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:

• MPI for Psycholinguistics news item
• Runieuws.nl: Schilderen met woorden: in het Siwu kan het wél
• RU/Kennislink: Ideofonen openen je ogen voor compleet andere taal

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!)

Iconicity and depiction

Now let me reveal what you already knew: lɛkɛrɛɛ depicts being somewhat chubby (the smaller end of the scale), while lukuruu depicts being seriously fat (the large end of the scale). You used two types of evidence to come to this conclusion. First, you used your own intuitions of magnitude sound symbolism to match the back vowel /u/ with the idea of large magnitude and the front vowel /ɛ/ with the idea of small magnitude. This type of magnitude symbolism is probably a universal feature of human embodied cognition, relying on cross-modal mappings that are common to us all. Ideophones, due to their depictive nature, often show it, but long ago Edward Sapir (1929) showed that English speakers have similar intuitions about nonce words like mil and mal. The second type of evidence you used (if you watched both video clips) was Ruben’s gestures. They relied on a perhaps even more transparent way of mapping form onto meaning: for lɛkɛrɛɛ, the gesture was relatively small and located mainly around the belly, while for lukuruu, the gesture occupied a much larger area of gesture space.

This example shows some ways of mapping form and meaning that make universal sense. Ideophones, marked words that depict sensory imagery, often tap into such form-meaning mappings: their form betrays something of their meaning. But we should not think of ideophones as simply imitative words. Consider the particular template in which these vowels do their sound-symbolic work: L-K-R. Is that suggestive of “fatness”? Probably not. What we have, then, is a combination of iconicity (the magnitude symbolism of the vowel) and conventionalized form (the L-K-R template). In my thesis, I argue that it is not simple resemblance that characterizes ideophones, but rather a depictive mode of representation. Ideophones are depictions: they enable you to experience what it is like to see the thing depicted, but just like line drawings or paintings, they require knowledge of representational conventions to be interpreted fully (Gombrich 1960). As Edward Sapir wrote, “They do not directly grow out of nature, they are suggested by it and play with it” (1921:6). Much more on that in chapter 7 of the thesis; and more about the gestures accompanying folk definitions of ideophones in chapter 9.

Check out thesis.ideophone.org

That’s right. My thesis, titled The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu, has been finished for a while now. I can’t distribute it yet, but most of the supplementary materials are online at thesis.ideophone.org. This means you can already enjoy video clips of folk definitions of ideophones, pictures and diagrams of a sorting task with ideophones, and photos from Kawu, among many other things. Oh, and there is the bibliography.

As soon as the thesis becomes available, I will announce it here. Meanwhile, enjoy this appetizer!

References

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. PhD dissertation, Nijmegen: Radboud University/MPI for Psycholinguistics.
2. Gombrich, E. H. 1960. Art & Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation. London/New York: Phaidon.
3. Ohala, John J. 1983. “Cross-language use of pitch: an ethological view.” Phonetica 40 (1): 1-18.
4. Sapir, Edward. 1929. “A study in phonetic symbolism.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 12 (3): 225-239.

One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known as the Akpafu) is a little book written in 1998 by Rev. H.B.K. Ogbete. This book contains a wealth of material: it records oral traditions, names of ancestors and chiefs, and a lot of background information on the culture of the Mawu. However, it is very difficult to find. Therefore, by popular demand, and with the permission of Prof. Kofi Agawu of Princeton University (who was involved in the publication of the book), I am making available a digital copy of it here.

Download it here: A history of the Akpafus (PDF, 2.5Mb)

This is the first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu. It was written down by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887. The account was originally written in Twi, and translated in German in 1889 by the eminent linguist J.G. Christaller, who published it in a German geographical journal. It was translated from German into English by Mark Dingemanse in 2009.

I posted the German text on this blog earlier. What follows is my English translation. You can also download a pdf version which includes both the original German and the English translation. Enjoy!

When we travelled on in the morning, the chief of Tɛtɛman provided us with a guide to Akpafu. In actual fact we had wanted to go from Tɛtɛman via Baika to Lolobi; but we were told here that that road was blocked and was no more travelled; but the Akpafu one would be good and short. And the disease [which the travellers had been told previously reigned in Akpafu] had not been in Akpafu itself, but in Odomi, and it was long gone.

We looked very much forward to come to Akpafu, which is famous for its ironwork and blacksmiths. Everywhere along the way we saw the charcoal that they use to melt the iron. They chop green wood, dig a pit in the ground, stack the wood in it, and cover it with leaves and earth, leaving only a small hole through which they set fire to the wood. Only after eight days they quench the fire and take out the charcoal.

Soon after climbing the mountain and reaching the plain we saw the place where they melt the iron, which is a little away from the town. Their furnaces they build like a rice granary, but the walls are much stronger than that, about 5 feet high, and open at the top. At the bottom there is a opening, through which they insert the charcoal. The iron ore is then poured on the charcoal. When the charcoal is set fire to, the opening at the bottom is closed with clay until only a small hole remains, through which air can enter; also, 5 or 6 small holes are made in the furnace, so that the fire will draw and not go out.

If everything goes well in the blaze, one will see the melted slag flow slowly out of a hole that is made at the bottom; but the good iron remains in the furnace. Only 24 hours after lighting the oven it is taken out. The emptied furnace however retain its heat for a long time; whatever food one puts in will be well done. A deep, steep abyss is next to one of the smelting-furnaces; when one rolls a stone into it, it will be heard rolling for 5 to 7 minutes, and still it has not arrived at the bottom. Children like playing that game.

We arrived in Akpafu somewhere around 9 o’clock. The town is big, its main street wide. When we arrived, all of the townspeople flocked together to see us — even the smiths stopped their work — because never before had any whites come to this town. Had it depended just on these people, we would have stayed for several days. They first led us to a place where we could refresh ourselves; from there we went to salute the king, an old, powerfully built man.

They took us into a forge and showed us everything they make there. Their anvil is not made of iron, but it is a big quartzite stone that is attached to the ground, the upper side of which is polished. When they are forging, they don’t remain in one place but they walk around the anvil. They make their own tools, like hammer, tongs, chisel and so on. Their hammer is not like a European one, but the handle is iron like the upper part, short and smooth round about; some are big, others small. Their bellow is like one of the olden days; one grasps it with both hands and works it like a drum; therefore this is not done by a single man, but by 3-5 persons in turn.

All of the tools they forge are made in the same way: a long, curved piece of iron is made into cutlass, hoe, and celt alike. Their hoes are different from ours, in that they are rounded; others are like ours [flat with two corners], and only the edge is rounded. After that they showed us where they dig iron ore; it is on the same mountain as the town. The shafts are similar to the gold mines in Akem; they dig down and then make side galleries connecting the vertical shafts to one another.

Some few people here understand Twi; one of them, who had been in Cape Coast, we got to translate our preaching. Their giant king was very amiable and wanted us to stay for several days; however, our schedule did not permit us to do so. We talked with him about God’s word, and he said that if we wanted to station someone in his town, he would comply with pleasure.

Of the people of Buem, these are the brightest. That the children go naked has become a custom, here too. Because of their ironwork, everything is well-organized; for people from all over the region come here to buy iron tools.

The houses here are not covered with grass, but they have flat mud roofs; these are not called adán [normal houses] but àbã [houses like forts and stone houses]. The Buems that live in such houses are the following towns: Borada, Akpafu, Tɛtɛman, Baika, Lolobi, Santrokofi. The towns in which iron is worked, are Akpafu, Santrokofi and Lolobi. There are two Akpafu towns: Akpafu-gã (the big one), which is on the mountain; and Akpafu-Dome, which lies on the plain. Lolobi consists of two towns; Santrokofi has three towns, all of them not more than five minutes removed from the other.

Because of the ironwork done here there are many forges in the town; when one sees their zeal in forging and ironsmelting, one has to wonder. The people are all pitch-black. One of the smiths showed us a wonderful feat: after he had rubbed his hands in the dust of the floor of his forge, he took a red-hot piece of iron out of the fire and brushed past it with his hands so that it sparked; but his hands were not hurt.

The diligence of these people, their hospitality, and their quiet behaviour pleased us so much that we really came to love them. If only we would have had more time, we would have met their wish to stay with them one more day. When we took our leave, the king said that we should return soon and bring guns, because their guns were all damaged. We told him that we were preachers of the gospel and had nothing to do with that kind of business. He gave us a guide, who brought us to Santrokofi in the evening of that same day.

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 twee details, voor de goede orde: (1) hoewel ik promoveer bij de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, voer ik mijn onderzoek uit bij het Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguistiek, ook in Nijmegen; en (2) ideofonen zijn bestaande woorden: 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.