http://ideophone.org/tuareg-expressive-verbs/ Sounding out ideas on African languages, sound symbolism, and expressivity Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:21:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 http://ideophone.org/tuareg-expressive-verbs/comment-page-1/#comment-17 Lameen Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:24:26 +0000 http://ideophone.org/tuareg-expressive-verbs/#comment-17 Great post - I hope to answer it with one on the Kwarandzie equivalent sometime. (One of these is actually present in K. - ffedfed "to thrash about" (normally used of a sheep just after its being slaughtered.) K. expressive verbs, like Arabic ones, normally consist of a reduplicated CeC - eg t.t.er.t.er. "be very fat", bbetbet "be tiny", lleghlegh "be full to point of nausea", mmet.met. "suck hard, suck dry", qqedqed "be spotted". I'm not yet sure whether they constitute a unified class, or indeed how to treat them, but they often seem to have an intensifying or distributive sense (and CeC reduplication with pluractional/distributive meaning is regular for a hard-to-define subset of verbs.) Great post – I hope to answer it with one on the Kwarandzie equivalent sometime. (One of these is actually present in K. – ffedfed “to thrash about” (normally used of a sheep just after its being slaughtered.) K. expressive verbs, like Arabic ones, normally consist of a reduplicated CeC – eg t.t.er.t.er. “be very fat”, bbetbet “be tiny”, lleghlegh “be full to point of nausea”, mmet.met. “suck hard, suck dry”, qqedqed “be spotted”. I’m not yet sure whether they constitute a unified class, or indeed how to treat them, but they often seem to have an intensifying or distributive sense (and CeC reduplication with pluractional/distributive meaning is regular for a hard-to-define subset of verbs.)

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