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…
One 1 of the nice things about fieldtrips is getting immersed in another culture area with, for one thing, different…
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 was published in eLanguage on July 15th, 2008. However, that e-journal has not…
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.
I wasn’t planning to make this a software weblog, but I’ll make an exception for Zotero because I think fellow…
Having been a small and quite isolated language for centuries, Siwu was relatively late to attract attention from outsiders. Europeans…
The most common use of the term ‘ideophone’ today is as a term for a lexical or grammatical category of words. This use goes back to C.M. Doke, who introduced the term in this sense for the description of Bantu languages. However, Doke did not coin the term. Who did, and how was it used before Doke?
Some years ago I was following a course by Maarten Kossmann on Tuareg (Tamasheq, Tamajeq, Tamahaq). It was thoroughly enjoyable. After the first lecture we were all alotted a letter of the great Dictionnaire Touareg — Français (a consonant, obviously), and for the remainder of the course these 15 to 40 dictionary pages would form the basis for a number of excercises in the weeks to follow. Here I write about what I found on expressive verbs.
Recently I picked up Simpler Syntax in the library. It is a good read on a very complex topic, and…
Languagehat’s news flash on w00t (chosen as the Merriam-Webster’s Word of ’07) piqued my interest. A quote: There’s a lot…