Slides for my recent paper 'Ideophones in unexpected places', presented at LDLT2 in London, November 13-14. Though the inquisitive rooster in the title slide may not be looking for them, there are ideophones for just about any salient feature depicted in this scene. But what are people using them for? And what specialized uses may arise out of the core interactional functions of ideophones? Those are the questions addressed in this paper.

Supplementary material can be found on another page. A slightly updated version of the full paper is available here (PDF). Here is how to cite it:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'Ideophones in unexpected places'. In Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2, ed. Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan, and Peter Sells, 83-94. London: SOAS.

 

Intangible and abstruse

the bright silk of the sunlight

Pours down in manifest splendor,

You can neither stroke

the precise word with your hand

Nor shut it down under a box-lid.

Tsze Sze's Second Thesis
Ezra Pound, The Unwobbling Pivot, 1947

 

Taro Gomi said: "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. After all, onomatopoeic expressions are not really language; they are, in a sense, raw language."

Toronto by night

Embedded in the Iconicity conference in Toronto is a pleasant surprise: a three-day workshop entitled Cognitive Poetics: A Multimodal Approach. Speakers include Reuven Tsur, David Herman, Margaret Freeman, David Miall, Zoltan Kövecses, Yeshayahu Shen, Mark Changizi, and of course the organizer, the colourful Paul Bouissac. (As an aside, I can’t resist quoting the latter on the omnirelevance of semiotics: “My definition of semiotics is everything that is interesting.”)

The programme features quite a bunch of unlikely bedfellows, but there is at least one thing uniting most of them: they theorize about written language. I don’t — I focus on spoken discourse, and everyday conversational discourse at that. So I’m one of the odd ones out. Unsurprisingly, just like the others, I’m inclined to count my own perspective among the more worthwile. But besides ego, I think I may also count time on my side. The point being that spoken language of course is primary on both the evolutionary and ontogenetical timescales: it comes before writing in the history of mankind and in the history of each and every individual. It seems to me, then, that if one wants to find out how and why authors structure texts, how recipients engage with them, and how meaning emerges in the process, the natural place to start looking would be spoken discourse — the primordial home of communication (Levinson 1983).

Yet what I’ve heard so far leaves me with the feeling that many literary theorists somehow operate on the unchecked assumption that the phenomena they are exploring are unique to literature. I think a more inclusive approach would have far more potential: aren’t these issues best tackled by looking at verbal art in the widest sense, including not just written, but also oral and signed forms of artful language? Quite probably, all of the literary phenomena we’ve heard about in the past few days —aesthetic involvement, enaction, evocation, foregrounding, multi-modality, intermediality, and yes, literariness— ultimately derive from affordances of spoken language in its various forms.

Or to make the point in one sentence: had I videotaped the coffee breaks, we would have been able to observe all these forms of ‘literariness’ in their natural habitat.

Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of Toronto, June 9-14, 2009. It looks like an interesting bunch of linguists and literary theorists. I will give a talk on Tuesday the 9th, the abstract for which can be found below.

Ezra Pound among the Mawu: the everyday poetics of ideophones in a West-African society

by Mark Dingemanse, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

The language of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana has a large class of ideophones: marked iconic words that vividly evoke feelings. Ideophones are found abundantly in African, Asian, and Amerindian languages; as a distinct class of words they are rare in Indo-European (Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). Their use has been summarized eloquently by Fortune:

‘With them one is in a special realm of spoken art. There is a roundness, a complete shape, not so vividly conveyed by more complex constructions, more formal expressions. They attempt to be a vivid re-presentation or re-creation of an event in sound ... Always they try to capture the freshness of an event and express it of themselves with nothing to dull or cloud the evocation’ (Fortune 1962, 6)

The similarity between ideophonic and poetic language is easy to see (cf. Nuckolls 2006). Yet the shadow of Lévy-Bruhl, who assigned mimesis in language to the realm of primitivity, has loomed large over linguistics and literary theory alike. The poet Ezra Pound, a central figure of Modernism, is a case in point: while his fascination with Chinese writing spawned the ideogrammic method, the mimicry and gestures of the ‘primitive languages in Africa’ would never become more than a mere curiosity (ABC of Reading, 21).

This talk imagines Pound transposed into the culture of the Mawu. What would have struck him about their ways of ‘charging language’ with imagery? I will show that there are three levels of iconicity in Siwu ideophones —direct, relative, and Gestalt iconicity— which are combined in various ways to vividly recreate sensory events in sound. The abundant use of ideophones across a wide range of discourse genres suggests a concern of Siwu speakers with their perceptions. These observations will be juxtaposed with Pound’s views on the ‘word of literary art which presents, defines, suggests the visual image’ (Selected Prose, 321), and his perpetual interest in the exact qualities of perceptions. The goal of this contrastive analysis is to shed light on the linguistic and cultural ecology of an everyday poetic device in the world's languages, and in so doing to rehabilitate what one might call ‘the ideophonic method’.

References

1. Fortune, G. 1962. Ideophones in Shona: An Inaugural Lecture Given in the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland on 28 April 1961. Oxford University Press.
2. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1910. Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures. Paris.
3. Nuckolls, Janis B. 2006. The Neglected Poetics of Ideophony. In Language, Culture, and the Individual, ed. Catherine O'Neil, Mary Scoggin, and Kevin Tuite, 39-50. München: Lincom Europa.
4. Pound, Ezra. 1914. Vorticism. Fortnightly Review 96, no. 573: 461-471.
5. ———. 1934. ABC of Reading. London: Routledge.
6. ———. 1973. Selected Prose. New York: New Directions.
7. Voeltz, F. K. Erhard, and Christa Kilian-Hatz, eds. 2001. Ideophones. Typological Studies in Language, 44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Jedesmal, wenn ein Solo beendet hat, fällt der ganze Chor ein und singt einen Refrain, der aber nur aus den verschiedenen Vokalen besteht, die auf alle möglichen und unmöglichen Arten ausgesprochen werden, also eigentlich immer dasselbe. Interessant wäre es, einen solchen Gesang aufzunehmen. (Kruse, Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu, 1911, p. 192)

Everytime when a solo ends, the choir joins in and sings a refrain that just consists of a number of different voices which are uttered in all possible and impossible ways; so in a way it is always the same [words]. It would be interesting to record such a song.

The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places (e.g. Culture Making, Far Outliers) as evidence of a cultural revival. Although I feel it is really too soon to say whether this is the case, I'm glad to report that the dirges are in fact being played on funerals, to great acclaim. Even people who I don't know very well have told me how glad they are that these dirges are available now. I in turn should thank Timothy "T.T." Akuamoah from Todzi for bringing up the idea of recording the dirges in March 2008. Were it not for his organizing talents, we would never have had so many wonderful singers around. There are plans for a follow-up project involving more recordings in the weeks around Easter.

I don't think Friedrich Kruse, the German missionary whose description of a Siwu funeral dirge is quoted above, ever actually expected these dirges to be recorded. The Germans were quite adamant about their Ewe-only policy in schools and churches; in fact there is no evidence that any of the missionaries (who manned the Akpafu missionary station for a good thirty years altogether) ever learned to speak Siwu — to the contrary, Schosser (1907) records several cases of women who could not yet be baptised because of their limited understanding of Ewe, and the mission chronicles show a glaring ignorance of Mawu culture in general (Bürgi 1921). It speaks for the vigour of Mawu culture that Siwu is alive and well nowadays, and that the Mawu are taking an active interest in their own cultural heritage.

Kananana

Allow me to present another wonderful example of the genre. Last summer I wrote about the ideophone kanana. Here is a funeral dirge in which that ideophone, evoking a tranquil silence, plays a central role. It would normally be sung during the wakekeeping, in the middle of the night.

The song, with call and response revolving around the realization that death strikes everyone —barren women just as well as nursing mothers—, begins and ends in silence. Be silent and stay in your houses. What more can one do in the face of a sad loss? Text, structure, and melody work together to create a compelling and most of all intensely sad dirge.

[See post to listen to audio]

Parallelisms

The funeral dirges of the Mawu are full of parallelisms. The above dirge features parallelisms within and across lines. Within lines, the powerful contrast between ɔlɛmã 'barren woman' and ɔtalɛpo 'nursing mother' is used to silence all — one's status in life is of no relevance whatsoever to death. Across lines, grave (ìwo, literally 'pit') and grave-mound (sìse, literally 'clay heap') are parallels that help establish a certain poetic balance. Some examples of semantically rhyming words that are commonly used in parallelisms are:

The previous posting noted how the grammatical affordances of Siwu were used to achieve a tight and pithy expression. Here, we see in more detail the work being done by the selection and contrast of semantic units. First of all, ideophones —words that are perfectly suited to vividly express feelings and emotions— are used in the dirges to great effect. Secondly, we see that parallel units related by likeness or contrast are an essential device to enrich meaning and achieve poetic balance in this genre of verbal art. (See Fox 1974, Baronti 2001, for parallels from other languages.)

References

1. Agawu, Kofi. 1990. Variation procedures in Northern Ewe song. Ethnomusicology 34, no. 2: 221-243.
2. Baronti, David Scott. 2001. Sound symbolism use in affect verbs in Santa Catarina Ixtahuacan. Dissertation, University of California, Davis.
3. Bürgi, Ernst. 1921. Geschichte von Station Akpafu, 1897-1917. Lome. Signatur 7,1025 - 5/2; Film FB 3697. Staatsarchiv Bremen.
4. Fox, James J. 1991. Our ancestors spoke in pairs. In Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 65-85. 2nd ed. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Kruse, F. W. 1911. Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu. Der Anscharbote, October 29.
6. Schosser, Herman. 1907. Akpafu: ein Stück Kultur- und Missionsarbeit in Deutsch Togo. Bremer Missions-Schriften 21. Bremen: Verlag der Norddeutschen Missions-Gesellschaft.

Women performing a funeral dirge in Akpafu-Mempeasem

Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are a special genre of songs to be sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.

The funeral dirge below was recorded August 17, 2007 in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana (along with six other dirges). It was transcribed and translated with the gentle help of Reverend A.Y. Wurapa.

The Siwu is beautifully economic in expression. It contains only two verbs: pia 'be (with)' and ɖe 'be (existential)'. The sɔ that is translated as 'said' is actually a quotative complementizer. An English translation cannot do without marking tense, but in Siwu, the poem does not contain any tense or aspect markers, being set in an aorist-like default that can be interpreted as recent past or present.

Some of the poetic devices at work here are lost in translation. One is the focus construction which emphasizes the content words in the last four Siwu lines ('mourning it is; tears it is; sadness it is; graves it is'). Another is the fact that these content words belong to four different grammatical genders in Siwu: the first is an noun in KA with locative connotation, the second a liquid/mass noun in MI, the third a singular noun in I, the fourth a plural noun in A. I'm not sure whether this pattern is as striking to native speakers as it is to me, but note that the gender is reinforced by the agreement morphology on the 'be'-verb (ka-, mi-, i-, a-). One could think of it as a case of 'subliminal verbal patterning in poetry' (Jakobson 1980).

By fronting the content words and by presenting all four of them in the exact same frame, the dirge forces the reader to meditate on the inevitable consequences of being surrounded by mortality. We may think we're lucky to have company, but in the end it turns out to be mourning, tears, sadness, graves. The enumeration of closely related tropes is a common technique in the funeral dirges of the Mawu.

A Dutch translation

It is difficult to approximate the beauty and subtlety of this piece of poetry in another language. Nevertheless I have tried my hand at composing a translation in Dutch, my native language, if only because I am intrigued by the subtle interplay of words and grammar in this poem. This translation, then, is a modest attempt to translate not just the words but the terse form-feel of the original. I realize it will be difficult for non-native speakers of both Siwu and Dutch to judge whether the attempt has been successful, but I do provide some explanatory words below.

The first line stays quite close to the Siwu ("I said (to myself), 'people are with me'"). A less literal translation would have been Ik was blij dat ik mensen had 'I was glad I had people', but in the original the expression of contentness remains only implicit, so I felt making this more explicit was not necessary. The inflected verb form dacht 'thought' (past) in the first sentence also establishes the temporal setting.

Contributing to the terse style, the Dutch verb blijken 'turn out (to be)' nicely packages the Siwu sêgbe 'not knowing' together with the be-verb. Dutch verbs inflect not just for tense but also for number; hence the bleken/bleek alternation in the last four lines. To put this fact of grammar to poetic use, I have exchanged 'crying' for another word: afscheid. This makes it possible to couple the singular/plural alternation with two different rhyme patterns: Droefheid and afscheid are end rhymes, while tranen and graven are linked by assonant rhyme. The effect is an aesthetically pleasing ABAB structure in which the members of each pair agree in rhyme type and number. In the original, àsekpe 'graves' is the final word, but in the Dutch version it isn't; it somehow doesn't sound quite right to end with the plural graven; besides, afscheid (parting) is a very appropriate word to end the poem.

The future of dirges in Kawu

Speaking of parting, it is only rarely that dirges are heard in Kawu nowadays. Two factors are contributing to their decline: firstly the fact that many churches discourage their use, preferring edifying hymns instead. The reason behind this, I am told, is that the dirges reflect a pre-Christian worldview and as such are to be eschewed by true Christians. A second factor has been the coming of electricity to the villages halfway the nineties, which has led to loud music taking the place of the dirges during the wakekeepings. Elsewhere I wrote that "culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself", yet at the same time I can't help but lament the imminent loss of such a rich vein of Mawu culture.

However, during my last fieldtrip there were some signs of a renewed interest in the genre. For example, one pastor told me that he had been reconsidering the rash dismissal of the dirges by his church. Realizing how important the dirges had been in containing, orienting, and canalizing the feelings of loss and pathos surrounding death, he felt that the Christian hymns did not always offer an appropriate replacement. Another hopeful event was that I was approached with the request to help record a great number of dirges in Akpafu-Todzi in August 2008. This was not just to record them for posterity (although this was part of the motivation), but also very practically so that they could be played at wakekeepings. I gladly complied with this wish of course. The result is a beautiful collection of 42 dirges, sung by eight ladies between 57 and 87 years of age. The first time the dirges were played at a funeral they sparked a wave of interest.

Next in this series: a discussion of parallelisms in Siwu funeral dirges.

References

1. Agawu, Kofi. 1988. Music in the funeral traditions of the Akpafu. Ethnomusicology 32, no. 1: 75-105.
2. Fox, James J. 1991. Our ancestors spoke in pairs. In Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 65-85. 2nd ed. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Jakobson, Roman. 1980. Subliminal Verbal Pattering in Poetry. Poetics Today 2, no. 1a, Roman Jakobson: Language and Poetry (Autumn): 127-136.
4. Kruse, F. W. 1911. Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu. Der Anscharbote, October 29.

If one had to sum up their character in a short phrase one might say that they are poetry in ordinary language ; and one feels that no other sounds would serve the purpose equally well of evoking sensations which compose the meaning, just as one cannot think that any possible line could be substituted for, shall we say, "For ever piping songs for ever new".
(Evans-Pritchard 1962:145)

The reference to Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn is particularly apt because Ezra Pound (ABC of reading, p. 63ff.) discusses Keats' poetry in a chapter on the means of charging language to the utmost possible degree — which is exactly what ideophones do.

1. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1962. Ideophones in Zande. Sudan Notes and Records 34: 143-146.
2. Pound, Ezra. 1934. ABC of Reading. London: Routledge.

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:

Excerpt 1

The creatures of nature have a cause and effects; human actions have a principle and consequences: to know the causes and the effects, the principles and the consequences, is to approach very near to the rational method whereby one attains perfection. [1928]

Compare this with the later version:

Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and beginnings. To know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet. [1945

Excerpt 2

A prince who cherishes those who have incurred general and merited hatred, and who hates those who hold the general affection, outrages men's natural feelings. Disasters will come upon him. [1928]

The luminous and vigorous later version:

To love what the people hate, to hate what they love is called doing violence to man's inborn nature. Calamities will come to him who does this, the wild grass will grow over his dead body. [1945]

'Not a literal translation'

"Not a literal translation" is a note you'll find attached to some second hand offerings of the later version on Abebooks and Amazon. Take that as a recommendation. As Kenner says, 'The most elementary acquaintance with Chinese ideograms (...) makes it plain that the translator of Confucius cannot even begin without possessing, rethinking, and recreating his matter' (p. 312). Or, to let Pound himself speak on the art of translation:

'The action resultant from this straight gaze into the heart. The "know thyself" carried into action. Said action also serving to clarify the self-knowledge. To translate this simply as "virtue" is on a par with translating rhinoceros, fox, and giraffe indifferently by "quadruped" or "animal". (Pound 1969:21)

Le Ton Beau de Marot is not without merit. It is clever, witty, moving, and entertaining; but all the same less ground-breaking and mind-expanding — in short, less essential — than many other works (earlier works by Hofstadter himself included). Hofstadter's heavy tome is simply dwarfed by Pound's lucid insights and unrivalled grasp of the English language.

References

1. Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1979. Gödel, Escher, Bach. New York: Basic Books.
2. Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1985. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Basic Books.
3. Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1998. Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language. New York: Basic Books.
4. Kenner, Hugh. 1951. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions.
5. Pound, Ezra. 1947. The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest. New York: New Directions.
6. Pound, Ezra. 1969. Confucius: The Great Digest, the Unwobbling Pivot, the Analects. New York: New Directions.

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.