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Somali ideophones revealed
I missed it back in March, probably because I was in the field: a delightful post on ideophones in Somali over at Beautiful Horn of Africa. An intriguing introduction… In this fast moving 21st Century of information superhighway, you should feel obligated to expose youself to the rest of the world so that your presence […] ᐅ keep reading
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Semantic cookies
Semantic cookies are sold in Akpafu-Mempeasem, central Volta Region, Ghana (among other places) Fieldwork sessions on lexical semantics have become a lot easier since I found these cookies. I came across them in a small and dusty store in Akpafu-Mempeasem, my fieldwork hometown of all places. Semantic cookies are made in Turkey by a company […] ᐅ keep reading
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Early sources on African ideophones, part II: Vidal on Yoruba, 1852
Part two of our series on early sources (part one is here) is dedicated to Reverend O. E. Vidal, M.A.1 who as early as 1852 made a number of very insightful comments on ideophones in Yoruba in the preface to Samuel Crowther’s Yoruba dictionary: There is another very striking feature in the Yoruba language, which […] ᐅ keep reading
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Now serving you from ideophone.org
The Ideophone has found a new home at https://ideophone.org/. Links to the old pages should still work, but I would like to ask readers and fellow bloggers to update their bookmarks and blogrolls. The move was planned to take place in September but it had to be carried out prematurely because my provider itself was […] ᐅ keep reading
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GTM Workshop 2008
In 1968 Bernd Heine published the first comparative study of the so-called Togorestsprachen. Around the same time Kevin Ford and Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu were involved in the linguistic documentation of some of the languages of the Ghana-Togo mountains; Ford was writing a dissertation on Avatime (Siya) and doing comparative work on several other GTM […] ᐅ keep reading
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Kanananana
There are several ideophones in Siwu that have to do with silence. Here are a few examples: mì-lo kanananana! 2PL-be.silent IDPH (y’all) be silent kanananana! a-rɛ kpooo-o? 2SG-sleep IDPH-Q did you have a sound sleep? lò-to lò-karɛ ɔ itɔ̃me a-ɣɛ à-to à-nyɔ mɛ gbigbini-gbi 1SG-PROG 1SG-ask 2SG:O message 2SG-stand 2SG-PROG 2SG-look 1SG:O IDPH-REDUP1 I’m asking […] ᐅ keep reading
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Zotero Sync Preview
Exciting news for Zotero users: synchronization has arrived. After some months of closed beta-testing, a public Sync Preview version was released recently. This means that Zotero users can now automatically synchronize their libraries across computers and even across platforms. Although there are still some minor wrinkles, the sync functionality works perfectly fine and there are […] ᐅ keep reading
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Kawu in January 1887
The earliest description of Kawu (Akpafu) I have found so far is quite special in that it was written by an African in an African language. A German translation of it appeared in 1889 and can be found below. The original is a report of a travel made in early 1887 by David Asante. David […] ᐅ keep reading
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More visualizations
A visualization of the previous two posts on Many Eyes and Siwu ne Because recursivity is a Good Thing, here is a visualization of the previous two posts on visualizing linguistic data with Many Eyes. The astute reader will note that the strange loop is not perfect since I didn’t use Many Eyes for the […] ᐅ keep reading
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Many Eyes on Siwu ne
Lots of readers looked at the challenge I posted last week (my blog statistics say more than 450 views for the post alone, so that’s many eyes indeed). A few of you were even daring enough to come up with a story on the various functions of Siwu ne. The challenge was probably a bit […] ᐅ keep reading
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Visual corpus linguistics with Many Eyes
I recently came across Many Eyes, a nifty data visualisation tool by IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. It has lots of options to handle tabular data, but —more interesting to linguists— it can also handle free text. The two visualization options it currently offers for text are a tag cloud and a so-called ‘word tree’. The […] ᐅ keep reading
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Adjectives and the gospel in Ewe
Previously, we’ve looked at a perceptive account of ideophones in nineteenth-century Ewe by Joh. Bernard Schlegel. But Schlegel was not just a keen observator of the synchronic structure of Ewe, he also had clear ideas on where the language came from (damned primitivity) and where it was going (blessed enlightenment). A Pietist missionary above all […] ᐅ keep reading
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Under the spell of ideophones
One1 of the nice things about fieldtrips is getting immersed in another culture area with, for one thing, different news priorities. When in Ghana, I somehow find it relieving to read the news stories about the rise of herbal medicine, spectacular roundups of Nigerian armed robbers, local chieftaincy conflicts, and parcels of cocaine that miraculously […] ᐅ keep reading
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The Hidbap language of PNG
Mt. Iso in PNG, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Diuwe is spoken between sea level and the first isoline at 100m, Hidbap between the first and the second isolines. This week, the language of the week at Anggarrgoon is DIY, also known as Diuwe. Claire Bowern, noting that the only […] ᐅ keep reading
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The mysteries of Christian doctrine, or, How an African language was mistaken for an Amazonian one
In an excellent post over at Greater Blogazonia, Lev Michael unravels a spectacular error which led several eminent specialists of American languages to believe that a West African language named Arda was actually spoken on the Amazon between the Nanay and Marañon Rivers. Lev’s post is recommended reading (as is his blog Greater Blogazonia in […] ᐅ keep reading
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Done well: WALS Online
Note: An updated version of this review has been published in eLanguage on July 15th, 2008. A common dashboard sticker in Ghanaian taxi’s has it that “If it must be done, it must be done well”, where ‘done well’ cleverly doubles as a brand name. This is largely irrelevant except by way of introducing WALS […] ᐅ keep reading
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Waza waza
waza waza, Gomi 1989:193 · © 1989 I came across this lovely Japanese ideophone in my own copy of Gomi’s Illustrated Dictionary,1 and I’m sharing it waza waza just for you to enjoy. References Gomi, Taro. 1989. An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions. Transl. by J. Turrent. Tokyo: Japan Times. Thanks to Mami Maruko […] ᐅ keep reading
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Fieldwork snippet: What ideophones do
A while ago I spent some time with a language assistant to work through a list of the Siwu ideophones I collected so far. There were some interesting metalinguistic comments on the function of ideophones. Here are three representative exchanges. ᐅ keep reading
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Fieldwork snippet: What is the difference between these words?
Hello from the field! I’m currently on a five-week trip to Kawu in the beautiful Volta Region, eastern Ghana (see the picture to the right), hence the irregular posting schedule. In line with my main business here, I will share some notes on doing fieldwork. MD What about gligli? SA Gligli is ‘round’ MD But […] ᐅ keep reading
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Fresh wild melon and meat full of gravy: food texture verbs in G|ui (Khoisan)
Today’s dish of expressive vocabulary is particularly tasty. It comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana.1 To Africanists, expressive words from Khoisan languages are of special interest because Khoisan has been claimed on various occasions to lack ideophones, otherwise thought to be one of those linguistic traits that characterize Africa as a linguistic area […] ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
