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
- Müller, Max. 1862. Lectures on the Science of Language. 3rd ed. London: Longman.
- Nuckolls, Janis B. 1995. Quechua texts of perception. Semiotica 103, no. 1/2: 145-169.
- 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.