In 1968 Bernd Heine published the first comparative study of the so-called Togorestsprachen. Around the same time Kevin Ford and…
There are several ideophones in Siwu that have to do with silence. Here are a few examples: mì-lo kanananana! 2PL-be.silent…
Exciting news for Zotero users: synchronization has arrived. After some months of closed beta-testing, a public Sync Preview version was…
The earliest description of Kawu (Akpafu) I have found so far is quite special in that it was written by…
A visualization of the previous two posts on Many Eyes and Siwu ne Because recursivity is a Good Thing, here…
Lots of readers looked at the challenge I posted last week (my blog statistics say more than 450 views for…
I recently came across Many Eyes, a nifty data visualisation tool by IBM’s Visual Communication Lab. It has lots of…
Previously, we’ve looked at a perceptive account of ideophones in nineteenth-century Ewe by Joh. Bernard Schlegel. But Schlegel was not…
One1 of the nice things about fieldtrips is getting immersed in another culture area with, for one thing, different news…
Mt. Iso in PNG, 12 miles southwest of Sumo, east of the Catalina River. Diuwe is spoken between sea level…
In an excellent post over at Greater Blogazonia, Lev Michael unravels a spectacular error which led several eminent specialists of…
Note: An updated version of this review has been published in eLanguage on July 15th, 2008. A common dashboard sticker…
waza waza, Gomi 1989:193 · © 1989 I came across this lovely Japanese ideophone in my own copy of Gomi’s…
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.
Hello from the field! I’m currently on a five-week trip to Kawu in the beautiful Volta Region, eastern Ghana (see…
Today’s dish of expressive vocabulary is particularly tasty. It comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana. 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. One particulary nice dataset comes from G|ui, a language of the central Kalahari desert sporting an impressive amount of food texture verbs. The data comes from a talk on perception in Kǂʰábá (Khoisan, closely related to G|ui) given by Hirosi Nakagawa at ALT 2007 in Paris.
What better way to compensate for the overload of text in the previous posts than with some excellent illustrations of…
Today’s posting brings you the second part of Pfisterer’s 1904 article (see the previous posting for details on the context…
One of the goals of The Ideophone, besides functioning as a sounding board for ideas on expressivity and sound symbolism…
Zotero takes it name from an Albanian verb minus some morphology.