Gérard Diffloth, writing about the paradox of catching ideophones in the wild, notes the following: Il faut donc guetter les…
The LSA asks its members in a survey to choose the most important papers in Language, 1925-2000. Have you ever…
This blog has been suffering from a bad case of thesis-writing neglect. But I’m getting there. I just launched thesis.ideophone.org,…
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss, once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing till they can explain…
Archaeologists may be interested to hear the following story, told to me by an elder in Akpafu-Mempeasem in Ghana’s Volta…
I keep forgetting the kind of simple edits that are so trivial to make in CSL styles. Here I catalogue…
We’ve been working on this for quite some time, and we’re excited to go live now: the L&C Field Manuals…
Transient Languages & Cultures published a nice post by Peter Austin last month on the question of how much time…
Now online: SemiotiX New Series, an e-journal in semiotics. SemiotiX Bulletin has been around for several years, in hand-edited HTML.…
One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850’s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions. Today we look at Japanese, for which I have found some early 17th century grammatical treatises that offer information on ideophones.
Finally, some commentaries on the Evans & Levinson paper are trickling down the blogosphere. Nigel Duffield‘s “Roll up for the…
High time for a new issue of ‘Ideophones around the web’. First, the ultimately blend of ideophone and idiophone: Nick…
Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf’s (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo: This work falls…
Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen’s well-known book Talking…
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?
Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science…
Just got this letter, on official-looking paper with an official-looking stamp: Dear Mr. Dingemanse: You have been nominated to appear…
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…