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One year of ideophones
Time flies vuuu. About one month ago, The Ideophone has silently celebrated its first birthday kananana. English interspersed with ideophones looks childishly weird susuusu and chaotic basabasa,1 and that is precisely tutuutu one of the issues I’ve been trying to address here: what is the nature of ideophony, and how is it connected to language […] ᐅ keep reading
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Phonology Assistant
Phonology Assistant (PA) is a free phonology tool by SIL that (as of version 3.0) works interactively with the data stored in Toolbox, Fieldworks Language Explorer, and Speech Analyzer. It automates many of the cumbersome and repetitive tasks associated with doing phonological analysis, and it does so in a most systematic and revealing way. The […] ᐅ keep reading
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Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Ideophones for involvement at FeedBurner
FeedBurner, a service for managing RSS feeds, provided us with a nice example of ideophonic language on its corporate blog last year: Starting right now, you just log into your Blogger account, select Settings | Site Feed, enter your FeedBurner feed address and click “Save Settings.” Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Now you’ve got the complete picture […] ᐅ keep reading
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Unlocking the potential of the spoken word?
An intriguing article in Science two months ago suggests that advances in speech processing ‘may soon place speech and writing on a more equal footing, with broad implications for many aspects of society’. It reminds us that most of humanity’s approximately 50,000 years1 with language was dominated by the spoken word, and that the balance […] ᐅ keep reading
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Scandalised missionaries and quite a new class of priests: some unforeseen effects of early missionary efforts in the Gold Coast
In pursuit of early written sources about Kawu I came across a useful summary of explorations in the Volta Basin in the 1870s and 1880s. The document is clearly based on some dead serious German reports from around the same time, but it is written in a dry tone with barely submerged irony as only […] ᐅ keep reading
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Mumbling and other mouth sensations: Ideophone proeverij II (with sound clips)
With three mouth-related ideophones we’ve got a true proeverij this time. Welcome to dinner! You’re invited to try the first ideophone on the menu, mùkùmùkù. Feel free to sustain the mumbling to get some feeling for the word. Mùkùmùkùmùkùmùkù. The mumbling mouth movements of a toothless person. This is quite a special ideophone in that […] ᐅ keep reading
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12 must know Zotero tips and techniques
Zotero is getting better and better. In a while, version 1.5 will bring synchronization, online backup of your library, +1100 CSL citation styles, and PDF metadata extraction (for the daring, a sync preview version is available). But even in its current incarnation Zotero is easily one of the best bibliographic managers out there. Here are […] ᐅ keep reading
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Claude Lévi-Strauss on Arte
28-11-2008Claude Lévi-Strauss’ 100th birthday German television channel Arte devotes much of today’s programme to Claude Lévi-Strauss to celebrate his 100th birthday on the 28th of November 2008. It seems the broadcasts are not being streamed to the web. However, the programme web pages do contain a number of items viewable online, including some excerpts from […] ᐅ keep reading
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‘Poetry in ordinary language’: Evans-Pritchard on ideophones
If one had to sum up their character in a short phrase one might say that they are poetry in ordinary language ; and one feels that no other sounds would serve the purpose equally well of evoking sensations which compose the meaning, just as one cannot think that any possible line could be substituted […] ᐅ keep reading
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Ideophone proeverij I
While I’m busy analysing conversational data from the last two fieldtrips, my plan is treat you to a few fine Siwu ideophones every once in a while: an ideophone proeverij. Incidentally, the title of this mini-series testifies to a sad lexical gap in English: there seems to be no good equivalent for the Dutch ‘proeverij’, […] ᐅ keep reading
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Visualizations
Via Language Log, a nice tutorial titled Interactive Visualization for Computational Linguistics [PDF, 13,1 Mb] by Christopher Collins, Gerald Penn, and Sheelagh Carpendale. Includes not only lots of wonderful visualizations, but also a lot of background information on Gestalt perception, visualizations as ‘external cognition’, preattentive processing, info on a case study (slide 196ff.), and ample […] ᐅ keep reading
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On playthings and tools
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 […] ᐅ keep reading
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Wordle now does Extended Latin and diacritics
Great news for those who are into visual corpus linguistics but don’t work on SAE languages: since July, Wordle handles alphabets in the Extended Latin ranges; and today its maker, Jonathan Feinberg, added support for combining diacritics. That means that you can now feed Wordle texts from languages that use tone marks and other diacritics […] ᐅ keep reading
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Three misconceptions about ideophones
In a previous post I have outlined the history of the term ideophone. This post takes on three common misunderstandings about the nature of ideophones. As an added bonus, if you read all three, you get one for free. The working definition I adopt for ‘ideophones’ is the following: Marked words that depict sensory imagery. […] ᐅ keep reading
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Four Stone Hearth
The 51st installment of Four Stone Hearth is up at Clashing Culture, featuring an interesting mishmash of anthropological topics. For those of you who don’t know it, Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that brings together the four fields of anthropology (archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, bio-physical anthropology, and linguistic anthropology) — each of which is […] ᐅ keep reading
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Early sources on African ideophones, part III: ‘Onomatopoeia as a formative principle’, 1886
The steady influx of vocabularies of ‘exotic’ languages during the nineteenth century caused a veritable flowering of comparative philology in Western Europe. It became en vogue to be looking at languages from outside Europe, and the late nineteenth century especially seems to have been a time in which every gent in academia (and yes, they […] ᐅ keep reading
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More on bíaàà and other water ideophones
drizzle by +lyn (Flickr) Without wanting to detract from the supreme rendering of bíààà in the previous post, here is some more linguistic information on the word (as rightly requested by Breffni), with a few other water ideophones added for good measure. ᐅ keep reading
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Bíààà
The card arrived in the mail today, so I can now call myself the lucky owner of this rendition of the beautiful Kisi ideophone bíààà — ‘rain softly falling’. Some time ago I wrote about Taro Gomi’s illustrations of Japanese ideophones, citing his warning that “Linguists, who are always described by such orthodox adjectives as […] ᐅ keep reading
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Le Ton Beau de Ta Hio
Reading about the two translations of the Confucian Ta Hio by Ezra Pound, the earlier one first published in 1928 and the later one created in 1945, I was reminded of Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot. Though Hofstadter’s book on the problem of translation is personal and impressive, I also found it annoyingly ignorant […] ᐅ keep reading
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The sound of rain falling, in your ears
More from the missed-while-I-was-in-the-field dept.: back in August, artisan jewelry shop My Word! featured a beautiful pair of earrings decorated with the Kisi ideophone bákàlà-bákàlà for ‘the sound of big, fat raindrops.’ I love the design, in which colour, shape and size work together to recreate the event evoked by the ideophone. Kisi [kqs] is […] ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
