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
On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users’ sensitive feeling…
The Language & Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics will present a session on The Senses in Language and…
In their commentary on Evans & Levinson’s hotly debated Myth of Language Universals paper, Pinker & Jackendoff briefly mention ideophones — and erroneously shelve them away as ‘response cries’. What could go wrong?
LDLT2, the 2nd conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, will be held in London this weekend. I’m looking forward…
ELAN is a tool for creating complex annotations on video and audio resources. It’s great for doing the hard work…
When I finished my MA thesis back in 2006 I made it available online as a gesture to the Yoruba…
There is no free ride for semiosis. Signs have a cost and a carbon footprint. Sign processes, in any form…
Intangible and abstruse the bright silk of the sunlight Pours down in manifest splendor, You can neither stroke the…
Not all linguists may be aware of this, but since 2007 there has been a Unified Style Sheet for publications…
Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years: he published the first large-scale comparison of some 200 African languages (the famed Polyglotta Africana), but also a corpus of Kanuri folklore, a grammar of Vai, and a grammar of Kanuri. In the latter, he wrote about “singular adverbs which seem to be common in African languages” — one of the first comparative statements on the type of words that would later come to be known as ideophones.
With another busy summer gone, here is a post highlighting some of the stuff that’s floated by in the ideophonic…
The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). This post relates how I traced a mangled 1898 fragment of a song to a hard-to-get modern-day MA thesis, and how I was able to translate it with the help of the Rev. Albert Wurapa.
One day in Accra, my daughter came home from school and talked to me in English. I said, “I no…
We’ve just launched the web page for a project we’ve been working on in the Language & Cognition group: Synaesthesia…
Embedded in the Iconicity conference in Toronto is a pleasant surprise: a three-day workshop entitled Cognitive Poetics: A Multimodal Approach.…
Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of…
If you’re in London and able to come to SOAS at short notice, there will be two talks on ideophones…
The AAA is currently conducting a survey on how to implement a website that would be hosting AAA Meeting Abstracts.…
In a neat 1965 paper on ideophones in Southern Sotho, Daniel P. Kunene writes about an ideophone derived from a…