native speaker.

References

  • Kenner, Hugh. 1951. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions.

More visualizations

Posted on by
Reply
ne

A visualization of the previous two posts on Many Eyes and Siwu ne

Because recursivity is a Good Thing, here is a visualization of the previous two posts on visualizing linguistic data with Many Eyes. The astute reader will note that the strange loop is not perfect since I didn’t use Many Eyes for the visualization — that is because nothing can do a simple visualization as beautifully as Wordle.

Unfortunately, Wordle doesn’t seem to handle Unicode outside the basic Latin range very well (probably because of the fancy fonts), otherwise I would’ve fed it some Siwu text, too. (I think Wordle could be made to work with SIL’s freely available Unicode fonts.)

Queensland grammar scandal at a glance

As an added bonus, here are the 75 most common content words from the recent discussion of the Queensland grammar scandal (sampled from three verbose posts at Language Log and from matjjin-nehen, including comments). It won’t help the debate, but it does give you the brouhaha at a glance. Another different something function. Grammatical grammar. Australian grammar errors indeed.

ne

The 75 most common content words about the Queensland grammar brouhaha in the linguablogosphere

(Link to Wordle found in Cornelis Puschmann‘s del.icio.us feed.)

Many Eyes on Siwu ne

Posted on by
3

Lots of readers looked at the challenge I posted last week (my blog statistics say more than 450 views for the post alone, so that’s many eyes indeed). A few of you were even daring enough to come up with a story on the various functions of Siwu ne. The challenge was probably a bit too difficult (involving an untranslated text in an as of yet undescribed Niger-Congo language), which makes those few attempts all the more heroic. So what did they see?

ne

ne and its right periphery; “ne, …” accounts for almost half of the tokens

Brett was the first to bite the bullet, providing some statistics on the use of ne. He noted that “it occurs sentence initially 158 times (out of 1161) and sentence terminally 83 times. (…) It often seems to bracket a whole clause and it can even be doubled. The ne kama ne string is quite common.” Ray Girvan didn’t trust the visualization and inspected the raw text instead. He discovered that the text contains some dialogues “as well as as a complete song/poem with multiple uses of “ne” in a question”; that the construct Si …. ne occurs frequently in it; and that the text probably consisted of several different text types. On came Jason with a number of rather detailed observations: Continue reading →

Visual corpus linguistics with Many Eyes

Posted on by
10

I recently came across Many Eyes, a nifty data visualisation tool by IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. It has lots of options to handle tabular data, but —more interesting to linguists— it can also handle free text. The two visualization options it currently offers for text are a tag cloud and a so-called ‘word tree’. The former visualizes simple token frequency, the latter displays the occurences of a given word (or phrase) in a branching view. It is the latter that I find the most exciting feature, because it allows for rapid visual exploration of linguistic patterns in a text.

Many Eyes applet temporarily disabled.