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…
“See what I just did? Made another me.” Darwin (Marvel Comics), panel from X-Factor issue 37. There is a very…
Dashboard Post-it is a simple plugin for WordPress 2.7 and higher that allows you to leave yourself or other authors…
The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places as evidence of a cultural revival. Although it is too soon to say whether this is the case, I’m glad to report that the dirges that we recorded in Akpafu-Todzi are in wide circulation now. Here i share an example with analysis.