The Basque word for their language is Euskara or Euskera, earlier Heuskara. The first part of this word is the Togo R. word for "Akpafu", Likpe be-fu "Akpafu", Bowili o-vu-ne "Akpafumann", Santrokofi o-fu "Akpafumann", Akpafu ka-wu, ka-'u "Akpafu". The early initial Basque h is from k, as can be seen from ka-wu, ka'u. The a has changed to e in this lexeme. The consonant between e and u has been lost. Basque lacks the semivowel w, which drops out here in Akpafu ka'u. See Lafon (1960 : 92) for confirmation from placenames etc.: Ausci, Aoiz, Auch.

The second part of the word, ka or ke is a word for "speak", Niger-Congo gue "voice, language", Ewe, Ga gbe "voice", Agni guere "language, speech", Yoruba i-gbe "loud cry", Gbari e-gwe, e-gbe "mouth". The e is for original a in this word. Niger-Congo e is secondary. Compare Niger-Congo ka, ke, k'e "to speak", which is related. The final sylable -ra is the Niger-Congo article. No clearer proof could be found that the Basques were originally the Akpafu!

Thus says mr. GJK Campbell-Dunn "M.A. (NZ), M.A. (Camb.) Ph.D." in a most interesting document titled "Basque as Niger-Congo". (Just to remind you, Akpafu is another name for Siwu, the language I've been doing fieldwork on over the last three years.) I mentioned this story over a year ago in the comments of an excellent post over at Glossographia titled Debunking and de-Basque-ing, but I never got around to posting about it here. In his post, Stephen Chrisomalis notes that "There is probably no culture or language that has attracted more pseudoscientific attention than Basque."

I'm not intent on debunking Campbell-Dunn's story here; I think the quotation above stands just fine on its own. But I do want to draw attention to the irony of this particular case. There you are, author of such groundbreaking works as The African Origins of Classical Civilisation, Maori: The African Evidence, and Who were the Minoans?: an African answer. You now want to solve the Basque enigma once and for all, and since the general thrust of your work is to link everything to Africa one way or another you set out to discover that Basque is in fact a Niger-Congo language. A look at the rich lexical material in Westermann (1927) provides ample inspiration. Let's pick one of the Togo Remnant Languages, you think — after all, Basque is sort of remnant too. Akpafu. Euskara. Hey, why not. Let's just see what we can do... no-one's going to notice, right?

Well, I noticed. And I just want to say it loud and clear: Graham Campbell-Dunn's work is crackpot science. Don't believe it; don't even read it. Siwu and Euskara are fascinating languages that deserve of serious research. But they are most certainly not related. Although... come closer, I have to tell you a secret...

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

References

1. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2006. Sound Symbolism and Motion in Basque. Lincom Europa.
2. Westermann, Diedrich. 1927. Die Westlichen Sudansprachen Und Ihre Beziehungen Zum Bantu. Berlin: In kommission bei W. de Gruyter & co.

Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science section, written by Berthold van Maris. There's no online version of the article, but here is a PDF version if you read Dutch (or even if you just want to appreciate the look of Siwu ideophones in Dutch orthography!).

Klankschilderen: NRC, January 23, 2010, Science section, pp. 4-5

Nog meer goede pers! (30 januari)

Nog meer goede pers! Ik ben geïnterviewd door Dolf Jansen in de Radio 2 show Spijkers met Koppen (zie ook twitter). Met minder dan 10 minuten was het een kort interview, maar ik ben erg trots dat het Siwu het nu zelfs tot op de nationale radio geschopt heeft! Ik ben ook best tevreden met het verloop van het gesprek, hoewel er natuurlijk te weinig tijd is voor nuance. Maar oordeelt u zelf — klik op de speler hieronder om het fragment af te spelen.

[See post to listen to audio]

O, en voor de goede orde: (1) ik werk natuurlijk bij het Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek, niet bij de 'Universiteit van Nijmegen' zoals Felix Meurders zegt in de aankondiging; en (2) ideofonen zijn dus woorden (ik heb dit een paar keer gezegd maar het is kennelijk toch niet triviaal). Woorden die iedereen die Siwu spreekt kent en die je in een woordenboek kunt opnemen. Het zijn dus geen spontane geluidseffecten, het zijn ook geen tussenwerpsels, maar 'gewoon' woorden die eruit springen vanwege hun opvallende klanken en kleurrijke betekenissen.

Bulbul posted an interesting anecdote in a comment on one of my earlier posts:

On my way home today, I took the scenic route, through the old town, where the Weinachtsmarkt is in full swing with Christmas lights glowing, Glühwein flowing and all that jazz. As I was trying to get through the crowds, I noticed a black gentleman standing next to one of the stalls obviously admiring something and talking on the phone in a language I could not immediately identify.

And just as I passed him, he said “You know” and then something I would transcribe as “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” followed by a laugh. “I bet this ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ is an ideophone” I said to myself and immediately started wondering whether the person on the other end truly understood what was being conveyed – in other words, whether that “ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ” was a word with a shared meaning. Now I know better – assuming I was right in identifying the word as an ideophone, of course.

I still don’t know what language that was (I’m guessing Yoruba based on a few words I might have heard), so do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them as such?

Decide for yourself

So that's today's question: do ideophones really stand out that much? This is something you can only decide for yourself. Here are three examples from Siwu. They come from my corpus of everyday discourse and represent the three most common ideophone constructions. These three constructions account for 88% of 230 ideophone tokens in the corpus; the examples thus can be said to be typical of ideophone usage in day to day conversations in Siwu.

I will not transcribe them at this point; I just want you to listen.

Example 1

[See post to listen to audio]

Example 2

[See post to listen to audio]

Example 3

[See post to listen to audio]

Well do they?

Now you're in the position to answer bulbul's question: do ideophones really stand out that much that even a non-speaker can identify them? The answer —mine at least— is yes. If you are a hearing person, I'm willing to bet you had no trouble at all identifying the ideophones in the above three sound samples.

Before I give you the transcriptions, it is worthwile to ponder for a moment why ideophones stand out like this. I've hinted at this on other occasions, for example yesterday's ditty on vivid suggestion, a post on Feedburner's Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk!, and the last ideophone proeverij; and also in a recent paper, where I wrote:

As marked words, ideophones set themselves apart from the surrounding linguistic material; as a likely locus of performative foregrounding, they stimulate emotional engagement; as depictions, they supply vivid imagery and recreate sensory events in sound, inviting the listener onto the scene as it were.

So ideophones stand out for a reason: to attract attention to themselves as words qua words, to mark themselves as depictions in a stream of descriptive material. Let's suppose the gentleman overheard by Bulbul was indeed using an ideophone. Standing at the Weinachtsmarkt, he was attempting to share a vivid image of something he had in mind with the person on the other end; to do so, he needed to signal that what followed 'You know' was different somehow from bland referential prose; and this he did (unwittingly for sure) by performatively foregrounding 'ŋɛrɛrɛrɛ'.

Of course it's a bit flaky to draw conclusions on the basis of a couple of syllables overheard on a Weinachtsmarkt. Was it Nigerian Pidgin, which we know has lots of ideophones (Faraclas 1996)? Was he codeswitching? Was he perhaps simply stuttering? There's no way of knowing. That's why I gave the Siwu examples, which come from an extensive corpus of everyday social interaction. Want to know what those mean? Click 'Show' below to check it out.

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

References

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, 83-97. London: SOAS, November 14.
2. Faraclas, Nicholas. 1996. Nigerian Pidgin. New York: Routledge.

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.

Slides for a talk titled The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones, presented in Berkeley at the 2009 International Conference on RRG, August 9, 2009. The handout can be downloaded here. The slides are also available as a PDF file. You can cite this presentation as follows:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. "The interaction of syntax and expressivity in Siwu ideophones". Paper presented at the 2009 International Conference on RRG, August 9, Berkeley.

Slides for my recent presentation at the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics. Incomprehensible without the handout. Since this is an overview talk, there is some overlap with presentations given in Berkeley (RRG, August 9) and London (SOAS, June 3).

I'm using the following working definition of ideophones: "marked words that vividly depict sensory events" (elaborated here; your comments are welcome).

Cite as:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. 'What do we really know about ideophones?' Paper presented at the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics, August 21, Köln.

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 loads 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 Tɔkpaikɔ.

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 (I won't go into that right now, but I'll give a talk on this issue at LDLT2 later this year).

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's the other reason. Significantly, this fragment has always been embedded in the continuity of Tɔkpaikɔ 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.

In a time of severe language loss all over the world, that's 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. The really cool thing, then, is not so much that I've refound Plehn's mangled fragment. It's that in a very real sense, it 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.  

One day in Accra, my daughter came home from school and talked to me in English. I said, "I no be hear English. In my home, we speak Siwu." My daughter said, "But the teacher has said that we should not speak Vernacular at home!"

Vernacular! Vernacular! By that he means any local language other than English. So I said to her: "Siwu is my language. In my home we speak Siwu! At school you can speak English!" She started shivering and crying, because the teacher had threatened children who spoke Vernacular. So he had put her in fear. But I said to her: "If you do not speak Siwu to me in my home, I will not pay your school fees!" Now that she is grown up, she boasts that she can speak Siwu fluently even though she grew up in Accra. Many of her cousins don't hear Siwu at all.

This quote is from T.T., a very proud speaker of Siwu. Not all Mawu people raising children outside of Kawu are quite so insistent on maintaining Siwu, but his words do highlight the prevailing attitude among Mawu speakers, namely that it is good to speak Siwu. Teachers, meanwhile, are steadfastly convinced that speaking 'Vernacular' is about the worst thing a student can do.

In the same conversation, which took place some months ago in his home in Akpafu-Tɔdzi, T.T. continued:

I cannot pray in English. I cannot pray in Ewe. I talk to my God in my own language. When someone outside Kawu asks me to pray, I will pray in my own language. They may not understand, but they will hear 'Amen'. They will know alright that I have prayed, and they will say 'Amen' to it.

AMEN!

Slides for a talk titled How To Do Things With Ideophones, presented at SOAS, June 3, 2009. Without the actual talk most of the slides will be either underspecified or dense, but since people have asked for them, here they are. I also have a handout (PDF) containing the conversational extracts referred to in the presentation. Comments most welcome!

(I've embedded this presentation using Slideshare.net. If you'd rather have a copy of the slides, let me know.)

This presentation can be cited as follows:

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2009. How To Do Things With Ideophones: Observations on the use of vivid sensory language in Siwu, presented at the SOAS Research Seminar, June 3, London.

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.